China Power | Society | East Asia

Taiwan’s Democratic Blind Spot: Statelessness and Legal Exclusion

Taiwan’s stateless and undocumented population, numbering in the tens of thousands, has no access to basic rights, including healthcare, legal residency, and in some cases, education.

The square in front of Taipei Station is a popular gathering place for migrant workers on their days off.

Taiwan is often discussed in the contemporary international community through its democratic resilience in the face of Beijing’s authoritarian pressure. In Europe, where many countries have transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy, Taiwan’s experience has become a significant point of reference: a small society that built a system widely regarded as worth defending. 

This dominant narrative of Taiwan’s success is not incorrect. However, what is often obscured beneath it is a less visible but critical issue: the presence of stateless and undocumented populations numbering in the tens of thousands, who live in a democratic country without access to basic rights, including healthcare, legal residency, and in some cases, education.

The United Nations’ 1954 Convention defines a stateless person as an individual who is not considered a national by any state. Hannah Arendt, a German-born political theorist who lived as both a refugee and a stateless person for over two decades across Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, and the United States, identified the right to citizenship as the most fundamental of all rights. She argued that because human rights are protected and exercised through the nation-state system, individuals without citizenship are effectively rendered powerless, reduced to mere existence, stripped of political agency, and unable to claim or exercise their rights. 

Stateless people and the undocumented population in Taiwan exemplify Arendt’s claims. Despite Taiwan’s positioning itself internationally as a progressive democracy committed to universal human rights, these populations living within its borders remain outside the legal framework through which those rights are actually guaranteed.

Taiwan is home to several stateless populations whose existence reflects different forms of legal exclusion. Statelessness in Taiwan takes several distinct forms, each produced by a different mechanism within the same legal architecture. Broadly speaking, there are three main pathways through which people have become stateless or effectively rightless in Taiwan.

Born Stateless in Taiwan

Numerically, the most significant group is stateless children, whose numbers range from 700 registered to over 10,000 unregistered. The emergence of this population is closely tied to Taiwan’s labor migration system. Taiwan relies heavily on over 800,000 migrant workers, primarily from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines, to fill critical labor shortages in manufacturing, construction, and caregiving. However, the system that brings them to Taiwan is structurally designed to import labor without creating pathways to permanent residency. 

A combination of factors – including employer-tied visas, restrictive brokerage systems, prohibition on changing employers, and chronic imbalances between salary and workload – pushes many workers into undocumented status once their contracts expire or become untenable. Over 50 percent of these undocumented workers are women. 

Taiwan does not follow jus soli, the principle that birth on a country’s soil confers citizenship, but jus sanguinis, making citizenship available only when at least one parent holds Taiwanese nationality. Consequently, children born to undocumented migrant women in Taiwan are stateless from birth unless registered with the respective representative office (the de facto embassy). Out of fear of deportation, their parents frequently do not register births with the relevant authorities, rendering these children invisible to the state from birth. Without holding a formal nationality, foreign or Taiwanese, they lack access to health insurance and other social welfare rights, and remain at the mercy of NGOs.

The problem is compounded by the absence of a comprehensive asylum law in Taiwan. Although Taiwan has domestically incorporated major international human rights covenants, asylum seekers and stateless persons continue to be managed through ad hoc administrative arrangements rather than a coherent legal framework. 

Marrying Into Taiwan and Becoming Stateless

Marriage migrants constitute another stateless population in Taiwan. Predominantly from Southeast Asia, over 520,000 women have married Taiwanese nationals since 1997. Their path to citizenship has seen genuine progress, from being prohibited from marrying Taiwanese nationals in the 1990s, to the 2016 amendments to the Immigration Act extending naturalization protections to victims of domestic violence and widowed spouses, reducing the risk that women immediately lose legal residency after marital breakdown. 

Despite this progress, Article 9 of the Nationality Act still requires foreign spouses to renounce their original citizenship before naturalization. 

What makes this requirement particularly hypocritical, according to migration scholar Isabelle Cheng, is that Taiwan selectively waives the renunciation requirement for certain nationalities, including Japanese spouses and applicants from countries where........

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