Wooing the ‘Singapore Diaspora’ Home?: A Comparative Study on Returning and Non-returning Singaporean Transmigrants to the United States

Return migration has often been noted to have received scant attention in the literature until recently, when concerns to do with talent mobilities and ‘reverse brain drain’ have been brought to fore.

But even with the ongoing effort to bridge this gap, there remains a tendency to treat ‘return’ as the migrant’s final step in a closed migratory circuit, and even a natural course of action to take in a world of rigid citizen-to-state correspondence. Suggestively, this casts ‘return’ and ‘non-return’ as diametrically opposed subjects—the former being about the successful completion (and cessation) of international sojourns; and the latter about defection to (alien) ‘host’ societies.

By studying both phenomena comparatively in the context of Singapore, and its recent political overtures in coaxing overseas Singaporeans home, this thesis attempts to offer an alternative analytic, by drawing ‘return’ and ‘non-return’ into parallel fields of transnational relations. It argues, using the biographical insights of Singaporean ‘(ex-)emigrants’ to the United States (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), that the decision to ‘come back’—or not—is nowadays frequently motivated by a wide-ranging, but congruent, repertoire of reasons, and is simultaneously susceptible to (re)reversals by future situational shifts along multiple transnational planes.

On another crucial front, the research also interrogates the not-unproblematic trajectories of highly-skilled migrants beyond economic rationality, incorporating the often neglected issues of transnational family formations and identities.