The Highly-skilled, Part-Singaporean, Binational Family

“Being married to a Singaporean, right, I consider myself Singaporean. In fact, I still consider myself half-Singaporean.”

A is a Spanish woman married to a Singaporean man, P. After living in Singapore for 10 years, they now reside in a third country due to the educational needs of their three children. In a few years, they will return with their son, so he can fulfil his National Service obligations, and “reintegrate into [Singaporean] society”.

Binational families like A and P’s are increasingly prevalent[1] in Singapore, but they are poorly understood. Unlike lower-income binational families, they are a more heterogenous group comprising migrant spouses from across the globe and tend to be highly-mobile with two possible robust income streams and fundamental immigration rights in places other than Singapore. Thus, their choice to make a home in Singapore is meaningful from a public policy perspective: they are exemplars of local-foreign integration; a microcosm if you will, of whole-of-society integration.

Also, they are deeply desiring of robust integration: they have familial roots and significant social links to Singapore that fully-immigrant families generally lack. There is little scholarship that addresses migration trajectories that entwine significant skill levels and transnational kinship ties, with marrying and raising citizens, while the migrants themselves, are not.

At next week’s PAS 2024 conference, we present the first in a series of papers on this topic based on ethnographic work collected over 2021 and 2022. Specifically, we delineate how material precarity resulting from the migrant spouse’s immigration status affects highly-skilled, part-Singaporean, binational families based in Singapore. We identify three requirements these types of families have. ‘Secured mobility’, the ‘retention of individual autonomy’, and ‘material integration’ are cornerstones, all contingent on the migrant spouse having a deep and stable immigration status, to the thriving of this type of family. When unfulfilled, material precarity ensues, creating uncertainty about their belonging in Singapore. We argue that policies which target the migrant spouse have repercussions for the functioning and well-being of the entire family, casting the whole unit as outsiders. This is at odds with how binational families view their sense of belonging to Singapore—not a halving, but rather, a doubling. 

Further reading:

If this topic interests you, please join us at our presentation at PAS 2024 Annual Meeting, Day 1 Session A2-2 (Family Policies in Singapore).

Loh, B., Yeoh, B. S., Huang, S., & Yeung, W. J. (2022). Structural Vulnerability and Neoliberal Subjectivities of Low-Income Binational Families in Singapore. Women's Studies International Forum, 94, 102634. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2022.102634

[1] From 2012 and 2019, 35 to 40% of all marriages took place between a citizen and a non-citizen. This is more than double the rate of 15.1% in 1984, when such data was first publicly available. Of this quickly growing segment, highly-skilled couplings seem to be steadily rising. An approximation of the reducing proportion of lower-income binational families can be established by the fact that the proportion of foreign brides from Asia has been trending down. 74% of citizen marriages were based on a non-citizen brides from Asia in 2012. This dropped to 70% in 2017, and 68% in 2022. There has also been a corresponding upward trend in citizen marriages between foreign men and Singaporean women. 24% of citizen marriages involved a foreign groom in 2012. This rose to 27% in 2017 and 29% in 2022. With lower-income binational families tending to comprise women from around Asia married to Singaporean men, we can infer that the proportion of highly-skilled binational marriages is steadily growing.