Integrating Care Regime and Migration Regime: A Case Study of Taiwan

Care provision for the elderly and young has become an unprecedented challenge in recent years in Asia. Due to the rapid demographic transformation—including greater longevity, declining fertility rate, and ageing of population—many advanced industrialized Asian countries have put care onto the social policy agenda and redefine their roles in care-giving. Various institutional and policy measures have been made to provide assistance for elderly and child care, such as long-term care insurance (LTCI), parental leave, and increasing number of public day care centers. In order to meet the high demands for care workers in the labour market, some East Asian countries also start to recruit foreign care workers from other less-developed countries. Thus, different migrant care worker policies have been implemented to attract foreign labour into their social welfare sectors. During the process, these states' social welfare policies have been mitigated and influenced by their migration policies and vice versa. In this paper, I will use Taiwan as a case study. I wil investigate how Taiwan’s social care policy has been changing in the past two decades and explore its relationship with Taiwan’s migrant care worker policy which was first implemented in 1992. In addition, I will trace the policy debates on temporary migrant care workers and analyze the formation and transformation of Taiwan’s migration policies in accordance with its social welfare policies. Lastly, I intend to tackle the ways in which Taiwanese government integrates its care regime and migration regime and redefines its role as a welfare state.