00:00Who would you say is the biggest beneficiary of these amendments?
00:04If you look at the amendments, it actually kind of spans across different kind of demographics of immigrants.
00:08What you should see is as a progress of extending it bit by bit rather than a focus on one particular area, you know, and particular focus.
00:20Yes, there are benefits to people who are long termers, but there's also you have to see kind of talent circulation as one big cycle about the people who are coming and the people who choose to stay.
00:29And kind of along the lines of how do we make those processes easier and more open for people along that process.
00:37Now, let's talk about your campaign for disability inclusion for foreign residents.
00:41What kind of people have you worked with?
00:43The first person who actually kicked off this initiative that brought it to our attention.
00:48His name is Oliver and he was a French national living in Tainan.
00:53He was suffering. He was onset by a sudden case of ALS and very, very severe.
00:59Basically rendering him from a completely autonomous individual in Taiwan and over the course of a year, completely immobile and dependent on his the family of his former girlfriend's family to take care of him because he had nowhere else to go.
01:18He had no time. Taiwan is already his home. He's already been living here for decades.
01:21He was unable to afford a lot of financial, you know, expenses that were piling up due to his treatments and his inability to access even something as simple as a free wheelchair or a wheelchair because he could not prove he was, you know, disabled without the official recognition.
01:38How would the amendments benefit people like Oliver?
01:42We were able to first open up disability certification last year and convince Ministry of Health and Welfare to open it up to people from countries with a reciprocal relationship.
01:53However, that was an administrative move. With this current reform, it cements into law, not only cements into law, these protections, but also opens it up to people from any country who are permanent residents, who are foreign professionals and who have lived in Taiwan for 10 plus years.
02:11Apart from disability certificate, I understand that getting government subsidies requires household registration.
02:18How does that work for permanent residents here?
02:21So currently, according to the law, only naturalized or citizens of Taiwan are able to acquire household registration, which is huji.
02:30Unfortunately, even people who are able to acquire disability certification are finding themselves without Taiwanese, without household registration and inability to be able to access a lot of very main services and assistance that are actually open and available for people with disability.
02:48In Taiwan, you'll find that a lot of financial subsidies relating to help in paying for expensive medical equipment or treatments are still unable to be accessed.
03:00The reasoning for this, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, is that if you don't have household registration, they have no ability to gauge their assets because a lot of these subsidies are based on an individual's financial assets before it's calculated.
03:16So it's still a gap.
03:18However, they're able to qualify for certain services and benefits, such as something as a disabled parking permits and at least recognition by their medical providers that they do have a disability.
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