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The growing phenomenon of serial migrants – people who have moved at least three times and profess belongings to more than two places – challenges the dialogic relationship imagined in studies of transnationalism. This is particularly true in the case of the mobile middle class, which has attracted less attention than the multiple migrations of low-waged labour migrants and the global professional elite. Drawing on interviews with 35 Australian and Indonesian migrants in Singapore, this article proposes the idea of orientation in order to understand the serial migration biographies of middle-class migrants. Rather than focusing on the propulsion and direction of movement, the notion of orientation suspends a migrant between reflection, action and imagination as they forge provisional pathways that upend or cleave to more conventional social trajectories. Developing this concept helps us to understand how migrants with middling resources navigate post-national socio-political formations contoured by race, gender, and class.

In order to understand how precarity is created for and experienced by labour migrants, we apply the concept of conditionality – which proposes that a migrant worker’s experience of precari...

This paper draws on Pecoud’s international migration narratives (IMN) as an analytical framework to examine the Global Forum on Migration and Development’s Civil Society Days (GFMD-CSD). We analyse...

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 ...

While there has been much debate on Singapore’s migration policies, a ‘black box’ continues to surround policymaking decisions. This article examines the dynamics of migration policy reforms in Singapore, using the case study of the mandatory weekly day off policy for migrant domestic workers. Designing our analysis around the three ‘Is’ – ideas, interests and institutions – we argue that the inclusion and formalisation of migrant rights in the policy sphere entails the framing of migrant rights in a manner that appeals to Singapore’s institutional logics and cultural repertoire; prioritising the needs and interests of citizens in the policy calculus; and institutional readiness and conviction to the cause.