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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Exequiel Camarig Cabanda, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted more than a billion migrants (both international and domestic) in a variety of ways, and this study demonstrates how COVID-19 has widened the gaps between citizens, non-migrant and migrant populations in terms of income, job retention, freedom of movement, vaccine etc.

While there is an emerging literature studying the impacts of COVID-19 on migration, the situation in Southeast Asia has not received much scholarly attention. Our research fills the literature gap by studying the experiences of migrants and citizens in Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore and highlighting how the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities between and within the groups. Furthermore, this research investigates the many ways how politicization of vaccine distribution has impacted them. These three countries are studied due to their high reliance of migrants in key economic sectors.

Our study is based on original data which was collected from around 200 informal interviews (via Skype and WhatsApp) with migrant populations living or stuck in several countries in South-East Asia, Middle-East Asia, Europe and USA between mid-February 2020 and August 2021. These respondents were chosen using the snowball method. We concentrated on low-skilled, semi-skilled, and high-skilled migrants who are directly or indirectly affected by COVID-19.

Our collected data shows that the migrant workers, especially the seasonal workers, have been hit the hardest by job losses since they are more likely to engage in informal jobs that lack safety nets in the event of job loss or illness. We are all eager to get back to normalcy now that vaccinations against COVID-19 are being administered. But what does return to normalcy entail? Even if COVID-19 is mostly gone, we have a feeling that many aspects of everyday life will not return to normal.

The core of our argument is, therefore, hysteresis, a concept established in physics and then embraced by economists. It basically means that eliminating the initial force no longer has the power to reverse the effects of a system modification. We want the world to return to nor­mal in order for migrants to go back to work and remittances to circulate throughout the global economy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

AKM Ahsan Ullah is Associate Professor in Geography, Environment and Development at the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD). Ullah’s research portfolio includes stints at the Southeast Asian Research Centre, Hong Kong; IPH, University of Ottawa, McMaster University; Saint Mary’s University, and Dalhousie University, Canada; the American University in Cairo (AUC); City University of Hong Kong, Osnabruck University, Germany, and Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand. He completed his PhD from Asian and International Studies, City University of Hong Kong in 2007. His research areas include population migration, human rights, development, globalization and environment. Dr Ullah has published more than 15 books, 60 articles in refereed journals and 40 book chapters.

Diotima Chattoraj is Adjunct Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Health Sciences in James Cook University, Singapore. She was a former researcher at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at National University of Singapore, in collaboration with Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University. Prior to that, she was based as a researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Universiti Brunei Darussalam and was involved in several research projects on Asian migration. She completed her PhD at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany in 2016. Her research interests include migration, development, ethnicity, international relations, and boundary-making. She has published in leading journals in migration and development and has authored a couple of books, book-chapters and also co-edited a few. She is an assistant editor for the journal South Asia Research (Sage) and serves as a peer reviewer for a number of refereed journals.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.