Grace Baey

The Place of Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Singapore: social reproduction, social ‘problems’ and social protection

Abstract While the literature on ‘global care chains’ has focused on the international transfer of paid reproductive labour in the form of domestic service and care work, a parallel trend takes the form of women marriage migrants, who perform unpaid labour to maintain households and reproduce the next generation. Drawing on our work with commercially matched Vietnamese marriage migrants in Singapore, we analyse the existing immigration–citizenship regime to examine how these marriage migrants are positioned within the family and nation-state as dependants of Singaporean men with no rights to work, residency or citizenship of their own. Incipient discussions on marriage migrants in civil society discourse have tended to follow a ‘social problems’ template, requiring legislative support and service provisioning to assist vulnerable women. We argue for the need to adopt an expansive approach to social protection issues, depending not on any one single source—the state, civil society and the family—but on government action to ensure that these complement one another and strengthen safety nets for the marriage migrant.

Debt, precarity and gender: male and female temporary labour migrants in Singapore

ABSTRACT As one of Asia’s key hubs for transient workers, Singapore’s migration regime creates particularly gendered streams of labour, especially among lower skilled occupations, as is apparent in two key sectors – domestic work and construction work. Drawing on surveys with Bangladeshi construction workers and Indonesian domestic workers based in Singapore, as well as in-depth interviews with each group, this paper examines gendered issues of temporary labour migration, precarity and risk, as they occur against a backdrop of migrant indebtedness. In this paper, we argue that migrant indebtedness occurs along a spectrum that ranges from less visible, or what we call ‘silently’ incurred forms of debt, through to more ‘resonant’ types of debt that are acquired upfront and thus more readily quantifiable. Using this spectrum of migrant indebtedness, we aim to complicate debates about debt-financed migration by underscoring the ways in which notions of debt and unfreedom can be imbricated with both constraints and opportunities for migrants’ agency.

Indonesian domestic workers and the (un)making of transnational livelihoods and provisional futures

Abstract Doreen Massey (2005. For Space. London: Sage.) argued that space and time should not be reduced to a bounded locality of the ‘here and now’ and instead proposed re-imagining ‘space as simultaneity of stories-so-far’. We build on her argument to suggest that an appreciation of migrant aspirations and future trajectories require us to go beyond simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’ but also consider ‘stories-to-come’ which may build upon, divert from, or even unmake the ‘stories-so-far’. We apply these ideas to our study (based on a questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews) of the transnational journeys traced by Indonesian domestic workers employed in Singaporean middle-class homes. We argue that socially and culturally specific notions of risk can work to propel and sustain migration into retrogressive occupations like domestic work, as well as disrupt dominant narratives around migrants as strategic actors, necessarily in control of their trajectories and driven by their migration plans. The calculus of risk-taking and aspiration on which transnational livelihoods are predicated is one that takes into account both situatedness in and connectedness across different places (in short simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’). At the same time, future ‘stories-to-come’ may entail both subtle shifts and constant (re)negotiations that propel individual life stories unto different pathways.

Renegotiating migration experiences: Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore and use of information communication technologies:

This article considers the ways in which information communication technologies (ICTs) are embedded in foreign domestic workers’ migration experiences in Singapore. Due to Singapore’s stringent migration regime, whereby foreign domestic workers are required to live-in with their employers, domestic workers often find their access and use of ICTs subject to a high degree of surveillance and regulation by their employers. Using Massey’s notion of power geometry, we consider how increasing reliance upon communications technology by both domestic workers and their employers necessitates a renegotiation of social relations in the household. In doing so, this article demonstrates that foreign domestic workers’ negotiations of ICTs are ‘always ongoing’, creating fluid possibilities for these women to exercise a greater sense of agency within the realm of their daily lives. Yet, we highlight that gaining access to ICTs also requires women to negotiate the inequalities inscribed upon their position as a foreign domestic worker.

“The lottery of my life”: Migration trajectories and the production of precarity among Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore's construction industry:

Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in the host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants’ trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.

Managing risk, making a match: brokers and the management of mobility in international marriage

Abstract In the last decade, while scholarly work on international marriages within East and Southeast Asia has increased, the role and significance of marriage brokers in facilitating this form of transnational mobility has been given little attention. This is a particularly obvious gap in knowledge in the Asian context, as migration is largely mediated by brokers who play a strategic role in navigating the complex systems of regulation involved in the increasingly formalised regime of transnational migration. Situating our focus on marriage brokers provides a critical vantage point for unpacking the ‘black box’ of migration research whereby scrutiny is placed on the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible, whilst illuminating the micro-geographies of emotion and power involved in the interactions between marriage brokers and their clients. Drawing on qualitative interviews with commercial matchmaking agencies and their Vietnamese female clients and Singaporean male clients, this paper analyses how marriage brokers manage risk in mediating the ‘gamble’ of international marriages, through techniques and practices of screening and selection, affective strategies of negotiation and persuasion, as well as by appropriating cultural conceptualisations of ‘fate’ as a way of managing clients’ expectations.

Bangladeshi construction workers and the politics of (im)mobility in Singapore

The most iconic image of the foreign construction worker in Singapore’s popular imagination is a figure perilously secured by safety harnesses atop a half completed high-rise building. However, we argue that an understanding of the labour process involved in fashioning the migrant worker is predicated on a more expansive understanding of the politics of (im)mobility. In other words, the labour process is not simply secured in the workplace of the construction site but is linked to the politics of mobility and immobility across different spaces in the host nation-state and beyond. Drawing on a mixed-methods study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore, we discuss three interrelated themes: (a) the time-structuring mechanisms of the migration regime; (b) spaces of enclavement, exception, and enclosure; and (c) the governing of time discipline.