Rate of ‘New Children of Taiwan’ on the decline

Still another reason is that fewer brides have come from abroad.

“People in my country know it’s hard to make a living in Taiwan now,” says another Vietnamese spouse. “Fewer girls want to marry Taiwanese.”

Taiwan’s long economic downturn has made girls in China and Southeast Asia unwilling to marry Taiwanese and come to Taiwan. They have better places to go get married.

South Korea is their top choice.

High economic growth has made South Korea a rising economic power. Its men can afford a larger “dowry” for foreign girls.

In the past, a Taiwanese would spend as much as NT$400,000 to marry a Thai or Vietnamese girl. The going rates are NT$100,000.

A richer South Korean is ready to pay NT$400,000 or more to tie the knot with a Southeast Asian girl.

Women in China, who are getting more self-assertive, don’t like to wed Taiwanese men, because their would-be parents in law are overly conservative.

“Parents in law in Taiwan like to interfere with the family life of their sons,” laments a Chinese bride, who worked as a public prosecutor in Chengdu before marrying a Taiwanese professional.

She helped arrange two marriages early this year. “The two brides from my hometown came to Taipei but got a divorce in a mere two months,” she adds. Nosy mothers in law were the cause of the two divorces.

Ms. Keh Yu-ling, executive secretary of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, doubts that the financial exigency is the main reason for fewer children of intermarriages but attributes the fewer arrivals of foreign spouses to tighter immigration restrictions.

“There certainly is a correlation between harsher interviews and the drop in the arrivals,” Keh says. Foreign spouses, those from China in particular, are closely questioned by immigration officers in interviews.

Interviews are often repeated many times. No wonder foreign spouses shun Taiwan, Keh regrets.

But Chien Tai-lang, vice minister of the interior, brushes aside the problem of foreign spouses and their children as “one not very important.”

After all, the New Children of Taiwan form a very small minority, Chien points out. “Maybe,” he opines, “people mistakenly think these children have formed a new important group of immigrants.”

Chien may have been mistaken. Anyone born in Taiwan with a Taiwanese national as a parent is a natural-born citizen. He doesn’t need naturalization. He isn’t an immigrant. His mother is an immigrant, though.

Foreign-born mothers have great influence on their offspring born in Taiwan. In that sense, mothers and children together form a new important group of immigrants.

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