"Citizens of the World" Have Stories to Tell about Immigration

Remember 1994's The Warning of a Taiwan Strait War? The author's prediction that mainland China would invade Taiwan in 1995 caused a flurry of panic on the island. Some people rushed to buy US dollars, others hurriedly emigrated, while still others laid in supplies of food and water. The war never came, but the author managed to rake in royalties and move overseas.

Taiwanese emigration always peaks whenever there's a big to do on the island, whether Kinmen's August 23 Artillery Battle, the ending of US-China diplomatic relations, or the 2000 presidential election. But emigration isn't the irrevocable choice that it used to be. With Taiwan just an eight- to 12-hour flight from its most popular emigration destinations-the US, Canada, and Australia-it has become common for emigrants to shuttle back and forth between their new homes and their old.

Thirty years ago, Taiwanese emigrants were largely students pursuing graduate degrees abroad. When the Hsin-chu Science Park developed a desperate need for technology workers in the 1980s, many of these individuals came back to Taiwan. In more recent years, the impetus to emigrate has been different, with some moving abroad for political or environmental reasons, and others to facilitate their children's educations. But most of these recent emigrants utilize a "root and branch" strategy that keeps the husband remaining rooted in Taiwan to earn money while the wife and children move abroad for the kids' educations.

This strategy, which maintains lines of advance and retreat, has become popular in Chinese communities the world over. In fact, sending a family member back to the motherland is even more common among mainland Chinese and pre-1997 Hong-Kong emigres than it is among Taiwanese.

Taiwan Panorama, whose readers cluster in North America, has for many years been reporting on highly mobile transnational immigrants, from students, Silicon Valley tech workers, and ethnic-ally Chinese entrepreneurs to immigrant schoolchildren in Canada. Editor Chang Chiung-fang and photographic director Jimmy Lin recently traveled to Brisbane, Australia, where they learned that Taiwanese immigrants to Australia aren't much different from their counterparts in Canada: they are largely successful members of the middle class. Yet, their need to provide for their children often drives them to leave their lonely paradise and return to the "joyful mess" of contemporary Taiwan.

Around the world, the trend in immigration is from developing nations to developed ones, with the US being the largest recipient of immigrants. Research by AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that 53% of the tech workers in Silicon Valley in 2000 were foreign immigrants, 25% of whom were of Chinese or Indian ancestry. In fact, Saxenian's study found 20,000 Indians, 15,000 mainland Chinese, and 5,000 Taiwanese working in Silicon Valley.

Prior to World War II, the enormous economic disparities between the developing and developed nations meant the former were badly weakened by emigration. Within 50 years, the situation was quite different. The rise of the emerging economies enabled Asian immigrants to move back and forth between their motherlands and their immigrant homes as opportunities arose. Emigrating to Australia became a goal of many Taiwanese, and the notion of "talent recyc-ling" replaced that of the "brain drain."

Nowadays, this movement of people between nations is akin to a "talent swap": like products, people are moving in both directions. More and more young people are treating their mobility as a strength, as a sign of their global vision, language and cultural skills, and adaptability.

How many Taiwanese return to nourish themselves in the soil of their homeland? Out of respect for personal privacy, the government doesn't keep precise records, but data from migration agencies indicates that about 20,000 emigrate and several thousand come back every year.

Those thousands may be no more than a drop in the bucket, their returns causing nary a ripple on the surface of small, densely populated Taiwan. But anyone considering emigrating would do well to listen to what those who have gone abroad and come back have to say. l