Taiwan Considers "Fugitive Slave" Law for Migrant Workers

14 Oct 2010 -- Taiwanese labor groups are outraged by a proposed law which would offer a reward to citizens who catch "runaway" migrant workers and turn them in. The legislation would be a second cousin to the Fugitive Slave Law in the 19th century U.S., which required citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners. Is Taiwan taking its legal system all the way back to the 19th century when people were property?

Taiwan's Council on Labor Affairs (CLA) has been struggling with a problem: migrant workers who travel to Taiwan on employer-specific visas keep running away from their employers. In fact, there are currently over 33,000 migrant workers in Taiwan who have gone MIA since taking a job. So what's the CLA's solution? Turn each one of its citizens into some xenophobic version of Dog the Bounty Hunter by offering cold, hard cash for the capture of a runaway worker. The pay day turns out to be roughly $160 per "fugitive" — not a fortune, but a way for someone struggling to make a living in a downed economy to get a leg up. And if people are hurt in a mob of cash-crazy vigilantes? Well, they're only migrant workers.

Of course, what the CLA or the Taiwanese government hasn't done is ask itself why migrant workers are running away in the first place. Most of them spend serious time and money getting visas to come work in Taiwan and many workers from Southeast Asian countries have families back home relying on that paycheck. Things must be pretty bad to leave a paying job and a place to live in a foreign country where you don't have immigration papers. And for some workers, things are that bad. Southeast Asian women and girls are trafficked into domestic servitude in Taiwan, often beaten and degraded by their employers. And just recently six men were killed at an unsafe work site, which probably hadn't been kept up to code because the men at the site were undocumented. But no one is proposing a law to reward citizens for spotting human trafficking, exploitation, or unsafe working conditions.

And what awaits these runaway workers when spotted by a vigilant public and turned in for reward money? Apparently, they will "be assisted with a passport and provided with the expenses for repatriation." That a really, really polite way of saying they'll be deported but the government will foot the bill for getting them the hell out. No attempt to figure out why these people have fled from their employers, no counseling or aid for trafficked people, no attempt to reform what is obviously a broken system.

The Fugitive Slave Law didn't help the U.S. two centuries ago, Taiwan, and its cousin won't help you now. Let's make sure the U.S. doesn't step back two hundred years like Taiwan threatens to by asking your state to support domestic workers' rights, many of whom are migrants. Together, we can make sure the Fugitive Slave Act stays a historical document. - Amanda Kloer, October 14, 2010, http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/taiwan_considers_fugitive_slave_law_for_migrant_workers