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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.

Although migrant women from neighboring Southeast Asian countries fill crucial care gaps in Singapore households as live-in domestic workers, their social protection remains uneven, uncertain, and indeterminate. Framed as unskilled work shunned by citizens and characterized by isolation in the privatized sphere of the home, domestic work has invariably become low-status, low-visibility, and low-pay work performed by foreign women engaged on private contracts. The access of migrant domestic workers in Singapore to social protection has thus triggered concern among international organizations, governments, and civil society. Using data derived from a survey of Indonesian domestic workers, interviews with key stakeholders, and archival research, this article adopts a transnational social protection research agenda by mapping how institutionalized practices that aim to reduce the vulnerabilities of migrant domestic workers in Singapore have shifted in the past decade. We begin by addressing the circumscribed impact of international conventions and origin government policies. Following our premise that the social support and protection of migrant domestic workers still depend largely on the host society, we focus on two interrelated developments in Singapore. First, we examine the reach of immigration, labor, and criminal law in recent “maid abuse” cases to reveal how criminal law in particular has broadened to account for the specific vulnerability of domestic workers and, relatedly, the culpability of errant employers. Second, we consider how civil society’s campaign for a “mandatory” rest day offers insight into both the success and limitations of developing transnational advocacy for domestic workers in Singapore.

There has been a surge of recent interest in the migration industries that facilitate the movement of migrants, particularly that of low-waged laborers engaged in temporary contracts abroad. This article extends this research to include migration brokers working in destination contexts, thus drawing analytical attention to the arrival infrastructures that incorporate migrants into host societies. Based on ethnographic research involving the employment agents who recruit women migrating from Indonesia to work as migrant domestic workers in Singapore, we use the concept of “translation” as a broad theoretical metaphor to understand how brokers actively fashion knowledge between various actors, scales, interfaces, and entities. First, we argue that through the interpretation of language, brokers continually modulate meaning in the encounters between potential employers and employees at the agency shopfront, reproducing particular dynamics of power between employers and workers while coperforming the hirability of the migrant worker. Second, we show how brokers operate within the discretionary space between multiple sets of regulations in order to selectively inscribe the text of policy into migrant workers’ lives. By interrogating the process of translation and clarifying the latitude migration brokers have in shaping the working and living conditions of international labor migrants, the article contributes to the growing conceptual literature on how labor-market intermediaries contour migration markets.

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.