This book examines international labour migrants in the context of South–South migration with a focus on Bangladeshi migration to Singapore. Two principal questions in the South–South migration are addressed: Why and how individuals migrate for work; and what impact this temporary form of migration has for migrants and their families. The book adopts a relatively new methodological approach to labour migration by linking different phases that migrants undergo in the migration process and by combining migrants in the host country with their families in the origin country. This is achieved through identifying and addressing six key areas: (i) migration policy, (ii) social imperatives of migration (iii) recruitment, (iv) social worlds of the migrants, (v) remittance process, and finally, (vi) family development dynamics. This book introduces the bari to migration research as a unit of analysis over and above individual and family units. The book reveals how social and cultural forces both initiate and perpetuate migration, and later on influence bari dynamics.

This volume provides theoretical treatments of remittance on how its development potential is translated into reality. The authors meticulously delve into diverse mechanisms through which migrant communities remit, investigating how recipients engage in the development process in South Asia.

Discusses how Britain replicated the "Singapore model" - the use of imported "industrious" Chinese labour - to other parts of its empire, with varying degrees of success. The transformation of Singapore, founded by Stamford Raffles in 1819, from a trading post to a major centre for international trade was a huge commercial and colonial success for Britain. One key factor in all of this was the recruitment of Chinese migrant labour, which by the 1850s made up over half of the population. The transformation, however, was not limited to Singapore. As this book demonstrates, colonial administrators saw that the "model" of whathad been done in Singapore, especially the use of Chinese migrant labour, could be replicated elsewhere. This book examines the establishment of the "Singapore model" and its transference - to Assam in India, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Mauritius, Australia and the West Indies. It examines the role of the key people who developed the model, including the Hong Kong merchant houses and their financial expertise, discusses central ideas which lay behind the model, notably free trade and the use of "industrious" Chinese rather than "lazy" natives, and assesses the varying outcomes of the different colonial experiments. The themes discussed - economic opportunities and globalisation; theneed to find labour without recourse to slavery, indentured labour or convict labour; migration, ethnicity and racism - all continue to have great significance at present, as does the idea that Singapore, still, is a model to be replicated more widely. STAN NEAL is Lecturer in Modern British Imperial History at Ulster University.

A study on the skills and certification-related matters and the importance of enlarging the size of the skilled workforce and diversifying the skills base for migrant aspirants.

When 7-year-old Anna told a lie to get out of trouble, she didn’t expect her older sister to go missing. Faced with her mother’s wrath and riddled with guilt, Anna tries to make amends as she grapples with the aftermath of her actions. Until her daughter’s body is found, Su Lai refuses to believe that she has simply disappeared. Turning to a medium as her obsession to find her daughter escalates, the family is sucked into a web of pain and deceit that forces them to confront their own measures of loss. A masterful debut by Jinny Koh, The Gods Will Hear Us Eventually boldly interrogates the extent of familial love and expectation while unravelling the complexities of hope and redemption.

Despite clear aspirations by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create an effective and transparent framework to facilitate movements among skilled professionals within the ASEAN by December 2015, progress has been slow and uneven. This report examines the challenges ASEAN member states face in achieving the goal of greater mobility for the highly skilled, including hurdles in recognizing professional qualifications, opening up access to certain jobs, and a limited willingness by professionals to move due to perceived cultural, language, and socioeconomic differences. The cost of these barriers is staggering and could reduce the region's competitiveness in the global market. This report launches a multiyear effort by ADB and the Migration Policy Institute to better understand the issues and develop strategies to gradually overcome the problems. It offers a range of policy recommendations that have been discussed among experts in a high-level expert meeting, taking into account best practices locally and across the region.

The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it. For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection. Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

"This is the best available single-volume treatment of the causes and consequences of Dominican migration to and from the 'two islands' ... Without a doubt, this book represents by far the best study to date of Dominican immigration to New York, and it will become not only the definitive statement on the topic for some time to come but also a work of great comparative value for contemporary theory and research on the immigration and incorporation of newcomers to the United States." Ruben G. Rumbaut, San Diego State University.

This book investigates the long-term impact of migration on development, engaging in a thorough analysis of the pertinent factors in migration. Migration scholars and stakeholders have long placed emphasis on the necessity of migration for development. At the heart of this book is the question: Has migration made development necessary, or is it the other way around? While existing literature is predominantly occupied with positive impressions about the migration-development nexus, this book challenges associated pervasive generalizations about the impact of migration, indicating that migration has not impacted all regions equally. This volume thus grapples with the different extents to which migration has impacted development by delving into the social costs that migrants often pay in the long run. With empirical support, this book proffers that some countries are becoming over-dependent on migration. An excellent resource for both policymakers working on migration policy, and scholars in international relations, migration and development studies, this book presents a range of innovative ideas in relation to the remittance-development nexus.

In striving to become cosmopolitan, global cities aim to attract highly-skilled workers while relying on a vast underbelly of low-waged, low status migrants. This book tells the story of one such city, revealing how national development produces both aspirations to be cosmopolitan and to improve one's class standing, along with limitations in achieving such aims. Through the analysis of three different groups of workers in Singapore, Ye shows that cosmopolitanism is an exclusive and aspirational construct created through global and national development strategies, transnational migration and individual senses of identity. This dialectic relationship between class and cosmopolitanism is never free from power and is constituted through material and symbolic conditions, struggles and violence. Class is also constituted through 'the self' and lies at the very heart of different constructions of personhood as they intersect with gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality.