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(This article is the second part of the two-part series: Foreign Students = Illegal Workers?)

Sri Lankan students Roshen and Thilinda had a rough start when they first arrived in Taiwan. They thought they were here on a work-study program to gain tech skills and practical experience in their fields, but were instead assigned to work full-time at food processor Lian Hwa Foods Corp. and take Chinese language classes on weekends.

After four weeks, however, they were found to be working illegally at the food processor and were then sent to where they initially expected to go: the Tainan campus of the University of Kang Ning.

Meeting up there with their friend Raashid, who had arrived in Taiwan with a separate group of Sri Lankan students, and being enrolled in courses related to their fields of interest, they thought their luck had turned for the better.

Instead, no sooner had they settled in than the school asked them to pay more than NT$50,000 in tuition for the semester. With the school the Sri Lankan students were to attend having already been changed from “Kainan University” to the “University of Kang Ning,” Raashid did not have high hopes that the program’s organizer would keep its promise of “Free course – 100% free” as advertised. But he was taken aback by the sudden bill for what he saw as a huge sum.

To be able to buy food and pay tuition, the Sri Lankan students went back to work. Working the maximum 20 hours a week they were legally allowed under work-study programs could not cover their living and transportation expenses, tuition, and health insurance expenses, so they opted to resume life as illegal workers toiling 40 or more hours per week.

Many of the Sri Lankan students questioned staying in Taiwan. With representatives of the organization that arranged the program having disappeared after the fiasco with Lian Hwa Foods, eliminating any obligation to pay the broker a US$1,000 fine for breach of contract for returning to Sri Lanka, several first year college students in the program decided to head home.

Roshen, however, was a third-year student who was well into the semester, and if he abandoned his goal of getting a diploma in Taiwan, he would have to start from scratch in Sri Lanka and take a college entrance exam again. So he decided to stick it out.

Photo by Justin Wu

Teachers as Middlemen

The person in charge of helping them find work in Tainan was named Alex, a part-time teacher at the University of Kang Ning who directed its Incubation Center and also served as head of a ward in Tainan’s South District.

The beverage chain “Tea & Magic Hand,” a common sight in the Tainan area, was one of the businesses Alex relied on to help students find work. Their main responsibility was covering the cups with an insulation film to keep drinks warm, earning NT$0.08 per cup processed. One person could generally fill seven to eight cartons a day, with 10 cartons in a day the record.

He also arranged jobs for the students to pick red onions, or work at steel, plastics or food processing plants or a chicken slaughterhouse. Those jobs paid anywhere from NT$5,000, NT$6,000 and NT$8,000 a month to NT$15,000, depending on the work and the number of hours on the job, though much of their pay was deducted by Alex.

What really was the last straw for the students, however, was tuition.

Taking to the Streets in a Foreign Land

Before the 2018 summer vacation, the University of Kang Ning hoped that all of the students would pay tuition before the long break. The students gathered in the main hall of their dorm and discussed in their native language how to handle the school’s request and what to do in the future.

A lecturer in the school’s Department of Digital Applications who had considerable interaction with the students, Liou Shiang-chun, and Union of Private School Educators president Yu Jung-hui were there to see if they could help.

Based on Yu’s advice, the students agreed to meet with the media to discuss their plight and then take to the streets in Taipei with union teachers and Tainan area teachers and students to present their appeal to the Ministry of Education (MOE).

After the protest, the MOE suspended the University of Kang Ning’s right to enroll students, deducted subsidies given for the work-study program, and prohibited the school from accepting foreign students. The university also promised the students free tuition and free board until they graduated, and the MOE and Ministry of Labor sent people to check if the students were working excessive hours. These steps took care of the student’s basic needs, enabling them to remain in Tainan.

Many Srl Lankan students had hoped to acquire skills in Taiwan they could not pick up at home. But that did not happen, and many feel if they had to do it over again they would not have come to Taiwan. (Photo by Justin Wu)

Foreign Students Become Illegal Workers

In April 2019, Alex agreed to talk to CommonWealth Magazine, and during a two-hour conversation he offered a diverging view on what motivated the students to come to Taiwan and justifications of his actions, including why money was withheld from their salaries.

“They came here to work, plain and simple. Nobody wanted to study. They kept borrowing money from me to buy luxury goods and send money home. The money I deducted [from their pay] was money they owed me,” Alex said, complaining that the school has not helped him get the money he is owed back. At the time of the interview, the students still owed him NT$300,000, he said.

The Union of Private School Educators was the first third party organization to get involved in the case.

“I cannot completely believe ward chief Alex. He used the students’ money to buy a vehicle to drive them to and from the factories, but the vehicle was his personal property. That’s not very appropriate,” says union president Yu Jung-hui.

Yu also had some doubts about what the students were saying publicly. “In terms of their motivation, I think it’s possible they wanted to come here to both study and work,” he says.

Still, he helped the foreign students contact the media and organize a protest, hoping that the “illegal worker” controversy could be put to rest.

Photo source: The Union of Private School Educators

Prosecutors have launched an investigation into the case, and regardless of the outcome, what it reflects is that the school never did create a system that deals rationally with foreign students’ financial situations and balancing education and work. Instead, the situation was left to a staff member to handle in rather haphazard fashion. Throughout the ordeal, the University of Kang Ning has been virtually absent, seemingly unwilling to assume any responsibility for the fiasco.

After the case surfaced publicly, the university decided to replace some of its top administrators. In a spacious office on the school’s Taipei campus, Yen Hang-tsung, the University of Kang Ning’s new chief secretary, said in a somewhat apologetic tone that because the case was under investigation, the school could not comment on any details of the case.

“To be honest, we are also investigating what our predecessors were really up to. We will do our best to make up for the mistakes of the past,” Yen said in an interview with CommonWealth on March 21.

He then said with some emotion: “Many schools today are facing the low birth rate crisis, and we can be seen as a warning signal. As an educational institution, we should be putting people first rather than money first if we want to avoid temptations and pressure.”

This statement represented a stark contrast to the university’s previous behavior.

As for the controversy over foreign students being treated as cheap labor and working illegally, Kao Yuan University, Hsing Wu University, Yu Da University of Science and Technology and Tungnan University were all found to be embroiled in similar cases. The Ministry of Education demanded that the schools provide the “internship contracts,” “work contracts,” and copies of the “direct payroll deposit accounts” of the foreign students. It also prohibited long internship working hours, the signing of multi-year work contracts, and brokers deducting money from student pay.

The Intractable Problem: Too Many Schools, Too Few Students

The questionable behavior by the schools seems to have been resolved, at least for the time being. But the problem at the heart of the foreign student abuses – too many schools for too few students – remains impossible to solve. Draft legislation on the transformation and withdrawal of private colleges and universities that touches on many vested interests remains buried in the Legislative Yuan.

During the 2019 Lunar New Year break, a CommonWealth reporter showed up in the dorm occupied by Roshen, Raashid and Thilinda.

It was not their first encounter with Taiwanese media workers. After the case was exposed publicly, many people wanted to know more about their story. But the interpretations that emerged in the media, such as they “conspired with brokers to come work illegally,” or they “were not good students and just came on the pretext of studying abroad” left the students befuddled, stunned at what was being said about them.

The Sri Lankan students found many of their classes too easy and that they did not learn as much as they could have in Sri Lanka. They also could not interact much with Taiwanese students because of the language barrier. (Photo source: A Sri Lankan student)

“Your class schedule includes applied English. Isn’t that too easy?” the CommonWealth reporter asked, considering that the students came from a former British colony and spoke English fluently in the interview.

The three students looked at each other, before Raashid answered: “It sucks. And it’s not only the English class that’s too easy….” his voice trailing off, somewhat embarrassed to continue as he looked toward Liou Shiang-chun.

“Don’t worry about offending me,” Liou said, encouraging the students to speak their minds. Thilinda spoke up, explaining that he was taking a video editing class in his information communication major “that I took in Sri Lanka. I can only learn easy stuff here.”

Roshen, who was capable of writing programs, also could not hide his disappointment. “I haven’t learned as much in Taiwan as I did in Sri Lanka. I don’t think it’s been worth it taking time off from college.”

The students said teachers went through the class material slowly because they had to go back and forth between Chinese and English to accommodate both the Taiwanese and Sri Lankan students in their classrooms. When the teachers were speaking in Chinese, the Sri Lankan students were spacing out, Thilinda said.

They said they used the Moodle open-source learning platform to turn in their homework, and found it straightforward to use.

When they were interviewed, they were going to class in the morning, then on to work four hours legally in a factory in the afternoon, and then exercised at the sports complex at night before returning to the dorm to play video games. They did not have to spend much time on homework, and the language barrier kept them from interacting with Taiwanese students.

When asked if they really had learned nothing, Roshen, Raashid and Thilinda all nodded. When Roshen said he would not choose to come to Taiwan if had to do it all over again, his two friends agreed, saying it was a bad decision.

Raashid admitted, however that a diploma from Taiwan would still come in handy when looking for a high-paying job in Sri Lanka. He was hoping to use the University of Kang Ning degree to find a fulltime IT job and use his spare time to run a business in the media field in which he has some expertise.

Would getting a degree without having learned the requisite skills be enough? Thilinda said that at least once he got his diploma, he could return to Sri Lanka and go to graduate school. He has not abandoned his dream of being an audio engineer and felt that as long as he could hang on for the next two years and get his diploma, his Taiwan journey will not have been in vain.

Who Benefits from the Recruitment Scam?

There are many factors playing into Taiwanese universities’ recruitment of students from South and Southeast Asia, but the students themselves are generally oblivious to these competing interests, seeing only an appealing ad and packing their bags for a new experience. In the end, the real players in the recruitment game are brokers, schools and factories.

The students from the University of Kang Ning who took to the streets in protest will at least be able to stay in Taiwan, their student status and daily life no longer in peril. But many foreign students at other schools were also squeezed at factories and stripped of their savings before escaping home.

In handling the case of the Sri Lankan students, the Ministry of Education described it as a “special case.” In fact, however, the University of Kang Ning model was nearly identical to other cases of abuse of students from Southeast Asia that have exploded into the limelight. In all cases, students were recruited overseas by a broker, worked an illegal number of hours per week (more than 20), took classes organized haphazardly, and had teachers act as go-betweens. The only difference with Kang Ning was that it did not receive government subsidies for hosting the special program.

According to Ministry of Education figures, the ministry estimated that 325 special programs for students from South and Southeast Asia would be set up at science and technology universities around Taiwan. At present, 160 programs have been created, attracting 5,286 students, with each program receiving a subsidy ranging from NT$2 million to NT$4 million.

This sizable incentive has become irresistible spoils for unscrupulous brokers, triggering a hidden storm of surprising proportions.

A total of 51,072 students from the 10 Southeast Asian countries studied in Taiwan in 2018, nearly half of the 104,470 overseas students in the country last year, and some of these foreign students inevitably use their student status as a pretext to work in Taiwan.

Have you read?

♦ The ‘Hidden Costs’ of ‘Hidden Champions’

♦ Southeast Asian Student Enrollment Up 85% in Taiwan

♦ The Opaque Market of Foreign Domestic Work in Taiwan

Franco Lacanaria, a priest at St. Christopher’s Church in Taipei, served as an advisor to Philippine students enrolled in Yu Da University of Science and Technology’s work-study program for Southeast Asian students. He believes that about a quarter of the Philippine students were here to work, while three-quarters were like Roshen and his friends and legitimately wanted to advance their studies but were duped.

St. Christopher’s Church priest Franco Lacanaria says that much like the Sri Lankan students, Philippine students were duped into coming to Taiwan to serve as illegal workers. (Photo by Justin Wu)

But the media focused on the opportunists who were here to work illegally, rather than analyzing the problems the foreign students faced.

These young adults from Southeast Asia were seen as a panacea for the ills troubling Taiwan’s universities caused by a low birth rate, but in the process, Taiwan sacrificed the quality of its higher education system and its international reputation.

As the interview with the Sri Lankan students was about to come to an end, Thilinda said the only course in which he actually learned something was his screenwriting class, but he admitted he was still struggling to come up with ideas for a script of his own. Raashid jumped in and suggested, “What about our story? Just write about our strange experience in Taiwan,” drawing chuckles from all three of them.

Their original aspirations for studying abroad no more than distant memories, finding humor in their hardships that few have understood was one of the few ways the students had left of making sense of their plight.

Have you read? More investigative reporting on Taiwan's higher education:

♦ Commercial Academic Publishing Preying on Taiwan

♦ Taiwanese Academics Undercutting the System

Translated by Luke Sabatier

Edited by Sharon Tseng