Migrant workers or future citizens? Taiwan’s foreign mid-skilled workers program

This paper critically examines Taiwan’s Foreign Mid-Skilled Worker Program, introduced in 2022, which offers select blue-collar migrant workers pathways toward permanent residency and citizenship. Utilising the developmental migration state framework, this study analyzes how Taiwan strategically deploys temporariness and conditional inclusion to balance economic pragmatism and demographic necessity with restrictive migration governance. The paper argues that this policy signals a significant evolution from Taiwan’s historically rigid, rotational guest worker scheme characterised by inflexible temporariness toward a system of controlled, multi-tiered temporality. Based on archival research and 28 qualitative interviews, it further contends that despite this evolution, the policy reinforces hierarchical, performance-based inclusion criteria. Migrants must continuously navigate provisional stages, underscoring their persistent precarity, despite formal expansions in family and residency rights. Theoretically, the paper integrates developmental migration state scholarship with temporariness literature, highlighting state intentionality in perpetuating migrant precarity to fulfil national developmental objectives. This nuanced understanding provides important insights into contemporary migration governance in Taiwan and broader East Asia.