The National Security Bureau (NSB) says that it has not found any evidence of the Islamic State (IS) infiltrating the community of migrant workers in Taiwan. The comments came Monday during an NSB report at the legislature.
The bureau has turned its focus on workers from Indonesia in response to comments from Indonesia’s authority for overseas workers. The head of that agency, Nusron Wahid, urged Asian democracies to be on the alert, saying that migrant workers are easy targets for IS recruitment. He said that workers had been discovered in Hong Kong and Taiwan wearing IS insignias.
Right now there are more than 580,000 migrant workers in Taiwan. NSB Deputy Director Wang Te-lin told lawmakers on Monday that although there are a large number of workers who are unaccounted for, so far no connection to IS has been discovered.
Wang said, “There are more than 50,000 migrant workers who are missing. Of those, workers from Vietnam make up the largest number – about 24,000. Next are Indonesian workers, who total about 22,000. Then come workers from the Philippines at about 2,000 people. Of course, with the increasing trend of workers going missing, there is also a growing concern about public safety. But so far we have not discovered any terrorist organizations or anyone disseminating related insignias.”
Wang says that the NSB has gone through international channels to gain a better understanding of the situation. He said that when the Indonesian official made the comments, he was speaking at a meeting for Muslim youth missionaries, suggesting that the missionaries could help prevent migrant workers from being recruited by IS. Wang said that the official was not in charge of anti-terrorism efforts and that he had not said that migrant workers in Taiwan were being recruited by IS.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Office of Homeland Security says that it is monitoring the situation and prepared to deal with any eventuality.