How do we study the social integration of temporary migrants?
The following essay was originally compiled for the Mixed Migration Review 2024 and has been reproduced here for wider access through this website’s readership.
The essay’s author, Yoga Prasetyo, is an MA candidate in migration studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. His research areas and interests lie at the intersection of labour migration, Southeast Asia, postcolonialism, temporalities and irregularity.
Introduction
Can a state temporarily integrate migrants into the folds of its society? If so, for what reason? The terms ‘integration’ and ‘temporary’ might sound contradictory, since integration connotes permanence. Indeed, many researchers and practitioners in the West have tended to treat integration as an evolving process toward permanent settlement and membership in society, therefore excluding those who are only meant to maintain a temporary foothold in host states. In countries that are structurally dependent upon the life and labour of temporary migrants like Singapore, however, temporariness can extend across many decades, resulting in what I would call ‘officially temporary migration’ but de facto permanent migration. It is in reconceptualizing temporariness as potentially ‘long-term’ and factually permanent that we may begin to understand why Singapore’s government started to employ increasingly integrationist discourses and measures despite providing no recourse to permanent settlement or citizenship to its temporary migrant workers.
Contradictory measures and attitudes to integration
Singapore’s integrationist approaches to managing its low-paid migrant workers became especially apparent after what is now widely known as the Little India Riot of 2013, in which a fatal bus accident that killed a 33-year-old Indian migrant construction worker spurred a conflict that quickly escalated into Singapore’s first civil unrest since the 1969 race riots. Around 400 temporary migrant construction workers confronted police officers in the Little India area – smashing, overturning and setting police cars aflame in what activists believed to be a spontaneous expression of solidarity and pent-up frustration deriving from their collective ill-treatment under Singapore’s exploitative temporary migration regime. The Singaporean government responded to the riot by introducing contradictory measures. On the one hand, it enacted strategies of spatial segregation by introducing the Foreign Employee Dormitories Act in 2015, which requires that all migrant construction workers be accommodated in ‘self-contained’ housing facilities on the outskirts of the island – equipped with mini-marts, canteens, TV rooms, and other amenities to “reduce their need to travel far [to the city] for basic services”. On the other hand, the government also made an explicit acknowledgement of migrant workers’ essential roles in Singapore and the need to “enable them to integrate into our [Singaporean] community better”, a commitment made manifest by the introduction of the Foreign Worker Ambassadors Program in 2014.
The passing of the Foreign Employee Dormitories Act was momentous in a sense that it marked a new phase of disciplinary control that involved pushing all temporary migrant construction workers away from public spaces in the city centre into ‘self-contained’, purpose-built dormitories at the edge of the island state. Constructed away from the city, these dormitories operate as a tool of containment that sets migrant construction workers apart from the rest of the city’s inhabitants – in which case geographical distances are understood to be a ‘natural buffer’ that lessens the psychological inconveniences of physical proximity and interactions between citizens and migrant workers. As such, these dormitories not only circumscribe migrants’ mobility and mark their otherness, but they also reinforce a sense of non-belonging in Singapore. At the same time, however, Singapore has paradoxically initiated attempts to foster social inclusion. In 2014, for instance, the state remarked that temporary migrant construction workers “have become an integral part of [Singapore’s] community” and, thereby, there is a need to inculcate “Singapore’s laws, culture, and acceptable social behavior[s] to enable them to integrate into [Singapore’s] community better”. The Ministry of Manpower began recruiting hundreds of foreign worker ambassadors (FWAs), whose number increased to 5,000 in 2020.
FWAs’ main role is to promote trust and facilitate exchanges and mutual understanding between migrant construction workers and the Singaporean public to “ensure a harmonious relationship within the [broader] community”. Considered already integrated, FWAs help new migrants understand their new roles in the country, educate them on crime prevention in their vernacular languages and report unruly or suspicious behaviours in and outside dormitories to the police. An informal structure of governance is created within each dormitory by appointing FWAs as informal local leaders whose profiles are clearly marked and featured on Ambassador’s Walls, allowing other workers to identify where to seek help, but who, most importantly, watch over their day-to-day activities both within and outside their ‘enclaved’ spaces of dormitories. In this sense, the state produces hierarchies within dormitories by dispensing a certain degree of power to FWAs in emulation of what Furnivall calls the kapiten system – a mode of colonial governance that involves establishing local leaders to discipline their own racial/ethnic populations by granting them a higher social status in recognition of their roles.
The ‘securitisation’ of integration
It is evident that, to a large extent, the integration of migrant construction workers is framed as a matter of public security and a process of producing docility and law-abiding behaviours that characterise the society in what Shanmugam refers to as “a country of law and order” that is Singapore. It is not surprising, therefore, that the police department takes centre stage in the integration agenda, providing training sessions on what is seen to constitute Singaporean values, laws and acceptable behaviours. Through collaborative projects with FWA, such as the Project Alliance, neighbourhood police divisions throughout the city-state make concerted efforts to “develop a greater sense of good will and trust [among migrant workers] toward the police and help them to understand that we [they] are here to help”. To tamp down migrants’ pent-up resentments and mistrust following the Little India Riot in which authority was viewed as oppressive, the police use these partnerships to reconstruct migrants’ perceptions of authority by creating a sense of tolerance and inclusivity.
This idea of inclusivity is constructed not only by reconfiguring perceptions of state and police authority, but also by curating annual activities that are fashioned with symbolic demonstrations of togetherness. Some examples include the 2016 event at Tuas View Dormitory, in which 300 Singaporeans and 200 migrant construction workers ‘bonded’ over games. In 2022, the government organised two other annual events themed Joining Hands, Building Bonds and Befriend our Migrant Friends in Little India and Geylang to commemorate International Migrants Day. Attended by more than 50,000 Singaporeans and migrant construction workers, these events facilitated social mixing through games, local foods, cultural trails along Singapore’s treasured heritage sites, as well as activities in which local communities were invited by the government to submit videos expressing their gratitude for migrant workers’ contributions. The following year, these events were attended by a far larger audience, comprising over 70,000 locals and migrant workers.
These celebrations of diversity and social bonding right in the tightly surveilled spaces of Little India and Geylang gradually replace the narrative of disintegration, manifested in the 2013 Little India Riot, with one of tolerance and diversity. More importantly, they create a space that offers a taste of Singaporean life and a fleeting sense of social acceptance to migrant construction workers. However ostensible it may be, this symbolic performance of social inclusion is necessary to create an impression of a society that is welcoming, but whose acceptance of migrant workers is premised on the contributions they make and their adherence to local social norms and laws. Migrant construction workers must, therefore, perform this Singaporean-ness while they are in public to be considered ‘integrated’. In other words, integration is understood not so much as a process of socio-cultural inclusion; rather, it is a process in which migrants are expected to assemble knowledge of values, laws and acceptable behaviours to enable them to perform Singaporean-ness in public domains throughout their temporary stay in the city-state, all aiming to limit social frictions and maintain public order.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while integration is defined in relation to the quest for full membership in Western liberal democracies, the case of Singapore shows quite the opposite. In fact, it is precisely because of the nonexistent pathways to permanence that integration measures are designed – that is, to reduce the potential risks of public disorder, as transpired in the Little India Riot of 2013, attributable to the country’s exploitative temporary migration policies. The case of Singapore reveals an interesting and important pattern that our Western-centric integration frameworks cannot adequately capture because of their heavy focus on ‘permanence’. We need to widen our analytical scope to understand how the concept of integration, which was developed in Western contexts but has now travelled across the globe, is understood, appropriated and pursued by non-Western states and non-state actors within their specific socio-political and historical contexts. To do this, we need to go beyond the rigid dichotomy of temporary-permanent to understand the long-term and uncertain nature of temporariness around which the life and labour of Singapore’s migrant construction workers are organised.
