For migrant workers in Taiwan, Beijing attack threat poses daunting challenges

Gilda Banugan of Davao City in the Philippines has worked for over a decade as a housekeeper in Taiwan.

While the money is much better than she could earn at home, it carries a cost: the knowledge that she is living in one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, facing the looming threat of an attack by mainland forces.

“If you ask many Filipino migrant workers, in case something happened are they going back to the Philippines or not, most likely the answer is no, they want to stay put in Taiwan,” said Banugan, 41. “Because, how can we survive even if they tried to rescue us?”

With tensions mounting across the Taiwan Strait, the fate of the island’s nearly 1 million foreign residents is often overlooked amid the geopolitical calculations. For many migrant workers, that awakens fear that they could be collateral damage, caught in the crossfire and left wondering whether they will be rescued.

Taiwan had 849,777 foreign workers at the end of July, according to the Ministry of Labour’s Workforce Development Agency, most from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, helping to ease labour shortages in manufacturing, construction, fishing, hospitals and home care for Asia’s eighth-largest economy. With dependants and others, the number exceeds 950,000, some 4 per cent of Taiwan’s population.