American-born lawyer bids for Taiwan parliamentary seat

TAIPEI, Feb. 4 Kyodo - An American-born lawyer aiming to run in an upcoming by-election for a seat in
Taiwan's parliament said Wednesday he would focus on environmental issues and
social justice in his campaign.
''We're going to run a very international campaign,'' Robin Winkler told Kyodo
News by telephone, referring to his bid to become the island's first
naturalized citizen to hold a parliamentary seat. ''Ours will be a platform of
global values.''
Winkler, 54, is seeking the nomination of the Green Party, a global political
party advocating environmental conservation and non-violence.
The party's Taiwan chapter, he said, will likely choose its nominee this week,
with that candidate running against those from the ruling Nationalist Party
(KMT) and the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party.
Winkler's bid to represent a key district in the capital Taipei also highlights
Taiwan's shifting identity politics in the era of globalization, as a flood of
immigrants and an ethnic divide figure prominently in the island's political
narrative.
He is seeking to replace former KMT lawmaker Diane Lee, who resigned from the
legislature last month amid a storm of controversy over whether she holds U.S.
citizenship. Taiwan law prohibits lawmakers from possessing dual citizenship.
That debate stemmed from the DPP's accusations that President Ma Ying-jeou of
the KMT still holds a U.S. green card from his stint at Harvard University.
Questions of allegiance spread to Taiwan-born Lee, whose resignation triggered
the by-election, scheduled for March 28.
The U.S. State Department said in December that Lee ''has previously been
documented as a U.S. citizen with a U.S. passport and...no subsequent loss of
U.S. citizenship has been documented.''
Lee claims her U.S. citizenship was automatically annulled when she took the
oath of office.
Still, she resigned on Jan. 8, as DPP lawmakers publicized what they said were
Lee's recent U.S. tax and social security payment records, indicating current
U.S. citizenship.
By contrast, Winkler, to all appearances, is a foreigner. In 2003, however, he
renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a naturalized Taiwanese, partly to
avoid deportation for his legal practice and activism, he said.
Fluent in Mandarin, he runs Winkler Partners, a Taipei-based law firm he
founded in 1993, and the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association, a nonprofit
dedicated to protecting the environment.
Winkler's bid comes amid a small but growing shift in demographics, as the
island transitions to what its National Immigration Agency calls an ''immigrant
country.''
Since the 1990s, nearly 400,000 foreign spouses from China and Southeast Asia
have immigrated to Taiwan, with ''cross-border'' families now accounting for
more than 10 percent of all births, according to the island's Government
Information Office.
As the island struggles to come to terms with the wave of immigrants, it also
faces a sometimes bitter ethnic divide between minority ''mainlanders,'' and
locals.
Mainlanders refer to the Chinese, or their descendants, who came to Taiwan in
the 1940s, as the KMT took over the island and eventually retreated to it after
losing a bloody civil war in 1949 with the communists on the mainland. Locals
refer to the ethnically Chinese Taiwanese, or their descendants, who trace
their lineage to Taiwan and identify with local culture over that of mainland
China.
==Kyodo