‘This country, law very strong’: Securitization beyond the border in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore

While work on the securitization of migration has often held borders to be the site at which state power is most keenly felt, this paper draws on static and walking interviews with Bangladeshi male migrant workers in Singapore to understand their everyday experiences of the securitization within state territory. These narratives demonstrate how the Little India district in Singapore has been scripted as an exceptionally problematic space associated with dangerous migrant bodies, within which Bangladeshi migrants encounter state power in a variety of guises, ranging from police patrols to video surveillance technologies. They also reveal how Bangladeshi migrants continually struggle against these state-led scripts of insecurity, even if their sojourn in Singaporean territory is circumscribed by a condition of permanent temporariness. Through this discussion, the securitization of migration is conceptualized as an unfinished project that is often exerted unevenly and paradoxically within state territory. The security-migration nexus should also not only be understood with recourse to bodies deemed “illegal” and “unwanted”—such as asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants—but should also account for temporary labour migrants who have been legally admitted into state territory, whose labour power is central to the host state’s economy but who are disallowed from ever belonging within the countries they work in