Padd Solutions

Converted by Falcon Hive


Doing some research on the public discourse surrounding last year's racist tram incident in the UK, I was prompted to ponder the rise of xenophobic sentiments in Singapore. 

As held in diaspora studies, there is no such thing as a mythical, unchanging homeland. A people's conception of their homeland is formed through experience: What you grow up knowing as your home will be the home that you know. That may seem obvious and tautological; yet people persist in perceiving their homeland as a thing unchanging, when, in reality, their conception of the homeland is simply that which they have learned.

As such, if you're used to the idea of a homogeneous or monocultural homeland, that is how you would conceive of your homeland; that is the image in which you might want to remake your country.

At the very least, Singaporeans are accustomed to the idea of multi-racialism. It has been drilled into us since we were young. Those with a libertarian bent may deride such education as plain indoctrination, but, in truth, it is hardly alien to the process of socialisation that every normal member of society goes through as he/she grows up. And it works. Of course, racism still exists, but there is no popular challenge to idea of Singapore as a multi-racial society.

Yet it has not saved Singapore from the tensions and culture shock associated with immigration, as immigrants from 'alien' cultures have become numerous enough to have a perceived impact on the local way of life. 

Further fuelling the tensions is the political situation, the official support for mass immigration, which sets up a bitter conflict between the authorities and citizens who feel that their grievances are being ignored. While I believe that an open immigration policy is, as typically held by liberal political philosophy, morally right, Singapore's immigration policy is firmly rooted in neoliberalism. In line with the country's ideology of 'pragmatism', immigration is to be supported on the basis of its necessity for economic growth. 

This ideology reduces not only immigrants into economic units, it does the same to the locals, who must embrace cutthroat competition. Wages are driven down and the economic worth of immigrants, especially that of the wealthy among them, is emphasised. The latter is clearly demonstrated by the Chinese evening daily's headline on the recent accident involving a reckless Ferrari driver from China. While hardly relevant to the tragic incident, the newspaper opted to announce the wealth and prestige of the driver first, perhaps to pre-empt local anger, ever-simmering as it was, towards Chinese immigrants. 

What the headline ends up doing is intensifying the existing social tensions, as locals once again feel that they are being treated as mere economic units whose worth is incessantly being compared to the immigrants'. And the fact that local media is tightly controlled by the authorities lends whatever the former prints an air of official legitimacy—it certainly means the authorities cannot conveniently push the blame away. 

Thus, the knee-jerk xenophobia among the public, while deplorable, should be understood as a by-product of the neoliberal race to the bottom, which has exacerbated social inequality in the name of economic growth. And as long as growth takes precedence over social justice and a fair distribution of rights and responsibilities, the government will continue to give ammunition to the xenophobes; which is a pity, since an open immigration policy could work without driving down local living standards and causing so much resentment, if only the government would speak the right language of multiculturalism, abandon the neoliberal religion and adopt better labour regulations.