A typical drive through Singapore offers an almost continuous view of orderly and largely uniform highrise apartment buildings. Residents’ clothes dry in the hot, damp air on retractable hangers protruding from windows. These public housing estates, called HDBs, are generally offered at lower prices than private property and are home to more than 80 percent of Singaporeans. While some are fancier than others—one near the Central Business District, the 50-story Pinnacle@Duxton, boasts the “world’s longest sky gardens”— most, if not all, like Singapore itself, are extremely well-kept.
The people responsible for constructing these very Singaporean dwellings are overwhelmingly male migrant workers. These low-wage manual laborers, along with female migrant workers who tend to work in domestic capacities, today make up nearly one-fifth of the total population of Singapore, according to Jolovan Wham, the executive director of the Humanitarian Organization for Migrant Economics, or HOME. Most hail from Malaysia, China, Bangladesh, India, and other Asian countries.
