It appears counter-intuitive to suggest that a
cosmopolitan hub like Singapore might have a problem with xenophobia.
Yet xenophobia has emerged as a major political
concern in the city-state. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has routinely
addressed the issue of immigration and foreign workers in his National Day
Rally Speeches since 2009 — and in 2012 he openly warned Singaporeans to
refrain from overt expressions of hostility towards foreigners.
The trigger for this new xenophobic fear was former
Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng’s 2005 decision to engage in massively
expanding the intake of foreign workers to avoid an anticipated recession. This
directly led to the current situation where nearly 40 percent of Singapore’s
residents are foreigners — many of whom have no interest in developing ties to
the country or the opportunity even if they were interested.
The government confessed that it failed to take any
steps at all to provide infrastructural or social support for this influx of
foreign workers. Bear in mind that while the government’s target population was
only 4 million for 2010, the population passed 5 million that year — so even if
the target had been taken seriously for infrastructure planning, infrastructure
would still have been under stress.
After 2005, xenophobia started to emerge gradually,
with immigration becoming a major issue in the 2011 general election campaign.
Yet even with this background, no one was prepared for the hostility that was
unleashed against foreigners when a group of Chinese bus drivers went on strike
in November 2012, nor the unprecedented 4,000-strong protest in February 2013
against the government’s publication of a White Paper, calling for even higher
levels of immigration. There was also public outrage over the riot by South
Asian foreign workers in Little India early this year. Reports of concern about
the hardships and insecurities endured by foreign workers have only slightly
softened the pattern of escalating hostility.
Yet there is clearly a new xenophobic mood taking
hold that is threatening to become a full-blown crisis of national identity:
does Singapore see itself through the prism of an ugly self-righteous and
self-defensive nationalism, or is its natural pride in national achievements to
be expressed as a positive, cosmopolitan form of national pride?
Such questions of national identity have
historically been in the hands of the government, and Singaporeans are
fortunate that the government is clearly dedicated to taking Singapore down the
path of benign cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately that is where the good news ends,
because most of the policy options that would deal with this problem appear to
be out of bounds to policy makers.
The heart of the immediate problem is the high
number of foreign workers. The influx has been of such proportions that even if
the government had taken basic steps to provide infrastructure and had given
some thought to the social integration of this population of outsiders, a
negative reaction from locals was almost certain.
Singaporeans were used to giving little thought to
the presence of foreign workers on a day-to-day basis. Beyond purely transactional
or incidental interactions — noticing construction workers, or dealing with
your foreign maid, a waiter, or your boss — they were largely invisible to
Singaporeans except the few Singaporeans who frequented one of the preferred
haunts of foreign workers at particular times of the week, such as Little India
and Golden Mile Complex. But this ‘invisibility’ is no longer the case — and
has not been for almost a decade.
Singaporeans are not exceptionally xenophobic by
nature, but by the same token they are just as prone to being defensive about
differences as any other national peoples. Given stimuli, they react like
anyone else — and there are presently over a million sources of ‘stimuli’ on
the island.
The obvious solution for the Singaporean government,
which has at its fingertips many levers of social, economic and political
power, would be to drastically decrease the number of foreign workers. But here
there is a problem: its development model relies on the exploitation of these
foreign workers. This is precisely why former Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan
Seng increased the foreign worker intake in the first place.
The government is desperately trying to modify its
development model to reduce reliance on foreign workers — for example
increasing the level of prefabrication in construction processes — but there is
no sign that it is willing to seek out a radically new development model that
will solve the problem.
If we go beyond the immediate problem to more
remote causes, we come to national identity. Singapore’s state-constructed
national identity rests on a firm foundation of racial stereotypes and smug
confidence in the superiority of Singapore as a ‘success’ that ‘punches above
its weight’ and is a ‘model’ to the world. The smug confidence may be slipping
a bit in the wake of a litany of government failures, but it still has life in
it; and the racial stereotyping is stronger than ever.
This is a heady cocktail on which to build a
national identity — and not one that is conducive to level-headedly responding
to an influx of very different foreigners who seem to be everywhere. Given this
background, it is a credit to Singaporeans that their reactions to foreigners
have not been more uniformly hostile: there does at least appear to be an
emerging level of sympathy both at the elite and grassroots levels for the
plight of temporary low-paid foreign workers.
The government is reluctant to do more than fiddle
at the edges of its model of economic development and its model of
community-based social construction. But without one or both of these models
being radically transformed, it is difficult to see how it is going to be able
to realize its goal of reducing tensions between foreigners and Singaporeans —
no matter how seriously it seeks such an end.
Michael D. Barr is senior lecturer in international
relations and editor-in-chief of Asian Studies Review.
No comments:
Post a Comment