I was awarded the JEMS Prize for Best Dissertation in Migration and Refugees Studies for my dissertation titled “Integration-transnationalism nexus in the context of enforced transience: Managing racial harmony and temporary labor migration in Singapore.” The prize was jointly awarded by Sussex Department of Geography and Sussex Centre for Migration Research.

Training an analytical spotlight on Singapore’s temporary migration regime, my dissertation explores what it means for migrants to simultaneously integrate and segregate, and how their enforced transience and indefinite foothold in the city-state further complicate their social relations with others in Singapore, as well as transnational ties with those at home.

My dissertation advances two sets of arguments. First, the Singapore state simultaneously employs strategies of integration and segregation to construct desirable migrant subjectivities and lessen the perceived ‘social ills’ associated with its highly temporary migration regime. This partial and ‘temporary’ integration is a necessary ingredient that allows the state to reap the benefits of temporary low-paid migrant labor while concurrently evading the assumed threats of its structural dependence on temporary migrant labor to its multicultural harmony.

Second, while migrants are socially pressured to integrate and legally forced to remain embedded in transnational social fields, their pathways to legal-political integration are blocked and their ability to reconstruct transnational practices is often structurally constrained. This produces processes of integration and transnationalism that are riddled with a sense of uncertainty and involuntariness. While invariably feeling stuck, however, migrants are not always passive agents. Circumnavigating the rules and restrictions of the work permit system, some migrants prove their deservingness and exert their often invisibilized existence by caring for the city through various volunteering activities. I conclude the paper by reiterating the need to train our analytical lens on temporary migration regimes for more comprehensive theorizing of the relationships between integration and transnationalism under conditions of enforced temporariness.