Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: koika/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
A RAID ON a nightclub venue in Tainan earlier this month led to the arrest of 107 migrant workers, who were primarily Vietnamese. Among them, 11 workers were found to have illegally left their place of employment. The partygoers were mostly in their 20s and 30s.
What has made headlines, however, is that packets of drugs and ketamines, amounting to 900 grams in more than 300 packets, as well as 380,000 NT, were confiscated at the venue. The venue was run by a man surnamed Huang, who was apparently holding all-night drug parties for Vietnamese migrant workers.
This is not the only crackdown on migrant workers that has made news in recent memory. Earlier in the week, police entered the campus of National Taiwan University in order to arrest a “runaway” migrant worker, who was a 31-year-old Vietnamese woman. Before apprehending her and taking her away from the campus, a man on a bicycle who was leaving when National Immigration Agency officials arrived was detained.
It is unclear if there is any increase in police activity against migrant workers. This is not the only time that authorities have conducted raids on parties held by migrant workers.
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, police raided a party that had 102 migrant workers in attendance. Police happened on the party, which took place at a Vietnamese restaurant in Taoyuan, while conducting door-to-door inspections.
As the party was during a level two alert, gatherings of more than 80 indoors and 300 outdoors are forbidden. Violations of restrictions on indoor gatherings could be punished by fines of between 60,000 NT and 300,000 NT. Such fines would prove steep for migrant workers who may not even make 20,000 NT per month, however.
In the midst of the pandemic, workers at electronics factories in Miaoli were confined to their dormitories, with restrictions placed on their freedom of movement that other members of society did not face. The Miaoli government, despite being criticized by progressive politicians such as Tseng Wen-hsueh, took the racist view that migrant workers were a group particularly prone to spreading disease.
Whether that incident or the present one, society failed to reflect on the fact that migrant workers who work long hours for meager pay–whether in the midst of a pandemic or after it–might turn toward drugs as a means of release. After all, migrant workers take on the so-called “3D” jobs that Taiwanese workers do not wish to take on, so-named because they are “dirty, dangerous, and demeaning.” Instead, social attitudes will probably be to condemn.
This would be a way in which racist attitudes in Taiwanese society dovetail with prejudice against drug users. With drug users, there is rarely the rehabilitative view that these are individuals who may turn toward drugs because of the issues present in their lives. Rather, the attempt is to punish and stigmatize. As such attitudes already exist in Taiwanese society toward drug use, treatment of arrested migrant workers is expected to be all the worse.
Indeed, the 2017 shooting death of Vietnamese migrant worker Nguyen Quoc Phi is one case in point. As Nguyen appears to have possibly been on drugs and threw rocks at a police officer, police opened fire on him and shot him nine times, after which they left him to bleed to death. After the incident, the officer in question was defended by supporters on the basis of Nguyen being a drug user, which was used to frame him as violent, dangerous, and opening fire on him as an appropriate use of force.