New migrants need to integrate

The need for national integration is a pressing reality, particularly in a small multiracial and multi-religious country such as Singapore. Hence, continuous efforts have been made since Independence to strengthen multiracialism and forge a common national identity here. However, generational differences between earlier waves of migration and today’s arrivals mean that existing structures of integration need to be examined to see how effective they still are in integrating new migrants. President Halimah Yacob served a reminder of

the need to guard against social complacency when it comes to migration,

in a speech delivered at the Institute of Policy Studies’ 35th anniversary gala dinner on Monday. The basis of her remarks was the growing concern that not all those who are new to the city-state consider it necessary to mix with Singaporeans, since they can manage quite well and are very comfortable in their own exclusive social circles.

This is a pity. Earlier migrants did not possess a sense of entitlement to life in Singapore; if anything, they were grateful to have escaped the miserable material and social conditions back home that had driven them to leave for foreign shores. Once here, Chinese and Indians did look to kinship networks to anchor their presence in the new country. In fact, many of them were sojourners who desired to return home after they had made their modest fortunes here. However, the day-to-day exigencies of living brought diverse races together socially in ways that transcended the “plural society” model envisaged in colonial times, a model in which ethnicity corresponded generally with economic function. As sojourners became settlers and found neighbours for life here, a new era of Singapore’s history began. Migrants became more interested in the future of Singapore than in the pasts of the countries that they had left behind.