London vs Singapore: comparing & contrasting the FT experience

Further to my last post about xenophobia and racism towards Filipinos in Singapore, I was asked the following question.

"Limpeh, I know you have been working in London for many years now and whilst I know you're a British citizen now, surely people there do see you as an immigrant - or what we consider a 'foreign talent', right? I know you feel quite strongly about Singaporeans reacting in a xenophobic or racist manner towards foreign talents working in Singapore - but what has been your experience in the UK? Have the Brits been more accepting towards expatriates or foreigners there? Or do they worry about the same things that Singaporeans worry about? Care you share your experience please? Thank you very much."

Closing ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics

That is a good question and I think it would be useful for me to share some of my experiences to give my Singaporean readers a chance to compare Singapore with another country's system. Since you've asked specifically about my experiences, that's where I will start. Now the work I have done - be it in finance or media (read the story here as to how I came to work in two industries) - has always been influenced by my linguistic skills (here is the breakdown of the languages I can speak here). So I have always found myself in companies who deal with clients from all over the world, thus requiring linguists who speaks several different languages. That's where my strengths lie and that is the kind of work I am naturally drawn to in both finance and media. So in finance for example, I would always be on the sales & marketing teams dealing with foreign clients who do not speak English as a first language and would rather conduct business in their native languages.

For almost eight years, I worked for an extremely international company who had employees of the following nationalities: British, Irish, German, French, Belgian, Italian, Portuguese, Argentinian, Indian, Russian, Ukrainian, Kyrgyzstani, Pakistani, Jamaican, Kazakhstani, Tajikistani, Romanian, Australian, Chinese, Singaporean, Taiwanese, American, Israel, Sri Lankan, Canadian, Dutch, Namibian, Lithuanian and South African. I think I may have missed out a few as there were so many, but that's six continents and many, many countries. Yeah, it felt like a bit like a United Nations there with so many people from different countries speaking different languages. That's why I stayed there for nearly 8 years because it was the perfect place for me to use my languages. So it's not like I was in the kind of place where everyone's white and British and I was the only Johnny foreigner - on the contrary, my skills naturally drew me to environments where there was usually quite a vibrant mix of foreign talents.

I worked 8 years in a very multi-national company!

Currently in my company, I am the only person who isn't white and everyone else is British, American or Kiwi and English speaking - it is quite a different environment from that previous company which was far more vibrant and multi-ethnic, but I feel like I stand out here. I am the person who has to deal with anything that isn't in English - which can sometimes be a right headache. I remember when in the old company, I had the luxury of grabbing a German colleague to help me with any German translations when I felt I couldn't cope (my German is very basic, but I do make an effort). Now in my company, I'm on my own but fortunately the language I have to use most often is French which I am far more confident in. And it's not like I am trying to say write an article in the most perfect French for a French newspaper - hell no. I'm dealing with French-speaking clients in their native language to make them feel more comfortable, so if I were to conjugate a verb wrongly or use the wrong gender like saying "la contrat" (wrong) instead of "le contrat" (correct) - then it's no big deal because I am sparing the client the hassle of struggling in English.

My nationality or my ethnicity isn't really a factor - I think we're just too busy to care about things like that. My boss really just cares if I get the work done on time, if I take good care of the clients, if they keep on investing money with us, if I am able to deal with their complaints when they arise - stuff like that. I am in an industry dominated by white males of a certain age. I remember when I attended an industry event last year for fund managers and good grief, there were only two non-white people there and two women in a room full of white men. Does that bother me? Not really - I just wonder why there aren't more women and ethnic minorities in my industry, but there you go.

As long as the work gets done quickly and efficiently...

I am based in London and it does attract migrant workers from all over the UK. You have all these young graduates from small towns all over the countries turning up in London all the time, drawn here by the bright lights of the city. The fact is many of these young people have very limited career opportunities if they were back to their home towns, especially if they have come from a small town in the middle of nowhere. So they go to the big cities - most come to London but some go to other cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow or Leeds. So even within the UK, there is this culture of internal migration - people in the big cities are used to migrants pouring in from other part of the country, bringing with them different accents, cultures, languages and dialects. This has been something that has been going on for not just decades but centuries.

Remember this guy called William Shakespeare? Well, he was from Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in the Midlands. He moved to London to further his career as his plays became more and more famous. This was back in 1592 when there was the first record of a review of one of his plays being staged in London. Did the Londoners reject Shakespeare? Did they tell him to go back to the Midlands where he had come from? Did they accuse him of stealing jobs from local London playwrights? No - they loved Shakespeare and well, the rest is history.

Given how small Singapore is, you simply don't have the concept of 'internal migration' within Singapore. Well I guess you can move from Pasir Ris to Boon Lay, but I guess we would consider that moving house rather than internal migration. Internal migration is more like moving from Shanghai to Beijing, Manchester to London or from Penang to Kuala Lumpur. Within the UK, someone who moves from Lerwick to Penzance is moving a distance of 1170 km. That is the equivalent of moving from Singapore to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in Vietnam - 1090 km. How do you know if a country is big? It's when they have internal flights and yes the UK is big enough for internal flights, usually from Scotland and Northern Ireland to somewhere in the south like London or Birmingham.

The fact is in big countries like Canada, China, Russia or America, you can move thousands of kilometres without leaving your country whereas if you come from a small country like Luxembourg, Monaco or Singapore, you cannot move very far without straying out of your country! Hence in the UK, whilst we're not as big as Russia or Canada, it is by no means a small country (hey we have internal flights). So by that token, with that "big country mentality", we don't really make that much of a distinction between an outsider (someone who is not from my town/city but from elsewhere in the country) and a foreigner (someone who is not British) for they are both outsiders.

Britain has a long history of internal migration. 

In more modern times, given that UK is part of the European Union, we have always seen plenty of migrants from other EU countries in the big British cities. There was a bit of a panic back in 2004 when 10 new countries joined the European Union on the 1 May 2004 - many assumed that migrants would flood into London from poorer countries like Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary and Lithuania. The fact is, some did come but none in the numbers anticipated and indeed, many who came stayed for a while, realized that the streets of London were not paved with gold and went back after having gained some valuable work experience. We then saw that inter-EU migration was more cyclical - rather than one way. So a young Polish worker might come to Britain for a few years to improve his English and gain some work experience, but he would not stay for good and would then move on to another country or return to Poland after a few years - only to be replaced with new arrivals from Poland who would also stay for just a few years and the cycle repeats itself. Some do stay for good but most go back.

There are some similarities between the situation in London and Singapore. I have heard so many Singaporean complain that there are too many lowly skilled migrants from countries like China, Philippines and India - we have the same situation here in that we do have the same kinds of lowly skilled migrants coming from poorer EU countries like Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Greece etc. There is no minimum standard for migrants from within the EU. They can come and go as they please and work in the UK if they are from an EU member state.

Here's where the key difference lies though: there is a much smaller difference between living standards between say London and somewhere like Slovakia than between Singapore and rural China. These Eastern European countries have never really been all that poor to begin with despite years of communism prior to 1989. Sure there are very poor Eastern European countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus but they are not part of the European Union (and probably never will be). So if you were to offer a well educated Estonian or Czech young person a crap job in London for a very low wage, they'll probably turn their noses up at such offers and say no. However, if you were to offer a young person from some some rural corner of China the chance to work in Singapore, then they will grab the opportunity to get out of China with an offer like that and will be far more willing to put up with difficult work conditions and low pay. PRC Chinese migrants are far more desperate than Eastern European migrants. Hmmm. Maybe this is why Singaporeans feel less threatened by Malaysian migrants - given that Malaysia isn't such a poor country (like China or Philippines) and hence Malaysians by that token aren't as desperate?

Prague, Czech Republic - a rather rich and prosperous city!

Let's put some figures on it - I am going to use GNI per capita (PPP). This is not really that accurate but it will illustrate my point. I am simply going to compare UK and Singapore to four countries (+Malaysia) where they are receive many migrants from.

UK: $36,970
Czech Republic: $24,910
Estonia: $21,270
Poland: $20,450
Hungary: $20,380

Singapore: $59,790
China: $8,430
Philippines: $4,160
India: $3,640
Vietnam: $3,260
*Malaysia: $15,190
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)_per_capita

China - a lot poorer than Singapore. 

As you can see, the difference in wealth between the host nation and the immigrants is far bigger in Singapore than in the UK. Well, the reasons are obvious - the UK joined the European Union which was a project set up after WW2 to ensure that European neighbours would always get along and never start another long and bloody war amongst themselves in the future. The fact that some EU nations (like Germany, UK, Sweden, Austria etc) are richer than others (Greece, Romania, Latvia, Bulgaria etc) is a completely incidental and those from poorer EU states are taking advantage of the political union to improve their economic conditions by moving to a richer country. Whereas the Singaporean government is quite happy to take advantage of the fact that Singapore does come across as the promised land to a lot of these migrants from much poorer countries and thus the relationship between the Singaporean state and her new migrants is quite different from what one observes in the UK.

Unfortunately, one other implication of this huge gap between Singapore's wealth and the relative wealth of countries like the Philippines is that some (not all, but some) Singaporeans have this ridiculous sense of superiority over their Filipino counterparts. This often manifests itself in blatant, ugly racism. Look, if you're lucky enough to be born in a relatively rich country, then thank your lucky stars for your good fortune but you have no right to think you're better than anyone else simply on that basis! Likewise, because the gap between the UK and say Poland or Slovenia isn't that big - so we tend more to see our EU neighbours as equals. That is not to say that there aren't British people with an unjustified sense of superiority over their Eastern European counterparts - they exist, but they are far more rare than in Singapore. Yes, that makes Singaporeans far more racist than the British - oh yes, you heard me right.

London - a very cosmopolitan, international ethnically mixed city.

Hence British people feel less worried about these new migrants than Singaporeans, given that Eastern Europeans have a far lower tolerance for low pay and bad working conditions. Yes it is true that Eastern Europeans who come over tend to be very hard working and more often than not, tend to do quite well for themselves here - but you have to remember that this does not represent all Eastern Europeans. There are the lazy ones who are risk-averse and unadventurous - but these are the ones who would never come to London in the first place.

I note that there is this common complaint of how Singaporean employers prefer foreigners (for a whole range of reasons I am not going to go into now). We tend not to have the problem here in the UK, foreigners are not perceived to be superior - in fact, the onus is on the migrant worker to prove that s/he speaks English competently and is able to carry out the job as well as a local. Another difference is that in Singapore, PRC migrant workers can get away with just Mandarin as about 70+% of Singaporeans do speak Mandarin whilst in the UK, you cannot get away with no speaking English. Furthermore, English is widely taught as a second language in all Eastern European countries - so most migrants turn up in England speaking remarkably good English. Yes they may have an accent but it's still stunningly good English. Now compare that to migrants from China, who are far less likely to speak English competently.

As for those migrants coming from outside the EU, well the bar is set very high for skilled migrants for a simple reason. We already have enough unskilled migrants coming from poorer European countries and more to the point, unlike the Singapore government, the British government are not interested in actively trying to increase the population size of the country. The population is growing very slowly at about 0.5% or so since the 1982 when it was -0.4%. Last year it was 0.66% and it has never exceeded 0.85% even back in the 1960s. This is ironic since there is a lot of land in this country - once you step outside the big cities you have just so much countryside that is not used for anything, not even agriculture. So technically speaking, this country can take in more people, but that's not the route the government are pursuing and it is not likely to change in the future. Hence migrants are viewed in terms of quality nor quantity - the bar is set high but if you do meet the high standards then please, come on in and make yourself at home.

The bar is set very high for those coming from outside the EU.

Furthermore, there is far less of a culture shock for the Brits when facing these migrants. They have no problems dealing with American doctors or Japanese investment bankers who came through the skilled migrant route - likewise for those who are from elsewhere in the EU, well they are European, just like the Brits and there share many cultural traditions. Many British people do in fact speak another European language like French, Spanish or German which they learnt at school - so it is really not that big a deal when they do meet a migrant from elsewhere in Europe. However, the case in Singapore is quite different: despite the fact that Singapore is 74% Chinese, there is a huge cultural gulf between the Singaporean-Chinese and the PRC-Chinese migrants and this has caused a lot of friction between locals and migrants.

Thus London is a very international city - it does feel very different from the rest of Britain. Get on a bus in London and you will hear the other passengers chatting away in a variety of languages from Spanish to Hindi to Polish to Mandarin to French. It is really quite different from say a small towns in the countryside where there are far fewer ethnic minorities and immigrants. So living in London can be very different from someone who is living and working in a small town. Yes I have done some short contracts in small towns as well and it was only once in Leicester (population 330,000) that someone once commented, "why did they have to get you up from London? Couldn't they have found someone local?" Note that they didn't mention anything about the fact that I am Asian - but they took issue with the fact that the job didn't go to someone who lived locally.

That was an interesting case as Leicester is a very Asian city! White people number just 62% in Leicester whilst Asians make up 31% with the remainder being either black or mixed. The locals were so used to the fact that they lived in an ethnically diverse city with a substantial Asian minority - so their loyalties weren't divided on ethnic lines, but whether you were one of them (ie. a local from Leicester) or not (ie. from elsewhere).

Whilst I never had any problems with employers, yes there will always be people who will go on and on about "all these foreigners stealing our jobs". There are two things one can do when you encounter such a remark.

1. If it is heard on the news or if you read it in the newspapers, I usually just ignore such remarks. Why? Because these people can rant and rave all they want till the cows come home, they're not the ones deciding what immigration policies this country has - it is the people in government who are the ones who make such decisions. So it's really only when the government speaks that I actually pay attention - otherwise, sure these people can say what they hell they like (we value our freedom of speech here), but they are in no position to influence government policy at all.

Indeed, you can make all kinds of public statements, such as "university education should be free for everyone!" (University education isn't free in the UK, locals pay up to £9000 a year in fees.) Just because you shout it from your soapbox and say it over and over again doesn't make it true - but by the same token it is your right to express your opinion on the issue. Likewise, even if someone wants to shout, "stop these foreigners from stealing our jobs! There are too many immigrants already!" - well, the ultimate decision lies with the government. Such is the nature of democracy - yes people are allowed the freedom to express an opinion but at the end of the day, it is the government who makes such decisions when it comes to labour laws and whom to issue visas/work permits to and how high the bar should be set for potential migrants.

Prime Minister David Cameron - despite all the rhetoric, he's still letting in loads of immigrants. 

There are various legitimate ways to get involved in the process of course - such as by joining a trade union to have a greater say in labour laws, or by getting involved in politics directly by joining a political party. There are some political parties who are anti-immigrant, such as the BNP and UKIP - but these are fringe parties on the extreme right who are not in the mainstream at all. The main three parties - the Conservatives (Tories), Liberal Democrats and Labour have been quite pro-immigrant. Despite the fact that the Tories have spouted some anti-immigrant rhetoric in the past, the truth is that they are still letting in vast numbers of immigrants - so make of it what you will. I say actions count louder than words. That's British politics for you!

2. If I hear it in person, then I would always challenge the person. I would tell them, "What do you mean by that? Can you clarify your position please?" These people usually don't expect someone like me to challenge them and are never in a position to deliver a cogent argument. You see, these people aren't used to being challenged and when I force them to justify their position, they usually crumble under pressure as I paint them into a corner and expose their bigotry and ignorance at the same time.

One thing that I don't do is get upset. That's a fallacy that Singaporeans perpetuate. They imagine Asian immigrants who suffer racist abuse only know how to react by crying - well fuck crying I say. Look, I am from Ang Mo Kio where I grew up to be a Chao Ah Beng. I may be Asian but I'm anything but meek. The kind of people who complain about migrants stealing their jobs are those who cannot find work or are earning peanuts - so for me, I'm like, "hahaha I am an immigrant, I have a British passport and I earn a lot more money than you - what are you going to do about it?" The worst they can do is use racist rhetoric but aha, racism is illegal in this country and if anyone is overtly racist, say for example on Twitter - then the police will arrest them. So really, I am not that bothered by those who come up with anti-immigrant rhetoric because I accept it as part of the system - they're free to say what they want but if they want to influence government policies, then they have to work with the system like everyone else. Being racist to immigrants isn't going to scare them away, it's just going to get you arrested.

Being racist isn't going to scare immigrants away. It'll just get you arrested. 

So there you go, I hope I have answered your questions. There are many similarities as well as differences when you compare the situation in London and Singapore. On balance, I think foreign talents working as expatriates in London are better off than those in Singapore - but I hate to generalize. So much depends on each individuals' circumstances, so if you have any further questions, please feel free to leave a comment below, thanks!