Featured Work, Singapore, Travel - Thursday, April 22, 2010 16:38 - 0 Comments

The pain behind Singapore’s gains

Australian Financial Review, April 22 2010

It is Christmas Eve in Singapore, and the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics – HOME – is holding a celebration at its East Coast shelter. Donors have provided a Christmas dinner, and 60 women, all of whom sleep in a single room upstairs, have organised some carols as a thankyou. These are women who have fled their jobs as foreign domestic workers, or maids, sometimes because of physical abuse, sometimes mental, sometimes simply lack of sleep; they are here because they have nowhere else to go. They strike up Amazing Grace. Everyone in the room is crying.

The 830,000 Australians who clear immigration at Singapore’s immaculate Changi airport each year won’t see this; nor will most of the 20,000 who live here. They will see Singapore’s astonishing economic success story in action: a country that started out with nothing upon independence from Britain in 1959, too small to support agriculture or resource industries, yet which has become the eighth wealthiest state on earth per capita, earning over US$50,000 per person on a purchasing power parity basis. They’ll see the brand new casino developments rising around the city centre’s Marina Bay, and the cranes above the world’s busiest container port, but they’re unlikely to glimpse the dark side of the migrant economy without whose presence this stunning achievement would have been impossible.

Nb this is the version as originally filed; click on the PDF links to see the shorter version as it ran

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