“Foreign workers” in Singapore: conflicting discourses, language politics and the negotiation of immigrant identities

Abstract

Singapore's status as one of the most globalized nations in the world rests primarily on its reliance on cheap immigrant labor. However, with foreign workers now comprising 36 percent of Singapore's population, resentment is fast building up among local Singaoreans, as evidenced in the public discourses on migrants which contruct largely negative identities for them. In the context of Singapore's language policy, where English is deemed necessary not only as an interethnic lingua franca but for global economic competitiveness, anti-immigrant discourse frequently comes to be couched in terms of language politics and language ideologies that strongly smack of monolingual/monolithic attitudes in relation to English. Thus, paradoxically, despite a large proportion of Singapore's current population being the descendants of early immigrants, the “foreign workers” hired today for jobs Singaporeans themselves are unwilling to take up, are castigated for their English language skills, among other things. Because numerous studies dealing with the implications for language shift and maintenance in relation to Singapore's language planning initiatives already exist, our article refocuses issues to allow grassroots subjectivity to come in by examining how immigrant identities in Singapore are negotiated through the personal narratives of the everyday experience of these foreign workers, framed within the contraints of language politics and language ideological understandings prevalent in Singapore.

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