'We Built This Place Too': Migrant Workers and New Citizens Speak Out on Belonging in Singapore

The naturalisation certificate on Priya Subramaniam's wall took eleven years to earn. She moved from Chennai to Singapore in 2014, worked her way through an employment pass to permanent residency, and received her pink identity card in 2025. She lives now in a four-room HDB flat in Clementi, pays roughly $4,200 a month on a mortgage, and says she still gets asked, at least once a week, which country she is "really" from. "I tell them I am Singaporean," she said. "Sometimes they believe me."

Her story is not unusual. Singapore's Department of Statistics recorded that about 1.77 million non-resident workers lived in the country as of mid-2025, alongside around 530,000 permanent residents. The citizen population sits at roughly 3.6 million. Those numbers mean that nearly four in ten people present on the island on any given day hold something other than a red passport — a demographic reality that shapes everything from the queue at Toa Payoh hawker centre to waiting lists for primary school places. With the government's Forward Singapore exercise now translating into concrete policy updates across the Ministries of Manpower and Social and Family Development, the question of how the city-state manages migration and integration is sharper than it has been in years.

The Gap Between Policy and Pavement

At Geylang Serai Market on a Saturday morning, the conversation among stallholders turns quickly from food prices to the recently announced changes to the Complementarity Assessment Framework, known as COMPASS. Introduced in September 2023, COMPASS scores Employment Pass applicants on factors including salary benchmarks, educational qualifications and whether their employer already has a high concentration of staff from one nationality. Some business owners say the system has brought order. Others describe scrambling to find replacements after long-serving staff failed to meet updated scoring thresholds that took effect in January 2026.

The Migrant Workers' Centre, headquartered at Jurong East, handled 4,312 cases in the twelve months to March 2026, a 17 percent increase on the previous year. Many involved salary disputes or contract ambiguities. Separately, the Centre for Domestic Employees — which operates a drop-in hub at Orchard Gateway — reported that queries about contract renewals and levy structures rose sharply in the first quarter of this year, driven partly by confusion over the revised foreign domestic worker levy, which increased to $300 per month in February 2026 for households without qualifying dependants.

Foreign domestic workers themselves describe a more complicated calculus. One woman who has worked in Singapore for nine years and asked that her employer not be identified said she sends home roughly 60 percent of her monthly salary of $800 to her family in Mandalay. She has not returned to Myanmar since the 2021 coup. Her employment pass renewals, she said, now come with more paperwork and a tighter turnaround window. "Every two years I wonder if this is the last one," she said.

Integration Programmes Expanding, but Gaps Remain

The National Integration Council, which sits under the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, runs the Integration and Naturalisation Champions programme across all 17 towns. Volunteers — both Singaporeans and new citizens — organise neighbourhood events from Woodlands to Bedok. Attendance at such events rose by 22 percent in 2025 compared to the year prior, according to figures released in April. But participants say the calendar activities, however well-meaning, do not fully address day-to-day friction: competition for school places, housing costs, and the lingering suspicion that foreign-born residents are bidding up property prices that Singaporeans already find punishing.

HDB resale flat prices rose an average of 9.6 percent in 2024. Permanent residents are permitted to buy resale flats but cannot access new Build-to-Order launches, a restriction introduced in 2013 that many PRs accept but few celebrate. "We pay the same taxes. We follow every rule," said one Malaysian-born PR who has lived in Tampines for fourteen years. "But the message is always: you are a guest."

The Ministry of Manpower is expected to release updated workforce data in August 2026, which analysts anticipate will clarify how the January COMPASS revisions have affected approval rates by sector. Community organisations including the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, which operates a helpline at its Serangoon North office, are urging the government to pair any further tightening with expanded settlement support. The ask is straightforward: more funded English and civic integration classes, faster pathways to PR for workers who have been here beyond five years, and a single government portal — rather than the current patchwork of ministry websites — where migrants can track their own application status in real time.

Priya, the naturalised Singaporean in Clementi, says she will vote for the first time in the next general election, due no later than 2030. She is studying the electoral map. She wants to talk about bus routes and childcare subsidies, the stuff of ordinary civic life. "That is what belonging means to me," she said. "Not a ceremony. The boring, everyday things."