Lighthouse Ltd., the marketing company founded in Taipei by Japanese native Hajime Yamanaka, is closing in on its first birthday. “I am the only employee. But I plan to hire people, and I want to give back to Taiwan,” Yamanaka says.

The forty-six-year-old Yamanaka has 20 years of experience in advertising and marketing. In Japan, he was a senior manager at a foreign marketing firm. In October of 2021, Yamanaka secured an “Employment Gold Card” and came to Taiwan. His brainchild Lighthouse Ltd. specializes in social media marketing for LGBTQ groups.

His reason for choosing Taiwan was simple. “Taipei is the Berlin of Asia. I believe in the culture of diversity and tolerance here, and the blending of different ideas is perfect for creativity,” he says.

Launched in 2018, the Taiwan Employment Gold Card combines the functions and privileges of a work permit, resident visa, Alien Resident Certificate (ARC), and re-entry permit. It is a key part of Taiwan’s strategy to attract highly qualified foreign professionals. Expats like Yamanaka can come to Taiwan to seek employment freely, start a business, or work remotely over the course of one to three years. Upon expiration, card holders can apply to renew their cards. Card holders may also apply for permanent residence after holding the card for three years. Overall, Taiwan’s Gold Card has fewer restrictions and offers more benefits than even the PEP-–Singapore’s employment pass for the most highly sought-after foreign workers.

The Taiwanese government delights in touting the success of the Gold Card. As of the end of November 2022, Taiwan had issued 6,351 Gold Cards. The goal is to reach ten thousand by the end of 2023 and twenty thousand by 2030. 

Big numbers don’t a successful policy make

“If you look at the numbers, the Gold Card is apparently more successful than Taiwan’s previous attempts at attracting expats,” says Professor Jiunn-Rong Chiou (邱俊榮) of the Department of Economics at National Central University. Chiou participated in the formation of the policy.

However, Chiou admits that the Gold Card’s purpose was to help foreign professionals settle down and contribute to Taiwan. Therefore, it makes more sense to track how many expats make their home in Taiwan and contribute to the local economy than to crow about the number of cards that have been issued.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan was one of the very few countries in the world that was able to maintain life-as-usual. Between March 2020 and May 2021, the number of Gold Card applicants skyrocketed. Critics speculated that many applicants just wanted to ride out the pandemic; very few actually meant to settle down in Taiwan. 

In June of 2021, the Gold Card Office conducted a survey of their applicants. Out of 317 responses, 60% agreed that Taiwan’s handling of the pandemic was one of the reasons they decided to move to Taiwan. 

Between July and September of 2022, the Gold Card Office conducted another survey of Gold Card holders. Out of 1,081 responses, 58.9% of holders said they still lived in Taiwan; while 16.7% said they were no longer residing in Taiwan.

Former Gold Card holder Tom Fifield, who was granted dual citizenship status by the government in 2020, is a Generalist at the Gold Card Office. He says that, although “pandemic refugees” do exist, they are in the minority. Card holders usually leave Taiwan due to family, finance, or work-related issues. Ever holders who no longer reside in Taiwan still come to visit often, he says.

AI legal consulting company Proxifile in Taipei. Peretz is a serial entrepreneur who still plans to stick around in Taiwan for a long time. When the pandemic forced public schools in Taiwan to close sporadically, however, he took his family back to Silicon Valley, saying that he planned to return Taiwan once restrictions were lifted.

Paving the road does not change the direction

Once the pandemic is over, the battle for foreign talent will return to the criteria that really matter: job opportunities, pay, the investment environment, etc. The Gold Card could really shine when the other conditions are also competitive on a global scale.

“In the past, not only was Taiwan not competitive on the world stage, the way into Taiwan was blocked. The Gold Card may be commended for paving the way, but it is not attractive enough in and of itself,” says Hung-Yue Suen (孫弘岳), Distinguished Associate Professor at the Department of Technology Application and Human Resource Development at National Taiwan Normal University. Easier entry may improve the willingness of expats to seek employment in Taiwan, but if the job environment is not what they expected, talented professionals with the wherewithal to seek employment overseas will naturally begin to look elsewhere.

In the “2020 Salary Survey Projections” published by Willis Towers Watson, a human resources advisor company, Taiwan’s overall compensation ranked only tenth out of the fifteen APAC countries it surveyed. Taiwan not only falls behind Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, but also China and Vietnam.

Low pay chases away all talent

“The truth of the matter is, we’ve not seen any foreign professional come to Taiwan solely because of the Gold Card in the past years. The more common situation is Taiwanese businesses using the Gold Card as a way of moving their senior managers from other countries to Taiwan,” says Sophia Chiang (蔣宗芸), Executive VP at Rising Management Consulting, a firm that specializes in helping companies headhunt mid- to high-level professionals in the tech industry. Low pay is the number one reason why Taiwan is failing to attract the right kind of foreign talent.

In a survey conducted by the Gold Card Office in 2022, only 30.4% of those surveyed were actually employed in Taiwan, while. 34.8% were “hired overseas but working remotely from Taiwan”.

Fifield admits that many of these remote workers are earning American or European-level pay while living in Taiwan. But he stresses that they still pay Taiwanese taxes and contribute to the local economy. 

The lack of good pay not only chases away foreign talent, it also drives out local talent, or makes it difficult for them to come home. 

Forty-year-old Chris is an industrial designer working in a big tech firm in the United States. In the past five years, he has often considered taking his family back to Taiwan. But the salary gap is a major sticking point. “In Taiwanese and Chinese subcontractors, the industrial designer is just an executive. But Western companies place great importance on creativity. Your added value allows you to enjoy better compensation,” he says.

Suen points out that Taiwanese businesses excel at manufacturing, but this is a field in which “speed, quality, and low cost” are king. The obsession with driving down costs makes it difficult for Taiwanese corporations to offer higher pay. Because of this, Taiwan’s best electrical engineers and computer scientists are forced to go abroad. The only way to buck the trend is to nurture startups, but very few Taiwanese startups are competitive in the global arena, partly because of the sluggishness of the venture capital market.

Taiwan’s immigration policies need to be friendlier

“Industry policies need to break free of the idiom, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’,” advises Chiou. Once the government pinpoints the key industries it wishes to develop, it needs to go all-in. For instance, it can pour resources into promising startups so that they’d be able to offer world-class compensation and hire the best and brightest from around the globe. “If you build it, they will come, and so will the money,” says Chiou. 

The barriers that expats encounter in Taiwan should also be addressed. For example, finance is an issue faced by many Gold Card holders.

“Transferring funds between the U.S. and Taiwan is a hassle. Even electronic transfers that should take effect immediately run into the problem of Taiwanese banks holding on to the funds for seven to ten days, before they ask you to visit the bank in person to fill out forms, just so you can pick up your own money,” says Peretz. 

Tom Fifield (Source: Pei-Yin Hsieh)

Fifield also says that besides banks, many online platforms in Taiwan require Taiwanese identification numbers to register—something an expat would not have. “Taiwan’s immigration environment is far from perfect; there is still a lot of work to be done,” he says.

If Taiwan wants to emulate Singapore and attract talent from around the world, issuing Gold Cards is not enough. Taiwan needs to improve its wage system, startup ecosystem, and also build an environment that’s friendlier to all people if it wants to make real headway.

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Have you read?

• The evolving role of immigration in Taiwan politics 
• Time to leverage the pull- factor to attract more foreigners in Taiwan 
• Above Any Label – A New Kind of Taiwanese

Translated by Jack Chou
Edited by TC Lin
Uploaded by Ian Huang