Make Yourself At Home

	Staff members at the HFAC always greet visitors with a friendly smile. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
	The HFAC aims to provide foreigners with a wide range of information and services during their stay in Taiwan, thus helping them to feel at home. (Courtesy of HFAC)

Government-run assistance centers aim to make life easier and more enjoyable for foreign nationals in Taiwan.

“I would like to thank your government for providing the foreigner assistance center,” an American woman wrote in a letter to Hsinchu City Mayor Hsu Ming-tsai in April this year. “The people there were a lifeline to me when I was having work issues, going way above and beyond their job requirements to help.” In the letter, the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, expressed her gratitude to the staff at the Hsinchu Foreigner Assistance Center (HFAC) for their service.

In the summer of 2009, the woman arrived in the city in northern Taiwan to teach English at a private language school, but subsequently suffered repeated sexual harassment from one of her colleagues. “It is a terrifying position to be in a foreign country where you can’t speak the language and you aren’t sure what the laws are,” she wrote. After seeking advice from the HFAC on visa matters, however, she soon discovered that the center’s staff could offer a wide range of assistance and support to her during her difficult experience. “I went to the center hoping merely for an explanation of Taiwan’s labor laws, and ended up with a team of dedicated advocates who helped me through every step of my problem,” she wrote. “Their excellent command of English was comforting, and thanks to them I felt that I always fully understood my options … I hope that every foreigner who runs into difficulties is as lucky as I was to find such a center.”

For foreigners who do not speak Mandarin, living, working or simply traveling in Taiwan can be quite a challenge. The good news is that in recent years, the government has been working to make the island more welcoming to foreigners by helping them adapt to local life or travel more easily.

A Friendly Environment

For example, setting up foreigner assistance centers is part of the central government’s “Creating an International-friendly Living Environment Plan” proposed in 2007 by the ministerial-level Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC). The plan aims to create “favorable conditions and a friendly environment for attracting professional personnel from abroad.” To do so, the plan calls for the government “to set up foreigner assistance centers in major science parks and free trade ports to provide information covering issues such as housing, lodging, dining, shopping, medical services, tourism and travel assistance.” Eight centers are planned nationwide and will be run by local governments. The Hsinchu office was the first such center to be established under the plan, and is intended to serve as a model for future assistance centers.

The HFAC aims to provide foreigners with a wide range of information and services during their stay in Taiwan, thus helping them to feel at home. (Courtesy of HFAC)

“The center aims to provide foreigners with all necessary information and services during their stay in Taiwan, and it’s good to see that other local governments have expressed great interest in this initiative,” Jiang Yi-huah, then RDEC Minister, said at the inauguration ceremony for the HFAC in December 2008. A second foreigner assistance center was launched in Tainan City, southern Taiwan in September 2009, while a third one is currently being planned for Taichung City, central Taiwan.

According to Mayor Hsu, finding ways to make Hsinchu more appealing to foreigners has been high on the local government’s agenda. “With so many foreign professionals at the Hsinchu Science Park—roughly 10 percent of its workforce—as well as a great number of migrant workers and immigrant spouses living here, Hsinchu is the United Nations in miniature,” Hsu says. “We do need a foreigner assistance center to make our foreign friends feel at home.”

The HFAC is located in a three-story building right by Hsinchu City Hall and is open from Monday through Friday. A number of permanent government employees staff the center, as well as armed services personnel performing substitute military service and student volunteers from nearby National Tsing Hua University who speak English or Japanese. All staff members have the common aim of helping to solve any of the myriad problems that can arise from living in a new environment, such as how to get settled in Taiwan, arrange travel itineraries, do business, make investments, find housing or obtain medical care. The center also offers information on transportation, education and cultural activities. It has a reading area, computers with Internet access, an audio-visual room and a conference room for meetings or gatherings. While the center welcomes in-person visits from those seeking advice or wishing to use its facilities, outside of office hours questions can be left on the center’s website and are answered as quickly as possible.

“In the long run, we hope to have new recruits who can speak other languages such as Spanish, German or Korean, so that someday when our foreign friends come for help, but without a good command of Mandarin, English or Japanese, our translators can still give them instant assistance,” Hsu says.

“So far, most enquiries from our foreign visitors have been on residency issues, visa applications or tourism information,” says Fan Chun-luan, director-general of the Hsinchu City Government’s Department of General Affairs and supervisor of the HFAC. As of June this year, nearly 300 foreign visitors had received assistance from the center, and approximately 550,000 people had visited its website. Fan says that the center needs to do more publicity, however. “Many foreign visitors have told us they only found out that we’re here and ready to help them because they happened to pass by,” she says.

Someone to Turn To

“Having studied business management in the United States for almost eight years, I fully understand what it means to a foreigner to have a place to turn to when he or she needs help,” says Davis Huang, who has performed substitute military service at the center since January this year. “Many of our foreign friends told me they were very impressed with the center, saying that it makes them feel at home.”

Operators at the IFF call center do their best to answer queries as quickly as possible. (Courtesy of NIA)

Michelle Hsu, officer of the center, recalls how she made friends with a young black man from South Africa, who owns a local pub. He has lived in Hsinchu City for about 10 years, but cannot speak fluent Mandarin. “One day he came to our office and asked me about the requirements for a foreigner to start a business here. From then on, he became a frequent visitor to our center and a good friend of mine,” she says. “He even joked with me that after a visit to a nearby temple where a deity with a dark face is housed, he began to wonder if he and the god were of the same blood. What a cute guy!”

For foreign nationals living in other parts of Taiwan, help is just a telephone call away via a hotline called Information for Foreigners (IFF). According to the National Immigration Agency (NIA) under the Ministry of the Interior (MOI), as of June this year, the overall population of foreign nationals residing in Taiwan had exceeded 560,000. In order to help them solve any problems they encounter in their daily lives, the MOI and the RDEC jointly launched the IFF call center in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, in August 2005. “The hotline is intended to make life as smooth as possible for foreigners in Taiwan,” says Hsieh Li-kung, director-general of the NIA. The NIA is the supervisory agency of the IFF service. “Whenever our foreign friends need help, they can get it immediately with just a single phone call,” he says.

The IFF’s toll-free services are now available nationwide in Mandarin, English and Japanese 24 hours a day and all year round. Assistance is offered in seven major categories, including information on visas, residency, work, education, taxes, health insurance and transportation. The IFF also gives advice on lost property, housing leases, personal safety, investment, business, religion, legal matters and reporting domestic violence.

The hotline has been well received by foreigners living throughout Taiwan. Since it began operating, it had received approximately 166,000 calls as of June this year, with an average of more than 5,000 calls monthly in 2009. “Of these calls, residency advice, general information and information on visas constitute the top three categories, in that order,” Hsieh says.

In order to provide prompt and comprehensive services, the IFF cooperates closely with various government departments to help callers find an answer to their queries. “If our operators are unable to answer questions right away, they usually ask callers to leave their telephone number and offer to call them back after they contact the responsible agency,” call center supervisor Chou Tsui-tung says. “In emergencies, however, they use a three-party call system, with our operators serving as interpreters, so that callers can communicate more directly with the responsible person,” she says.

In addition to the call center, the NIA maintains the IFF website, where foreigners can find the latest information on a range of topics.

While the IFF was set up primarily to serve foreign nationals who come to Taiwan for work or travel, the NIA recognizes that many immigrant spouses of Taiwan citizens also face numerous challenges in their adopted homeland.

As of June this year, there were nearly 440,000 immigrant spouses in Taiwan, according to the NIA, mostly women from Southeast Asia and mainland China. “The IFF’s target group is foreigners residing, traveling or studying in Taiwan on a long or short-term basis,” the NIA’s Hsieh says, “but we also have a Foreign Spouses Hotline to provide them with information on adapting to life in Taiwan, related laws and regulations and family issues.”

Printed editions of the Taiwan What’s Up E-newsletter (Photo by Chang Su-ching)

The special hotline offers services in six languages including Mandarin, English, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian and Indonesian. Foreign spouses can also seek assistance at local government-run family services centers.

Another way to extend services to foreigners in Taiwan is to maintain an open and effective channel of communication such as an e-paper. This is especially workable in Taiwan, a country that has been rated by US-based Brown University as among the top five nations worldwide in e-government performance every year since 2001.

Taiwan What’s Up E-newsletter, a biweekly bilingual English-Chinese publication, was created by the RDEC in February 2008 for this purpose. Printed editions are also available at public facilities such as airport service counters and subway stations.

Starting from April this year, responsibility for the e-newsletter shifted to the NIA, and people can visit the agency’s website to read it online or subscribe for free. “Previously, most of its content had been provided by the NIA. Moreover, as a responsible agency for managing immigration as well as entry and exit affairs, we know better what our foreign friends really need during their stay in Taiwan. Thus, I feel it’s our duty to continue this effort and make its information more accurate and direct,” the NIA’s Hsieh explains. “We also hope to extend our readership to include not only white-collar employees, but also blue-collar workers and immigrant spouses.”

Information, Entertainment

The newsletter includes information on important laws and regulations relevant to foreigners living in Taiwan, as well as special reports on art activities, interviews, entertainment-related news and commonly asked questions. A number of stores and hotels even provide discount coupons through the e-newsletter. Taiwan What’s Up E-newsletter also welcomes feedback so that readers can make their needs known and assist the service in meeting them. As of June this year, the publication had nearly 3,700 subscribers.

“Through the e-newsletter, we hope to achieve a higher level of communication between the government and our foreign friends, and help them enjoy a more pleasant and convenient stay by keeping them updated on events, developments and important government policies and changes that may directly impact their lives,” Hsieh adds.

Given today’s trend toward globalization, it is important for Taiwan to create a friendly environment for foreign nationals and open its arms to those from all over the world. For foreign visitors and residents, living in and getting around Taiwan is becoming easier and more convenient thanks to the range of services provided by assistance centers, hotlines and online resources. “For foreigners in Taiwan, I want to ask, ‘Have you ever encountered a situation in which you needed help, but had no one to turn to?’” the NIA’s Hsieh says. “Next time, don’t hesitate to use these valuable resources. They can help you enjoy a pleasant experience and create many wonderful memories of your stay in Taiwan.”

Write to dennis0602@mail.gio.gov.tw

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