Governing Migrant Workers at a Distance: Managing the Temporary Status of Guestworkers in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper explores how a liberal democratic state keeps migrant workers in temporary status by preventing their permanent settlement. Using Taiwan’s guestworker policy as an example, we argue that through expertise discourses and strategies of “governance at a distance” involving private sector, the Taiwan government has formulated policies and implemented measures that effectively kept guestworkers in temporary status. Analyzing Taiwan’s guestworker policy helps us to understand how the state and its collaborators work together to enhance the control capacity over migrants, while at the same time, enabling the state to keep its liberal pretense.

Fearful states: the migration-security nexus in Northeast Asia

“…Indeed, as described earlier, at the outset they implemented and enforced regulations that would subject migrant workers to a mandatory criminal record check, and those who were found to have committed crimes in Taiwan were subject to immediate deportation (former senior executive of the Council of Labor Affairs, personal communication, February 7, 2014). Mechanisms were also put in place to prevent migrant workers from running away-such as retaining their passports, housing them in onsite dormitories, and temporarily withholding portions of their wages-and attempts were made to safeguard "population quality" by preventing their permanent settlement (Lu, 2011, p. 93;Tseng & Wang, 2013). Such measures have been carried out with the cooperation of the Council of Labor Affairs (upgraded formally to the Ministry of Labor in 2014), which has authority over foreign workers, with the public safety agencies of the Ministry of the Interior, including the National Police Agency and the National Immigration Agency established in 2007 (official of the National Immigration Agency, personal communication, January 21, 2014).…”

The Migration Industry and the H‐2 Visa in the United States: Employers, Labour Intermediaries, and the State

“…Like other guest worker schemes (see Tseng and Wang, 2013;Kemp and Raijman, 2014), the H-2 visa features the extensive involvement of private actors (Griffith, 2014). As this is an employer-sponsored working visa, it is the employers who initiate the process of hiring workers under the H-2 visa.…”

“…As they also channel state interests, intermediaries are not just passive actors. Labour intermediaries play a large and complex role not only in recruiting, employing, and supervising migrant workers, they also become a tool through which workers are “governed” (Tseng and Wang, ; Kemp and Raijman, ; Anderson and Franck, ; Goh et al., ). This research suggests that the “migration industry” is not formed of a loose agglomeration of individual actors but is an actual industry , formed of a dense and complex network of actors who, both individually and collectively, wield influence over migrants, employers and sovereign prerogatives relative to migration.…”

Does “buyer beware” work in migration? Contracting between brokers and migrants in Vietnam

“…Since a migrant worker is already in Taiwan by the time the overcharging is done, brokers' exploitative practices seem to be built on a regulatory "no man's land". Part of the reason is Taiwan's guest worker policy of governance at a distance (Tseng and Wang, 2013). In Taiwan, a migrant complaining of overcharges is directed to the Vietnamese broker.…”