Taiwan plans to attract 400,000 foreign nationals to make up for its shrinking working population. But income-based visas and English-language services alone won’t be enough for the island to compete against its neighbors.

The logic seems fundamentally sound. As the remote work model takes off worldwide, location-independent professionals will be attracted by the comfortable lifestyle and friendly people in Taiwan, as well as its robust technology sector. Some who come might later settle down and participate in the domestic labor market, which has a strong need for “internationalized” talent, eventually helping to transform the talent market as well.

This was the premise of the Gold Card program, which functions as Taiwan’s digital nomad visa. The Gold Card Office, operating under the National Development Council (NDC), has a much broader role than that of a visa agency, coordinating reforms across a wide variety of agencies and even working with entities like publicly owned banks to streamline Gold Card holders’ adjustment to life in Taiwan.

But what the government might define as a need doesn’t necessarily correspond with market demand. Foreign nationals coming to Taiwan generally fail to be hired by local companies, even when they are specifically looking for work. Many have reported that companies are unwilling to consider hiring foreign nationals, sometimes assuming that their salary requests will fall outside of the company’s acceptable range.

Of course, the main obstacle for foreign talent is language. In efforts to make Taiwan more friendly to the international community, the government therefore established a Bilingual 2030 policy aiming to improve education and civil service functions in English. But given the difficulty of learning a new language without an immersive environment, any aspirations for changes beyond the superficial are ambitious.

In fact, the National Federation of Teachers Unions in July urged the government to review the policy, claiming it had caused several issues in elementary and high schools. Teachers reported unsatisfactory results when instructors were made to teach in English despite lacking fluency, while students had to learn new subjects in a language they didn’t fully comprehend. Still, the policy is showing some effects in the increased number of bilingual schools.

NDC Minister Kung Ming-hsin in August announced that the government will work to recruit 400,000 foreign nationals within 10 years to make up for Taiwan’s decreasing population. Although the segment of foreign white-collar workers has received the most attention in the media, the target is also expected to be met through the influx of graduates of colleges in Taiwan and migrant workers.

But the question remains the same for both college graduates and international professionals: will the local employment market be able to absorb them?

Learning to hire

Attracting talent has been made more difficult by the impact on perceptions of Taiwan by China’s recent increased military activities and expectations of increasing cross-Strait frictions over the next few years. Although the tension following U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August has not had any major business impact, concern is growing in some corporate boardrooms and areas with complex supply chains, according to a recent survey by AmCham Taiwan.

Over the past several years, the pandemic has also led to lost business opportunities. In AmCham Taiwan’s 2022 Business Climate Survey, 86.8% of respondents said they were impacted to some degree by Taiwan’s 2021 summer outbreak. Many companies have also reported severe impact from the lack of on-the-ground presence of critical staff due to border restrictions.

“If [business owners] are willing to accept three days of quarantine, they can explore and look around,” says Jun Wakabayashi, associate at Appworks, a provider of startup ecosystem services. But many have been unwilling to do so.

Wakabayashi notes that some of the so-called COVID refugees from Europe, Singapore, New York, and Silicon Valley who decided to move to Taiwan in 2021 because of its relatively lax restrictions at the time did end up staying. As an example he cites Kevin Lin, co-founder and chief operating officer of Twitch, who returned to Taiwan and eventually ended up hiring several engineers for a new research and development center.

Taiwan is expected to lift its quarantine-upon-arrival rules in October, following a year in which it moved in a direction increasingly divergent from the rest of the world, with the exception of China. But even after borders fully reopen, Taiwan will need to confront deeper issues on the hiring side. Many companies have highly traditional hiring and staff management practices – especially smaller firms outside the tech sector. In extreme cases, occasional reports can be found of interviewers asking candidates about their parents’ occupations. In other cases, employers are unwilling to budge on salary and benefits like paid time off.

Internationally mobile professionals in the era of remote work tend to emphasize independence, respect, and diversity, says Cindy Chen, regional head of multinational recruitment firm Adecco. These values contrast with the loyalty emphasized by boomer leaders of many companies and require some effort to implement, making recruitment and retention challenging for these businesses. 

“Some of our most challenging assignments involve leadership and digital transformation,” says Chen. “We need people who can drive change in an entire organization, and then these companies can become more attractive workplaces for other hires.”

The language issue also needs to be addressed, Chen says, despite the availability of various overseas Taiwanese with varying levels of Chinese-language skills. “Top professionals will usually have English skills in any case.”

Chen adds that increased English proficiency levels among government and service-sector employees would help them understand international best practices and better communicate with foreign nationals. Many issues in the banking system, for instance – a frequent subject of complaint by foreign nationals in Taiwan – come down to insufficient awareness of foreigners’ particular situations and needs.

The lack of implementation of international best practices is also noticeable in the design of the visa system. Sam Reynolds, bureau chief of CoinDesk Taiwan and a Gold Card holder, recommends that the Gold Card program pay more attention to international examples, such as Thailand’s Smart T visa and Singapore’s ONE pass, pointing to Taiwan’s excessive level of bureaucracy in the application process.

“If you apply for any sort of visa that’s not the economy class (qualifying you based on income), things tend to go off the rails quickly,” a problem that doesn’t affect peer countries to the same degree, he says. Reynolds adds that any non-income-based digital nomad visa must deal with a plethora of possible occupations, making reduction of paperwork vital to its success.

Adecco’s Chen recommends that the government create a platform to bridge the gap between foreign professionals and domestic companies seeking foreign talent to help both sides understand the needs of the other and guide policy decisions. Such infrastructure could help government agencies like the Gold Card Office get to the bottom of why domestic companies are reluctant even to dip their feet into the international talent pool, while also educating those companies on foreigners’ requirements.

Another area where Taiwanese companies lag behind international practices is in the work-from-home model. Having been spared the worst of the pandemic, Taiwan was never forced to reform its work practices. But remote work could function not just as a way to attract overseas talent to more traditional work arrangements, but as an opportunity for Taiwan to upgrade its own workforce.

Reynolds says that some foreign companies have hired top-flight foreign talent, particularly from Singapore, to work in Taiwan for internationally competitive wages. Talent flows in the opposite direction are also an opportunity for Taiwan, both for directly building an internationally competitive workforce and for establishing benchmarks for businesses hoping to hire from the local market.

Looking closer to home

Considering the many challenges of recruiting international talent and retaining foreign professionals already in or with ties to Taiwan, it may be better for the government to reposition its thinking entirely from “talent recruitment” to “talent upgrade.” International professionals may not be the most important element in that process, nor necessarily the first step.

With a robust middle tier, companies may have an easier time thinking about top-tier international talent without creating uncomfortable cultural enclaves in their workforce. International attractiveness can help provide a measurement of this process, but it’s far from the entire process.

One recent missed opportunity was the government’s indefinite suspension earlier this year of a decision on permanent immigration from Hong Kong and Macau. The decision to nix Hong Kong migrants was justified on the basis of national security, although it applied to people already living in Taiwan as well.

Over just a few years, Hong Kong has descended from a hub attracting global talent into a hardship posting where talent availability may become a bottleneck for business operations. Hong Kong could in theory make an ideal source for international talent coming to Taiwan, despite differences in language and industry structure.

Meanwhile, around 400,000 Taiwanese live in China, and a total of two million people of Taiwanese origin live abroad. This segment is potentially large enough to make up for the shortfall without the adversity of language barriers.

But getting a comprehensive picture of the motivations of Taiwanese living in China and elsewhere is difficult, given the diversity of career paths and living arrangements among this group and the difficulty in polling.

Although Taiwanese don’t face language barriers in China, those who move there still have an international mindset. They will not necessarily come back to Taiwan if China becomes unsuitable, according to multiple sources.

But the biggest underlying question is more of a philosophical dilemma: does Taiwan want to transition from a low-cost to a value-added business model? For years, the Central Bank has resisted currency appreciation in order to keep production onshore; labor recruitment has been a known tradeoff for that benefit.

As Taiwan rethinks its place in the world in relation to a changing China and a new willingness by the U.S. to consider a deeper trade relationship, it needs to continuously question this choice. Visa reforms are good, but the main issue remains an imbalance between supply and demand. Taiwan must realize that it is far from the only player in this market.