New National Immigration Agency starting January 2, 2007

[bigal]

[Moderator's Note: Starting January 7, 2007 there will be a new National Immigration Agency which will take over responsibility of immigration responsibilities such as issuing and extending ARCs, extending visas, and controlling immigration booths at ports. This topic can be used to discuss what changes are in store as far as new locations, procedures, etc. The web site for the new agency is: http://www.immigration.gov.tw/ ]

Don't know whether it's already been talked about but this was in the Taipei Times today.

Immigration office switch
The Immigration Office under the National Police Agency (NPA), Ministry of the Interior (MOI), will become the Immigration Administration directly under the MOI on Tuesday. The new administration will handle all visa and Alien Resident Certificate (ARC)-related matters for foreigners. In Taipei, such duties were previously handled by the Foreign Affairs Division of the Taipei City Police Department until yesterday. Taipei-based foreign visitors and residents in need of visa or ARC-related services should visit the administration's office at 15 Guangzhou Street in Zhongzheng District, Taipei (北市中正區廣州街十五號) beginning on Tuesday. Offices will also be opening in the 24 other county and municipal jurisdictions nationwide, according to the ministry.

[Feiren]

I feel very sorry for anyone who needs to deal with visa issues in the next few days...

Good heads up though.

[meow]

Does anyone have an address for this new "immigration department"? I have read that the building isn't even completed yet. Can that be true? Does the current FAP have information on where to go?

I'm expecting too much, aren't I?

[Feiren]

Your wish is our command:

臺北市中正區廣州街15號　電話：02-23899983

No. 15, Guangzhou St. Zhong Zheng District, Taipei
Tel: 02-2389-9983

The Taipei Times ran a story about this the other day and someone posted it elsewhere in these forums,


Here is the the English site--ominously bare of any useful information. The Chinese side is, as you might expect, much more detailed and included the address of the Taipei service center. I would expect total chaos there for the next couple of months, but you never know.

Get a load of this blast from the cold war past in the English introduction:

After the ROC government moved to Taiwan, the Provincial Garrison Command of Taiwan and the Taiwan Provincial Government on 10 February 1949 jointly issued the "Temporary Regulations of the Taiwan Province on the Entry of Servicemen, Government Employees and Travelers" under the instruction of late President Chiang Kai-shek: consolidating Taiwan and supporting the efforts to put down rebellion in order to smash communist plots to invade Taiwan. The regulations governed entry control to prevent the infiltration of communist spies. In order to prevent the loss of population ...

Clearly some civil servants are still not with the program.

[jlick]

Here is the the English site--ominously bare of any useful information.

The URL is: http://www.immigration.gov.tw/immig_eng ... /maina.htm

In addition to the lack of information, there's also a lot of broken links and obsolete information.

[Tempo Gain]

sounds like the address of the "bureau of entry and exit", which always regulated the comings and goings of locals. maybe they've decided to combine all these functions into one unit.

[Feiren]

Yes, they have.

[llary]

An extremely important government site built entirely in flash with a cheesy musical background that despite being mainly useful for foreigners has almost zero useful information in anything other than Chinese. But as usual a veritable mountain of useless crap about who is more important than who in each department and ROC history that we've read a thousand times before when we applied for driving licenses, brushed our teeth etc. Another big fucking winner from the Taiwan e-gov machine.

[Dragonbones]

WHere the bloody F*** is that?!

[Feiren]

Llary,

I certainly agree that the English side of the website is awful.

But the new Immigration Department is not "mainly useful for foreigners." The Immigration Department has been created to deal with the 300,000 southeast Asian and Chinese women who are already in Taiwan and those who are following them. It also needs to deal with the tens of thousands of Chinese tourists who are about to arrive--processing, tracking, and deporting if necessary. It is very much an agency set up to control and manage these types of foreigners. Serving foreigners like us is WAY down on their list of priorities. I'm surprised you aren't getting the message--the Taiwanese government tolerates first world foreigners being here but it doesn't think Taiwan needs us and making life easier us for us is not exactly a policy objective. Think of it as a state of benign neglect mainly.

Notice what the Immigration's Department's first real act is--setting up biometric data collection (finger prints, faces, and retina scans) points at entry points to track Chinese nationals. This should give you an idea of what kind of agency this is going to be. Human rights and immigrant advocacy groups are complaining about all this, but it is going to be a struggle.