Infection, temporality and inequality: Sanitizing foreign bodies and protecting public health in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper probes how temporality is integral to the health examination regime that aims to protect citizens from infectious diseases in Taiwan. The paper finds that migrant workers in less-skilled occupations are examined more frequently than foreign professionals. Analyzing such differentiation, this paper argues that a hierarchy of sanitization is built on and increases the inequality between them and perpetuates instability in migrant workers’ circumstances. Applying a temporal approach to the study of health examination opens new inroads into our understanding of how a “migration state” achieves the exclusion of migrant workers by making them outsiders subject to permanent intrusion into their bodies.

‘There will be no law, or people to protect us’: Irregular Southeast Asian seasonal workers in Taiwan before and during the pandemic

“…During the pandemic, the mobility restrictions imposed on guest workers were loosened by the government, who temporarily permitted the transfer of workers between employers or between industries (Cheng, 2022). Disrupted cross‐border movement created labour shortages in industries relying on guest workers.…”

Book review: Migrant Workers in Singapore. Lives and Labor in a Transient Migration Regime

“…The migration literature has been enriched by various works exploring the link between COVID-19 and migration, producing interesting outputs, such as the edited books by Triandafyllidou (2021) and Silva (2021). With regard to the specific context of the Asian region, the third issue of the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, a special issue coedited by Chan and Lan (2022), is dedicated to discussing the cases of Hong Kong (Chan and Piper, 2022), Taiwan (Lan, 2022;Cheng, 2022) and Japan (Vogt and Qin, 2022).This edited book adds to this growing scholarship by offering a thorough and multi-disciplinary analysis of the way the Singaporean state and society have dealt with the presence of 1.3 million foreign workers when COVID-19 arrived. The book focuses particularly on the 300,000 foreign construction workers, mainly Bangladeshis, Indians and Chinese, who lived as part of a transient population in the city-state.…”

“…The migration literature has been enriched by various works exploring the link between COVID-19 and migration, producing interesting outputs, such as the edited books by Triandafyllidou (2021) and Silva (2021). With regard to the specific context of the Asian region, the third issue of the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal , a special issue co-edited by Chan and Lan (2022), is dedicated to discussing the cases of Hong Kong (Chan and Piper, 2022), Taiwan (Lan, 2022; Cheng, 2022) and Japan (Vogt and Qin, 2022).…”