By many measures, life is good in Taiwan. People here enjoy democracy, affordable healthcare, excellent public transportation, a thriving tech economy and some of the strongest protections for gender and LGBTQ+ rights in Asia. But for all its success, Taiwan is running out of children.
Earlier this month, the Ministry of the Interior announced that Taiwan’s total fertility rate last year dropped from 0.885 to 0.695, marking the fastest decline in recorded history. For a population to stay roughly the same size, the fertility rate, which measures the average number of children each woman is expected to have over her lifetime, must be around 2.1. The National Development Council projects that by 2070, Taiwan’s population will decline 35% to 15 million. At this point, more than half of the people in Taiwan will be over the age of 65.
Many advanced economies are experiencing population decline, but Taiwan’s figures are some of the lowest in the world. The government considers it to be a national security crisis.
“If we don’t have enough manpower, I don’t know how we can maintain all kinds of resilience,” said Chen Ching-hui (陳菁徽), a gynecologist, reproductive specialist and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator. Chen warned of fewer people in Taiwan’s military, fewer workers paying into the social welfare system and a smaller talent pool for the high-tech industry.
Despite the 600 billion New Taiwan dollars (roughly $19 billion) that the government has poured into fixing the problem over the past eight or so years, Taiwan’s population has continued to decline.
Chen cited housing prices as a main deterrent to having children, which outstrip what people can generally afford. President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) promised during his campaign to build 130,000 new social housing units, but the target has since dropped to 40,000 to 60,000 units, with Lai’s government shifting its focus to rental subsidies. Chen thinks subsidies are a subpar solution, as renters are still subject to the whims of the landlord. “I don’t think it’s very practical for a young couple or a young family. There’s no long term stability,” said Chen.
Work pressure is another deterrent to having children in Taiwan, where average working hours are the second longest in Asia and the fifth longest in the world. Chen cited a possible solution in a recent initiative by Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安), which has the government subsidizing flexible working hours for parents with children younger than 12.
Others think the root of the low fertility rate issue in Taiwan lies in cultural attitudes towards child-rearing, which is often treated as a private responsibility and a reflection of parental success. This worsens the emotional and social burden of raising kids, said Lillian Wang (王麗容), a professor at National Taiwan University and an expert in gender and social policy. Another issue is persistent gender inequality in the private sphere, where women tend to shoulder more of the domestic work. This would explain why Taiwanese women, in particular, are reluctant to have kids. “They want to be free,” said Wang. The government has spent a lot of money providing childcare subsidies to help working parents, but a cultural shift to greater equality in the private sphere is the more fundamental solution. “Money cannot buy the fertility rate,” said Wang, who sits on a board for the Taipei city government that focuses on the fertility rate. She is trying to increase public awareness that this is a societal issue, not just a women’s issue.
Young Taiwanese are not only less inclined to have children, but also less inclined to get married, said Yang Wen-shan (楊文山), a demographer at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology. While around half of men and women will cohabitate with their partners in their 30s, only 39% of unmarried 30-year-old men surveyed in 2017 wanted to marry, compared with 20% of women. Out of wedlock births in Taiwan are rare.
Yang thinks that Taiwan’s low fertility rate has become an irreversible feature of Taiwan’s demography. There is currently a surplus of about 400,000 to 450,000 Taiwanese men of marrying age who would not be able to find partners because cultural norms dictate that men marry women younger than them, of which there are fewer due to fertility drops. Moreover, since 2012, the population of Taiwanese women of childbearing age has decreased by roughly 500,000.
As a result, Taiwan is facing a critical labor shortage, for which “immigration is the only solution,” said Yang. There are around one million immigrants in Taiwan, the majority of which — about 850,000 — are migrant workers from Southeast Asia. To maintain its economy and a sustainable worker-to-dependent ratio, which the U.N. defines as three working adults to one dependent, Taiwan will need about one million new immigrants by 2030 and five million new immigrants by 2060, according to Yang.
But Taiwan is notoriously conservative when it comes to immigration policy. At an event hosted by the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club earlier this month, Minister of the Interior Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳) acknowledged that Taiwan’s economy relies on foreign labor from Southeast Asia, but when pressed on how immigration policy should be adapted to help address the demographic decline, Liu said, “the fastest way to stay in Taiwan is definitely through marriage,” adding that “if they are highly skilled technical talent, we will let them stay here.” As for paths to permanent residency for migrant workers, “the legal framework is not yet comprehensive. We must admit this. This is a difficulty we are currently facing,” Liu said.
Taiwanese law divides immigrants into two buckets, foreign professionals and migrant workers, who are typically from Southeast Asia and form the backbone of Taiwan’s construction, manufacturing and elder care systems. Migrant workers do necessary jobs that Taiwanese consider “dirty, difficult and dangerous,” yet they are treated as socially and racially inferior and legally excluded from long-term integration, said Isabelle Cockel, an associate professor of East Asian and development studies at the University of Portsmouth.
If Taiwan is to attract millions more immigrants, “we have to address the issue of inequality, marginalization, exclusion,” said Cockel. Taiwan has “been described as a beacon of human rights in East Asia. If it is to be continued to be respected as such, the government and the people must have a close look at how we treat foreign workers.”
The government is taking various steps to reform immigration policy. Cockel noted that on April 9, the Ministry of Labor announced a policy requiring employers in the manufacturing and fishing industries to cover recruitment fees, in an effort to curb forced labor and promote fair hiring. Migrant workers have previously had to pay brokers up to $6,000 to secure a job in Taiwan. In 2022, the Immigration Act was amended to allow some migrant workers to be labelled as “mid-level technicians,” creating a path to permanent residency. Separately, Yang noted the government’s efforts to attract foreign students to study in Taiwan. Statistics published by the Ministry of Education show that the proportion of foreign students in Taiwan has “risen sharply” in the past five years, Yang said.
When it comes to immigration policy, “Taiwan tends to favor a ‘test-and-see’ or ‘gradualist’ approach, cautiously adjusting policies in a way that avoids drawing excessive public attention,” Hong-zen Wang (王宏仁), a professor a National Sun Yat-sen University, wrote in an email. Wang, who focuses on gender, ethnic and industrial relations, thinks raising wages and increasing older worker participation could significantly decrease labor shortages without having to rely on immigration. In 2021, only 49.2% of people aged 55 to 64 were still active in the workforce. Low wages explain why Taiwanese might opt out of the labor market. For “blue collar” jobs, in particular, “the financial incentive isn’t there.”
The tech sector is adapting in several specific ways. “The semiconductor sector alone is estimated to face a shortage of over 30,000 workers,” Darson Chiu (邱達生), director-general of the Confederation of Asia-Pacific Chambers of Commerce and Industry, wrote in an email. Immigration policies such as the Employment Gold Card have attracted over 15,000 foreign professionals, “but this is still relatively small compared to industry needs,” Chiu said. Companies are adjusting by automating — this shifts the need toward high skilled roles — as well as broadening hiring profiles and hiring in other countries, as TSMC is doing at its fabs in the U.S., Japan and Europe. Universities are also expanding domestic training capacity for semiconductor talent.
“The key question going forward is whether these adjustments can offset the structural decline in the domestic labor pool,” Chiu said.
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