This book examines international labour migrants in the context of South–South migration with a focus on Bangladeshi migration to Singapore. Two principal questions in the South–South migration are addressed: Why and how individuals migrate for work; and what impact this temporary form of migration has for migrants and their families. The book adopts a relatively new methodological approach to labour migration by linking different phases that migrants undergo in the migration process and by combining migrants in the host country with their families in the origin country. This is achieved through identifying and addressing six key areas: (i) migration policy, (ii) social imperatives of migration (iii) recruitment, (iv) social worlds of the migrants, (v) remittance process, and finally, (vi) family development dynamics. This book introduces the bari to migration research as a unit of analysis over and above individual and family units. The book reveals how social and cultural forces both initiate and perpetuate migration, and later on influence bari dynamics.

Mobile Communication and Low-Skilled Migrants’ Acculturation to Cosmopolitan Singapore examines the role of mobile communication in the acculturation of South Asian labor migrants to Singapore, adopting a mobile phone appropriation model and following a pluralistic-typological approach. While presenting data from a questionnaire survey and interviews with low-skilled migrants from Bangladesh and India in Singapore, it explores how their specific social conditions, including their transient status and low entitlements in their host country, influenced their mobile phone appropriation. It considers the links these migrants established and retained with their countries of origin and residence to identify several types of appropriation and acculturation types among the various populations.

International migration is a dynamic global phenomenon that has been drawing increasing attention from both scholars and policymakers over the last few decades. It is particularly relevant to South Asia, since the region is a vast source of “sojourner” migrant labour, as well as home to permanent immigrant and diaspora communities. The chapters brought together in this volume provide insights into the study of international migration, diaspora engagement and remittances in South Asia. In particular, they analyse the implications of this phenomenon in relation to development and shed light on migration- and diaspora-led development in two sections: firstly, “Remittance-Induced Development” and secondly “Diaspora-Induced Development.” The geographic focus of the volume is the global South Asian emigrant population who live outside the region. This volume demonstrates that international migration, remittances and development offer an exciting field of academic study, as well as a vibrant area of policy study. Its multi-disciplinary dimensions enlarge its scope and applicability across several domains. As such, this volume offers an important contribution to the growing field of international migration in both the academic and policy spheres.

While decisions for working overseas are often based on expectations and promises of better jobs, opportunities, economic gains and, eventually, a better future, such assumptions may not always be realized. Focusing on the question of why migrants, despite not realizing their earlier aspirations, continue to remain as migrants rather than return home, this book provides a unified understanding of the rationalization of the migration decision making. It does so by empirically situating the study in the experiences of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Hong Kong and Malaysia.

This book is about multiculturalism, broadly defined as the recognition, respect and accommodation of cultural differences. Teo proposes a framework of multicultural denizenship that includes group-specific rights and intercultural dialogue, by problematising three issues: a) the unacknowledged misrecognition of non-citizens within the scholarship of multiculturalism; b) uncritical treatment of citizens and non-citizens as binary categories and; c) problematic parcelling of group-specific rights with citizenship rights. Drawing on the case of Singapore as an illustrative example, where temporary labour migrants are culturally stereotyped, socioeconomically disenfranchised and denied access to rights accorded only to citizens, Teo argues that understandings of multiculturalism need to be expanded and adjusted to include a fluidity of identities, spectrum of rights and shared experiences of marginalisation among citizens and non-citizens. Civic Multiculturalism in Singapore will be of interest to students and scholars of multiculturalism, critical citizenship studies, migration studies, political theory and postcolonial studies.