Immigration and Its (Dis)Contents: The Challenges of Highly Skilled Migration in Globalizing Singapore

In the past three decades, the bid to develop Singapore into a global hub for high-tech, knowledge-intensive industries has underpinned Singapore’s push to augment its local talent pool by attracting highly skilled transnational migrants. The ensuing influx of “foreign talent” into the “nation-city-state” has triggered major questions relating to social integration and cohesion, and raised implications for Singapore’s demographic future and its “multiracial” identity. The article seeks to understand the politics of identity stemming from the increased presence of highly skilled migrants. After reviewing conceptualizations of the globally mobile “international talent” and tracing the key changes in Singapore’s immigration-cum-labor policies (particularly those relating to highly skilled migrants), the article examines the fraught terrain on which the “integration” of highly skilled immigrants is staged, giving attention to the social dynamics of interaction between “foreign talent” and the “Singapore core” (popular terms often used in the media), the ensuing identity politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the slippages between the closure associated with building a “nation-state” and the openness critical to “global city” ambitions.