Integration as segregation: managing migrant construction workers in Singapore

Much of extant literature on migrant integration is dominated by western paradigms, in which integration is conceptualised as a process that necessarily translates into permanence and full membership. Such conceptual framings have cast aside temporary forms of migration as fundamentally irrelevant to integration research. This article is an attempt to push for a paradigmatic shift. Viewing migrant temporariness as indefinitely extendable and potentially ‘long-term’, it trains an analytical spotlight on Singapore, where integration is increasingly folded into migration governance as a new mode of managing temporary migrant workers. Based on 16 in-depth interviews and 2 focus group discussions involving temporary migrant construction workers, this article reveals how the Singapore state uses integration as a form of social conditioning to cultivate obedience and reinforce urban segregation, allowing them to reap the economic benefits of temporary labour migration while simultaneously avoiding its social costs. These insights expose the inadequacies in current western-centric integration paradigms, signalling the need for greater scholarly attention on how integration unfolds or, rather, comes to be operationalised under conditions of enforced temporariness that characterise Asia’s migration regimes.