by Yoga Prasetyo. Affiliated researcher, Sussex Centre for Migration Research

Yoga was Highly Commended in the DSA Masters Dissertation Prize 2025 for his submission at the Dept. of International Development at the University of Sussex on: Integration-transnationalism nexus in the context of enforced transience: Managing racial harmony and temporary labour migration in Singapore. Here he shares about the process of writing his dissertation.

Before starting my MA at Sussex in 2023, I spent roughly two years helping my mother transition to life in East Java, Indonesia. She had previously worked in the domestic services sector in Singapore. As a domestic worker, my mother was employed on a time-limited work permit that she had to renew multiple times to remain in Singapore. Even so, work permit holders like my mother are ineligible for permanent residency entitlements and forced to leave once their labour is no longer wanted.

In 2021, the Covid-related crisis led to her sudden contract termination, which my mother had always foreseen but which had only been brought about abruptly by the pandemic. She had no choice but to pack up her belongings and, within a week, remove herself from the country where she had lived and laboured for 25 long, memorable years. At home, which understandably no longer felt like home to her, she would tell everyone that she belonged in Singapore, and that she was already Singaporean in every way except that she lacked official status. Having helped her settle into new routines, I left for Sussex to study migration and deepen my understanding of the predicaments of ‘temporary’ migrant workers like my own mother.

During the early phase of my studies at Sussex, I noticed a recurrent theme throughout my modules: integration, perhaps mirroring Europe’s larger preoccupation with social integration of migrants. What struck me most within the integration literature was the overwhelming scholarly focus on permanent forms of migration in North American and West European countries. Integration is often conceptualized as a continuing process toward permanent settlement and full membership, almost entirely ignoring the experiences of migrants whose lives and labour are constructed from the outset as legally temporary. This may be why in the west, integration and temporariness have come to sound almost oxymoronic.

Yet my mother’s experience brings to light an important example of how temporariness can stretch across decades and how, despite nonexistent pathways to civil and legal integration, temporary migrant workers like her may still be ‘integrated’ in various social and cultural spheres. Building on my mother’s experience, I sought to decenter the western-dominated empirical focus of integration research, turning an analytical lens instead to Singapore’s temporary labor migration. To do this, I treated temporariness as officially transient but potentially long-term, thereby offering a new conceptual approach to the study of integration in temporary migration contexts.

As I began reading extensively about integration and Singapore, I came across the 2013 Little India ‘riot’, in which a large group of South Asian temporary migrant construction workers (TMCWs) took to the streets following a fatal accident that killed one of their fellow countrymen. The incident quickly escalated into violence and was largely seen as an expression of deep resentment among migrant construction workers. I became particularly interested in how the Singapore state has responded to this riot. While legislating the Foreign Employee Dormitories Act, which rehouses TMCWs in ‘self-contained’, large-scale dormitories that are sited on peripheral locations around the city, the state simultaneously initiated the Foreign Worker Ambassadors Program (FWAP) to promote ‘social integration’.

At this point, I decided to narrow my research focus—from temporary migrant workers in general to TMCWs. I wanted to understand why the state feels the need to socially integrate TMCWs, and what integration actually means in a context where permanent settlement is impossible. And what does it mean for TMCWs to have to both integrate and segregate all at once? I was convinced that the Singapore case would offer new theoretical and empirical insights into how integration, which was developed as a concept and enforced as a policy measure in the west, has come to be understood, adapted, and pursued in an Asian, temporary migration context. 

It was not difficult to recruit participants for my research. I had previously studied in Singapore, and during my time there I founded a prose-and-poetry writing initiative that drew migrants from varied national backgrounds. With the help of these former members, I was able to get in touch with a few ‘foreign worker ambassadors’. I deliberately refrained from specifying any particular ethnic or national category during participant recruitment in order to avoid treating it as natural and replicating ethnic biases, which have pervaded migration research. Instead, I turned my attention to social networks and observed when and under what circumstances ethnic identification gained its salience.

As my fieldwork progressed, I observed an increasing ethnic concentration, with Bangladeshi TMCWs comprising the majority. I believe it was partly because of the snowball sampling I used, but more importantly, it also reflected the broader logic of Singapore’s integration project. Within this framework, TMCWs from specific ethnic backgrounds are framed as problematic and potentially dangerous. As such, they are governed through carefully designed measures of discipline and control that are presented in the name of integration. Within the Foreign Worker Ambassadors Program, my Bangladeshi TMCW participants are enacted as local leaders whose primary task is to reinforce the regulatory powers of the state within their specific ethnic populations.

I found it rather challenging to elicit candid responses from my participants. As publicly visible figures, they were often featured in official events (such as the International Migrants’ Day and the Singapore Racial Harmony Day) and local news, so it was only understandable that they felt the need to maintain a positive reputation. A few participants believed that their voluntary work as integration ambassadors could present a chance of finally obtaining a permanent residency (PR) or even citizenship. As a result, some of my interviews appeared highly curated and rehearsed, and some narratives seemed self-censored to protect their image and chance of securing a PR. It was only later, when I shared stories about my mother’s predicaments as a migrant domestic worker, that they also began to open up and share their struggles.

The main insight from my research is that integration and segregation measures are used in tandem to exert control and produce obedient migrant subjects, enabling the Singapore state to reap the economic benefits of migrants’ transient and flexibilized labor while simultaneously minimizing the social consequences of its structural dependence on temporary labor migration. This finding throws new light on how integration operates across different socio-political contexts. I want to call on integration scholars to pay greater scholarly attention on how integration unfolds under conditions of enforced temporariness in non-western contexts.