Opening Our Doors to Foreign Professionals

But the plain fact is that Taiwan has too many regulations on the employment of foreign nationals, and that these convoluted rules are keeping foreign talent out.

Charles V. Trappey, professor in the Department of Management Science at National Chiao Tung University, is the most senior American member of the school’s faculty. A Purdue PhD, Trappey came to Taiwan with his Taiwanese wife, Amy J.C. Trappey, who teaches management in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at National Tsing Hua University. The couple are well known figures in management studies in Taiwan.

After 19 years at the university, Trappey recently began thinking about retiring. When he looked into the matter, he was shocked to learn that even though he was, like his wife and colleagues, a professor at a national university, his retirement benefits were radically different from theirs.

John Suppe, a former chaired professor at Princeton University, has attracted many top-tier students to NTU to work with him.

Double standard

Under the Ministry of Education’s rules on pensions for teaching staff, foreign educators working in secondary or tertiary education are granted a lump-sum payment when they retire. This contrasts with local teachers, who have the option of receiving a monthly pension.

“My colleagues who hold dual ROC-US citizenship are all eligible to receive monthly pensions, but the law requires foreign nationals seeking to obtain the same benefit to renounce their foreign citizenship and become naturalized Taiwanese,” say Trappey. “It’s a double standard and completely unfair!”

Why are foreign educators ineligible for the monthly pension? The MOE says: “When a foreign national passes away, it can be hard to determine who inherits the benefit. Making a lump sum payment reduces the potential for disputes.”

Academia, however, doesn’t accept this rationale. NCTU president Wu Yan-hwa, who is helping Trappey fight for his rights, says that while Taiwan’s education policy encourages the hiring of outstanding foreign faculty to spur internationalization, the law includes provisions unfair to foreigners that are intended to reduce administrative headaches. This undermines the policy’s purported objectives.

There are also problems with stringent hiring criteria. The law requires that foreign professionals have at least a master’s degree, or a bachelor’s degree and two years of work experience, at their time of hire. Companies must also pay them a minimum salary of NT$47,971 per month. This, together with the many restrictions foreign nationals face in their everyday lives, makes those interested in coming to Taiwan feel unwelcome.

Cyrus Chu, an academician with Academia Sinica and a minister without portfolio, says that Taiwan has a plethora of rules and regulations unfriendly to foreign nationals. As an example, he mentions that until recently, regulations required drivers’ licenses to expire with resident visas.

Charles V. Trappey, a professor at National Chiao Tung University who has spent half his life in Taiwanese academia, is speaking out against inequities in the pension system that affect foreign faculty.

Purchases of unlisted domestic securities have also been troublesome.

Foreign nationals have had to fill out an application in person at the Investment Commission of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and bring a stack of information with them to do so. If they want to use a bank card issued in Taiwan while abroad, they have to be careful that their residence visa hasn’t expired. If it has, they may well find that their card has been cancelled, leaving them unable to access their own money.

“A driver’s license is essentially a skill certification,” says Chu. “People don’t unlearn driving, so their licenses shouldn’t be withdrawn. The restrictions on bank cards are even more ridiculous. Even if your residence visa has expired, the money in your account still belongs to you. The banks’ cancellation of cards is a violation of people’s rights.”

A foreign national working in Taiwan once sent Chu a letter noting that while he had received permanent residency, his minor children who were in Taiwan with him were unable to obtain similar status. After they achieved their majority and went abroad to work, they had to go through the inconvenient visitor visa application process to come visit their parents in Taiwan.

Currently, Taiwan only permits top-tier professionals (such as people who have made exceptional contributions to Taiwan or who have technical skills required by emerging industries) and investors (those who invest a minimum of NT$15 million in Taiwan and create at least five domestic job opportunities) applying for permanent residency to obtain the same for their spouses and children.

A welcoming environment

Fortunately, the publication of a “talent manifesto” by Academia Sinica president Wong Chi-Huey and others prompted the Executive Yuan to begin looking into the matter. A series of interministry meetings led by the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) has since identified unreasonable provisions in the law that the government is now addressing.

In the case of the much criticized hiring criteria, the Council of Labor Affairs’ (CLA) original thought had been to minimize the impact on Taiwanese workers’ job opportunities and prevent corporations from using the hiring of “professionals” as a means of importing foreign labor.

San Gee, deputy minister of the CEPD, believes that the CLA’s intentions were good, but that the salary and work experience requirements ended up inhibiting recruiting, for with them in place, even graduates of top-tier schools such as Oxford University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were unable to take jobs in Taiwan until they had work experience.

Cyrus Chu, who is currently overseeing the inter-ministerial meetings on the talent issue, is more critical: “There’s a kind of mental rigidity at work here.” Opening our doors wider doesn’t necessarily harm Taiwanese laborers, but not doing so almost certainly harms Taiwan. Viewed in this way, the choice is clear.

With the interministerial meetings nudging the process along, the CLA has promised to undertake an immediate review of its “excessively high” standards.

At the end of November 2011, the rules on drivers’ licenses were amended, so that foreign nationals will now receive licenses valid for the normal six years. And when buying unlisted securities, foreigners can now notify the Investment Commission after the transaction, instead of applying beforehand. The government was also planning to set up an office by the end of 2011 to provide immediate answers to personnel and hiring-related issues.

Strengthening basic research

Even with universities in neighboring nations striving for excellence and rapidly catching up, Taiwan’s still has an advantage in recruiting talent for its particular research niches.

Shinya Shikina, a Japanese postdoctoral researcher at National Taiwan Ocean University, is a case in point.

He left his position as a researcher with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, packed up his family, and came to Taiwan in the summer of 2010 to research the gametes and endocrine systems of coral with Chang Ching-fong, who is a deputy minister with the National Science Council as well as a distinguished professor at National Taiwan Ocean University.

As a researcher in Taiwan, Shikina’s salary is just NT$50,000 or so per month, or only about half what it was in Japan. He is also subject to withholdings of 20% of that amount (for Taiwanese income taxes and the couple’s contributions to Japan’s national pension system). He admits that its tough supporting a family of three on what’s left.

“Fortunately, Keelung’s an inexpensive place to live, and with a little effort we can make it.” The cheery Shikina adds that Taiwan has abundant corals and produces excellent research: “As a scholar in this field, I hope to spend a long time here!”

John Suppe, Blair Professor (emeritus) of Geosciences at Princeton University, became a distinguished chair research professor at NTU in 2007. Suppe, author of Principles of Structural Geology, a must-read text in the field, had been here as a visiting scholar in 1978 and 1981.

He describes Taiwan’s unique geology as “a geosciences museum offering a virtually inexhaustible fount of research topics.” That’s the main reason he has chosen to spend his golden years working at NTU.

In addition to providing Suppe with a generous salary and very liberal research environment, NTU threw in numerous merit bonuses to make sure of landing him.

“It was absolutely worth it,” says NTU vice president Lo Ching-hua. “Now we have PhDs from top-tier institutions like MIT and Cal Tech clamoring to come to NTU to work with him. He’s an attractor of talent.”

Investments by our academy in international talent are investments in Taiwanese education. Their fruits may not be immediately apparent, but will nourish our future.