Managing the non-integration of transient migrant workers: Urban strategies of enclavisation and enclosure in Singapore

Abstract

Research on migration in arrival cities, particularly in the west, has traditionally focused on spatial formations such as ‘ethnic enclaves’ or ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ in order to investigate questions around assimilation, integration and settlement issues relating to more permanent forms of migration. By shifting attention to the cities of migration in Asia that operate largely under a regime of temporary migration, we foreground the twin concepts of enclavisation and enclosure not as fixed entities but as ongoing spatial-temporal strategies of disciplinary power with uneven consequences for migrant life and labour in the city. Set within the context of Singapore, we draw on qualitative interviews with two groups of transient migrant workers – male construction workers and female domestic workers – to examine two sets of conjoined processes underpinning their spatial containment in the city-state: ground-driven enclavisation or the formation of ‘weekend enclaves’ /gathering grounds as co-national social spaces of support and comfort zones of co-ethnic belonging; and state-driven enclosure in dormitories or home-workspaces as a set of containment measures in response to gender-differentiated concerns about enclavisation. As spatial–temporal processes that shape the migrant’s place in, and mobility through, the city in highly gendered and disciplined ways, enclavisation and enclosure work in tandem to reinforce the non-integration of low-waged transient migrants in the city.