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Eurasian Emigration from Singapore Factors Giving Rise to a Shrinking Minority Ethnic Population Lowe, John

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Eurasian Emigration from Singapore Factors Giving Rise to a Shrinking Minority Ethnic Population Lowe, John Eurasian Emigration from Singapore Factors Giving Rise to a Shrinking Minority Ethnic Population Lowe, John Published in: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Published: 01/11/2018 Document Version: Final Published version, also known as Publisher’s PDF, Publisher’s Final version or Version of Record License: CC BY-NC Publication record in CityU Scholars: Go to record Published version (DOI): 10.1163/22134379-17404003 Publication details: Lowe, J. (2018). Eurasian Emigration from Singapore: Factors Giving Rise to a Shrinking Minority Ethnic Population. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 174(4), 422-449. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379- 17404003 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on CityU Scholars is the Post-print version (also known as Accepted Author Manuscript, Peer-reviewed or Author Final version), it may differ from the Final Published version. When citing, ensure that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination and other details. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the CityU Scholars portal is retained by the author(s) and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Users may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain. Publisher permission Permission for previously published items are in accordance with publisher's copyright policies sourced from the SHERPA RoMEO database. Links to full text versions (either Published or Post-print) are only available if corresponding publishers allow open access. Take down policy Contact [email protected] if you believe that this document breaches copyright and provide us with details. We will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25/09/2021 Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 174 (2018) 422–449 bki brill.com/bki Eurasian Emigration from Singapore Factors Giving Rise to a Shrinking Minority Ethnic Population John Lowe Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong [email protected] Abstract In the late modern era, emigration and concomitant citizenship renunciations in coun- tries that do not allow dual citizenship can be the result of lifestyle preferences or better work opportunities. Although emigration is an integral dimension of cosmopolitanism in an era when national borders are porous, Singapore discourages the emigration of its citizens but prefers its new migrants to maintain cosmopolitan links. This is perhaps anomalous to its cosmopolitan vision. Eurasians of mixed European and Asian ances- try are a small minority ethnic group who have emigrated out of Singapore in large numbers. This work examines how their cosmopolitan politics of belonging have been at odds with the state’s authoritarian tropes of citizenship as ‘push’ factors responsible for this minority ethnic group’s dwindling population. Keywords Singapore – Eurasians – Joseph Schooling – push factor – migration – race – ethnicity 1 Introduction The Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore is a nation founded on immigra- tion and British colonization. Following its independence after a short merger with Malaysia between 1963 and 1965, it celebrated its fiftieth year of existence as an independently sovereign nation in 2015. In doing so, Singapore has solid- ified its self-invented national identity as an East Asian one. Saddled with a declining birth rate and rapidly silvering population, the ruling party’s liberal immigration policies have been designed to people the tiny nation-state, which © john lowe, 2018 | doi:10.1163/22134379-17404003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC license at the time of publication. Downloaded from Brill.com08/06/2019 03:58:15AM via City University of Hong Kong eurasian emigration from singapore 423 lacks natural resources, with migrants from the source countries of its current citizenry, such as China and India (Ho 2006; Yeoh and Lin 2013). This policy was undoubtedly inspired by pragmatism to preserve the continuity of its self- invented national identity. Offers of citizenship and permanent residency to migrants of Western origin are therefore made in much smaller numbers. Popu- list Singaporeans condemning the government’s immigration policy frequently allege that the rising cost of living, competition for jobs, and suppression of wages wrought by immigration are good ‘push’ factors for Singaporeans to seek emigration opportunities elsewhere. Anti-government comments diffused on social media by Singaporean dissidents living abroad have criticized the gov- ernment’s immigration policy for not doing enough to protect the interests of Singaporeans. By comparison, dominant attitudes to emigration were coloured by a sense of national patriotism around two decades ago. From a historical perspective, applying for permanent residency or renouncing one’s Singaporean citizen- ship in favour of citizenship elsewhere was deemed an affront to the city-state’s homilies of loyalty and patriotism. This has also been reinforced through com- pulsory male military service, which was introduced in 1967. Singapore does not allow dual citizenship. Citizens of Singapore applying for new passports must also declare that they do not hold a passport from another country. In his 1994 research on emigration from Singapore, Yap Mui Teng found that local attitudes towards emigrants were negative: On the other hand, certain segments of the Singapore population as well as its leaders adopted a more belligerent attitude towards the emig- rants. In an interview in 1987, former Prime Minister Lee reportedly said, ‘[T]here is no way in Singapore to prevent you from leaving […] Nobody is going to stop you. If you feel you have a better life in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, America, good luck to you. We feel we can get a Canadian or Australian to come to Singapore and work or a Malaysian, or a Thai, or an Indonesian we will try […]’ Other views on emigrants, as reflected in the mass media, included feelings of betrayal. The former Prime Min- ister himself was visibly emotional when he confessed that he could not empathize with the reasons for wanting to leave Singapore. Some Singa- poreans suggested that emigrants be made to return the educational and other subsidies they received from the country. YAP 1994:422–3 Emigration from Singapore was considered a destabilizing force to the collect- ive fabric due to the rapid economic and social progress of the small nation- Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 174Downloaded (2018) from 422–449 Brill.com08/06/2019 03:58:15AM via City University of Hong Kong 424 lowe state, which culminated in its achievement of first-world status in 1995. The haemorrhaging of talent through emigration and citizenship renunciations would negatively impact the country’s need to establish its newly found image as a developed nation that succeeded through authoritarian communitarian- ism. Singapore continues to pride itself on being a country that espouses the essentialized and ambiguous ‘Asian value’ of aggrandizing the imagined col- lective society over individualistic self-interest (Lingle 2000). During the 1980s and 1990s, Singaporeans who exercised their right to emigrate toWestern coun- tries were stigmatized by the ruling party as disloyal and individualistic for leav- ing after benefiting from Singapore’s economic progress. For example, many middle-class Singaporeans who left for Australia and New Zealand in the 1990s had sufficient funds to retire with, larger living spaces, and a higher-quality life- style by selling their government-subsidized apartments at substantial profits driven by inflation. Before the year 2000, the notion of a brain drain precip- itated by outflows of talented Singaporeans trained by tax-payer funds was pervasive in the city-state’s censored print media (Yap 1994). State discourses designed to discourage the emigration of its citizens had therefore trumped up the adaptational difficulties that Singaporean migrants would potentially face in the form of discrimination and racism as Asian minorities in their destina- tion countries (Seow 1998). Over the past decade, attitudes towards emigration from Singapore have ceased to be negative. Verweij and Pelizzo (2009:23) point out that large num- bers of young and talented Singaporeans are emigrating, with push factors including political anger at long working hours and low wages, and the unfair law that prevents unmarried people below the age of thirty-five from buying public housing.1 In a 2012 poll of around 2,000 Singaporeans, approximately 56% indicated that they would emigrate, if given a choice.2 According to Fet- zer and Millan (2015), the city-state’s authoritarian political climate and neo- liberal immigration policy remained the most significant ‘push factor’ in the emigration of Singaporeans to Australia. In the past decade, the Singaporean government has placed less emphasis on denouncing the emigration of its cit- izens as ‘quitters’, instead channelling its efforts towards the pragmatic goal of attracting foreign talent. The peremptory way this has been achieved callously reflects the state’s loss of faith in their own citizens’ economic capabilities and its view of their reluctance to reproduce (Verweij and Pelizzo 2009:24). 1 In Singapore, flats built by the Housing and Development
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