Continued from Part 1 …
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Aliens and national identity
Still, the real problem is not about immigrants entering but about short-term immigrants entering Singapore, knowing they are there on a temporary basis. How do we ensure these new short-term residents will assimilate themselves into our culture? They do have an incentive to do so if they intend to find more job opportunities here, but the inherent uncertainty of having a temporary pass makes it less valuable for them to invest time in doing so.
Another problem this new focus on immigrants and population is uncovering is the same issue that has remained a thorn in the side of Singaporeans for ages – our national identity. What is Singapore, and what is a Singaporean? Is Singlish a language and something to be proud of; do we have a national costume; what do we tell people we love about Singapore besides the food and shopping? It’s almost as if, as one friend says, “We don’t have an identity yet, so let’s just talk about food in the meantime.”
We can’t stick to the same ol’ same ol’ placeholders and safe topics forever. At some point, we need to confront the problems that are associated with race but not spoken about. Why do ‘poor Malays’ appear in the news more often when there are poor Chinese and Indians around too? Why do we associate the poor Chinese population with elderly Chinese living alone? Is under-education linked to culture, or to other factors?
Building a Singaporean identity means building up social relations within the community. There seems to be a deeply entrenched belief – perhaps not acknowledged, but there nevertheless – that the government will find a solution to the problem. But why do we want the government to decide on new social policies for us? In my opinion, Singapore has been annexed and dissected thoroughly enough to strip away almost all claims to Chinese communism, Indian nationalism or Malay indigenous ambitions. HDB racial quotas, cultural enclaves and our racial identity on our ICs have made us numbers where we are people. We need to come back into our own, not necessarily by challenging authority outright (that isn’t my point) but by putting ourselves out there, in the community. Communities create history together, and history generates shared identity. There is no straight line to national identity, much less by defining ourselves against immigrants. But together, we can make sense of what being Singaporean means.
Psychologists distinguish between incremental and entity theorists. The former believe that personality, beliefs and one’s learning capacity is constantly changing and able to change. The latter believe that these are static and fixed. Incremental theorists, or people who believe in changeable personalities and intelligence, often learn more and work harder, and do better overall, than those in the other group.
As Singaporeans, we should ask ourselves: do we want a culture that remains static, with a strongly Singaporean core (do we even know what that is?) and strongly defends against foreign influence, or do we want to absorb other ideas and cultures in a way that helps us innovate, change and grow? We do not need growth just to compete with other nations, but more importantly, to keep our people’s dreams vibrant, in a city which offers the best opportunities to its citizens. Singapore is at the top now, and it’s all too easy to fall. But we have got to the stage where sheer economic growth is not going to sustain our social needs. What we need is innovation, not just technological or social entrepreneurial, but community-based innovation – when people work together, they unfailingly bring new, emergent, spontaneous ideas to the surface. And by working together, we take matters of national identity and Singaporean-ness out of the hands of the governing bodies, into our own.
Community-based innovation
That work can and should begin here, in Singapore. Social change requires us to learn through community: through growing “communities-of-practice”, a term coined by social anthropologist Etienne Wenger to describe the way learning takes place socially rather than just cognitively. Communities-of-practice build social capital and build up trust and mutual cooperation as well as the capacity to innovate. New ideas for social change require new ways of thinking about social structures, and relationships between people and between organisations. Community innovation will deliver new ways for Singaporeans to relate to the world and to each other—learning together to build a more environmentally-sustainable city, to grow more local food, to make our city not just green but life-sustaining, to form links with migrant labour and reduce the growing hostility towards immigrants. It’s not about growing a gracious society. What does gracious mean anyway? Why be gracious, when our livelihoods are being taken from us? Rather, what is important is to retain our humanity. The Singaporean identity is growing stronger and clearer, but if this identity is built on a foundation of resentment, anger and words of hate against the immigrant community, then that identity seems a lot less desirable to me.
Other countries might have grown their own sense of national identity by hating foreigners and people perceived as being “not like us.” That has led to ongoing trans-boundary and national ethnic conflict in countries around the world, even within Southeast Asia. There are racial tensions within Singapore which are not talked about sufficiently, but our identity has never been linked to spite and hate towards foreigners. There are always new ways of creating a nation, and I am sending out a heartfelt plea: not to let our country’s identity grow strong only through groundless spite and racism against individual immigrants just because they symbolise a larger national phenomenon. It is not the individual’s fault; it is policy and we can solve policy while keeping our sense of humanity and care for other humans, not just other Singaporeans.