隱形居民與公民政治: 負向政治範式與普遍性命題的難題

According to the statistics of the Workforce Development Agency of Taiwan, there are 671,228 migrant laborers, particularly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, in Taiwan by the end of November 2017. This number is much higher than the population of the indigenous people in Taiwan. There are also increasing numbers of undocumented migrant workers, as reported by the National Immigration Agency, and the number of reported runaways or 'missing workers' has reached 52,322 in December 2017. We are also informed that there are more than 7929 stateless orphans in Taiwan, with no social welfare, such as health care or education system. These documented or undocumented migrant workers are not protected by Basic Labor Law in Taiwan, not recognized as citizen, and even their basic human rights can be easily violated and thus ended up as victims of a legalized modern slavery system. The increasing population of this type of invisible community, who live and work in the same city but cannot participate and do not have the same basic rights, has posited a serious challenge to the concept of citizenship and manifested a new form of internal colonialism. This essay argues that the situations of the migrant laborers is comparable to modern slavery and the emerging form of internal colonialism are costructured by the global chain of logistics that links the flow of capital, the flow of human labors, the local agencies and juridical systems, and the apparatus of civic exclusion. I call it the unconscious operation of the negative political paradigm in the neoliberal society. Through looking into Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson's concept of logistics, Etienne Balibar's critiques of border politics, Alain Badiou's set theory and mathematic ontology, as well as late Qing scholar Zhang Taiyan's theory of the empty riverbed as the metaphor of the topological space for all citizens. This paper proposes to view Taiwan as a dynamic topological site for constant re-composition so as to re-envision the possibility for equal citizenship.