My 6th engagement was a survey sent towards the community around me. I chose to do this engagement since I wanted to know how much the non-migrant worker’s community hold attention to the workers, and what they think of now that it has become an important and controversial issue. I received 87 responses.
Firstly, roughly half of my respondents had experienced working with migrant workers, and I also could see many people writing down their concerns on how migrant workers were treated. This seemed to me that a significant amount of people were aware and concerned about the issues going on. On the other hand, there were still some people that responded that they were not so much educated on migrant workers, making me realise that due to the small amount of news coverage about them except for the growing numbers of cases, this issue is an issue that although it is very important and big right now in this country, it is also an issue that information is needed to be collected actively if you want to know more about it. This shows the significant power the government holds in controlling information that is delivered to the public and the press companies.
I was surprised with the response to one of my questions, ‘To what extent do you think the Singaporean economy benefits from migrant workers?’ I had the respondents choose from a scale of 1 to 4, with No.1 being ‘We get a huge benefit,’ and No.4 being ‘We don’t get any benefits’. Although 63.2% responded as 1, 46.8% of the respondents chose 2-4, which was a little surprising for me since I thought a larger majority would choose 1. This was especially because, in the conference that I attended in my previous engagement, it mainly discussed the dilemma; ‘Although Singapore cannot be what it is now if we do not have migrant workers, and so we should treat them like any other, we are not willing to sacrifice the cheap cost of what we get.’ Since in this discussion, the fact that we get a huge benefit from the migrant workers was discussed as a premise, I felt a gap between the panellists’ view of migrant workers at the discussion and some of my respondents’ view of migrant workers.
In terms of attitudes towards migrant workers, I could see that a lot of my respondents were very aware and attentive on this aspect. In the question, ‘Have you ever found people around you holding any bias against migrant workers?’ 55.2% of my respondents answered a determined ‘Yes’ in spite of having a choice of choosing ‘Unsure,’ which was 20.7%. Furthermore, In the question, ‘Given the situation right now, is there anything that you think should change, though there would be sacrifices for others?’ 54% of my respondents chose ‘Attitudes towards migrant workers within Singapore,’ as one of their choices of 2-3. This shows how a lot of people seemed to be conscious of the problem we do not have chances to interact with migrant workers, and that this sometimes leads to people holding biases that do not exist.