Digital media,friendships and migrants’ entangled and non-linear inclusion and exclusion

Introduction

In this article, I debate the role that digital media and friendships play in migrants’ inclusion and exclusion. By connecting an in-depth empirical study with the scholarship on migration and digital media or ‘digital migration studies’ (Leurs and Smets, 2018), digital media and friendship and (differential) inclusion and exclusion, I develop the concept of entangled inclusion and exclusion. This perspective reveals the complex, dynamic and non-linear processes of migrants’ inclusion and exclusion and their related situatedness in diverse and entangled social, material and technological spaces.

Bunnell et al. (2012: 490, 491) describe friendship as the ‘interpersonal relationship between two or more people that is voluntarily entered into and may be similarly dissolved’ and a ‘means through which people across the world maintain intimate social relations both proximate and at a distance’. Friendships remain an under-studied form of relationships in the social sciences overall (Straughan et al., 2021) and in the field of digital migration studies especially (Sinanan and Gomes, 2020). In this article I ask: how do digital media influence migrants’ friendship-making and their related inclusion and exclusion? The findings underline the importance of friendships to migrants’ inclusion and exclusion and they contribute to uncovering ‘the granular, ambivalent, contradictory’ (Awad and Tossell, 2021: 623) role that digital media play in migrants’ everyday lives and their social relationships.

The analysis is based on a qualitative multi-method study with highly skilled migrants staying on employment passes or holding permanent residency in Singapore. The study combined interviews with mobile-media methods, cognitive maps and repertory-grid methods as elicitation strategies. The combination of methods pursued an open, explorative and ‘non-media centric’ (Smets, 2018) approach, which is ‘imperative for digital migration studies to avoid repeating the sensationalist exceptionalism surrounding the technological fetishization’ (Leurs and Smets, 2018: 8).

As I will come to argue, while playing diverse roles in migrants’ development and maintenance of (trans-)local friendships, digital media contribute to non-linearities in migrants’ subjective feelings of being included or excluded, making the processes involved more complex while also serving as material and symbolic signifiers of entangled inclusion and exclusion. It is important to consider migrants’ own perceptions of being included and excluded and the involved processes of discursive difference-making in choosing and maintaining friendships. In any case, an analysis of the fostering of friendships and the role of digital media therein must be contextualised in regard to the complexities of migrants’ situatedness in messy and contested everyday (trans-)local spaces.

Migration, friendships and the role of digital media

Kathiravelu and Bunnell (2018: 491) highlight that in order to understand migrants’ embeddedness in urban contexts, analyses of larger structural frames of migration legislation as well as categories and differences in hierarchisation must be amended by looking at ‘other more dynamic, elastic, latent and surreptitious forms of affinity, relatedness and connection within the urban environment’ such as friendships. Friendships were found to be crucial for emotionally, socially and culturally arriving and becoming embedded in a place (Bork-Hüffer and Peth, 2020), as a network of support and care (Sinanan and Gomes, 2020) and for migrants’ overall well-being (Bunnell et al., 2012; Straughan et al., 2021). Networks of friends can influence migrants’ self-identification, resources, job situation, preferences and lifestyles (Sinanan and Gomes, 2020; Straughan et al., 2021). In contrast to family relations, friendships are deliberately chosen and need to be nurtured to be maintained, and can thus come with tensions and ambivalences (Hall, 2019; Kathiravelu and Bunnell, 2018; Sinanan and Gomes, 2020). Understanding migrants’ friendship-making is an important aspect of ‘capturing the diversity of migrants’ relationships’ (Sinanan and Gomes, 2020: 674) and, as I will show, of grasping their perceived feelings of being included and excluded.

The role that digital technologies play in migrants’ connectivity and relationality has been a centre of concern in the digital migration scholarship (Diminescu, 2008; Leurs and Smets, 2018; Smets et al., 2020). However, major foci around concepts such as the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008), ‘diasporas in the new media age’ (Alonso, 2010) or digital diasporas (Brinkerhoff, 2010), have been the transnational maintenance of family relations as well as care relations (e.g. Madianou, 2012; Wilding and Baldassar, 2018). Friendships, particularly those in the receiving society, have only been the explicit focus in very few publications in this strand of literature (Sinanan and Gomes, 2020; Zhan and Zhou, 2020). Simultaneously, there is a broader scholarship that has looked into the role of digital media in friendship-making, but without explicitly studying migration contexts (see for example: Byron, 2021; Thulin et al., 2020). Still, there are various important insights in these existing studies in relation to this article’s topic that will be elaborated on further.

Digital technologies influence, among others, the communication, information, job finding and economic situation, mobilities and organisation of everyday life of migrants (Alinejad and Ponzanesi, 2020; Diminescu, 2008; Kaufmann, 2020; Peth and Sakdapolrak, 2020; Zhan and Zhou, 2020). Hence, they can provide them with new autonomy, knowledge and/or access to services (Diminescu, 2008). The advent of the mobile phone was a particular game changer in many migratory contexts (Kaufmann, 2018). It contributed to the ‘increasing prevalence of an “always on” culture of ubiquitous connectivity’ (Madianou, 2016: 183). Digital media can thereby create ‘“ambient co-presence”, which is the peripheral yet intense awareness of distant others (Madianou, 2016: 183). Ponzanesi (2020: 1) explains that this has produced an ‘affective turn online’ in which digitally mediated spaces have become of central importance for the maintenance of social and emotional bonds elsewhere (Diminescu, 2008), for the extension of care practices (Byron, 2021) and for coping with acclimation in the host society (Hillyer, 2021). Migrants often use several media in parallel for different purposes and with different groups, while carefully weighing social and emotional consequences of the choice of each medium in the context of all other media – a phenomenon described as polymedia by Madianou and Miller (2012: 170). At the same time, the devices along with their migrant users are also subject to local representations and renegotiations (Platt et al., 2016).

Digital media have also been found to assist with the establishment of friendships in socio-material space upon arriving in a new place (Bork-Hüffer and Peth, 2020), whereby Patterson and Leurs (2019) noted that digital communities can leave migrants with more choice regarding whether to join, compared to offline networks. Some authors argue that digital media can support the development of social contacts across difference, which expatriates were found to do more quickly than other migrant groups (McPhail and Fisher, 2015; Patterson and Leurs, 2019). Furthermore, research on digital media and friendship has found that mediated connections are characterised by strong homophily, where class boundaries are seldom crossed (Courtois and Verdegem, 2016; Thelwall, 2009; Utz and Jankowski, 2016). As will be further elaborated in the next section, digital media play an important role in the discursive (re-)production of categories of difference and ascriptions of identities, with central effects on migrants’ differential inclusion and exclusion.

Entangled inclusion and exclusion and the role of digital media

The language used in relation to migrant inclusion, exclusion, integration and assimilation is politically loaded and influenced by discursive constructions and apparatuses that change in space and time (Schrover and Schinkel, 2013). Concepts such as integration, assimilation and immigration have long been criticised for connoting a permanence that migrancy often does not have, construing a homogeneous receiving society to which mobile subjects should adapt to varying degrees in a unitary and linear process (Gomes, 2018). They have been further deconstructed by perspectives underlining mobilities, translocalities, fluidities and temporariness in migration (Greiner and Sakdapolrak, 2013; Oswin and Yeoh, 2010; Peth et al., 2018). As a result of the criticism of normative concepts such as integration and assimilation, in migration scholarship the use of inclusion and exclusion as well as differential inclusion has become more common.

Underlining the frictions associated with inclusion using the example of the structural oppression and marginalisation of Filipino Americans in the US, Espiritu (2003) coined the term ‘differential inclusion’ to describe a form of forced incorporation, when populations were on the one hand defined as an integral part of a society but, on the other hand, only included if they accepted a designated subordinate position. Ye (2017) amended Espiritu’s perspective on ‘differential inclusion’ by showing how, besides the role of top-down state migrant management, negotiations of social norms and civility as part of everyday encounters in shared spaces influence migrant inclusion. She concludes that inclusion and exclusion are not separated and distinct, but tightly interwoven, fluid and negotiated as part of everyday coexistence. I draw centrally upon this argument and argue that this often results in dynamic and non-linear processes of inclusion and exclusion of migrants.

In regard to the terms inclusion and/or exclusion, however, this article makes a point for using both, not only in an either/or sense but especially in regards to their entanglements as part of migrants’ negotiations of their complex everyday spaces in the receiving societies. Given, among others, the arguments by Schrover and Schinkel (2013) that most migration legislation is designed with the aim of excluding, and Pécoud’s (2013: 2) point that nation-states’ ‘migration management’ is mostly targeted at ‘disciplining human mobility and the establishment of an ideal mobility regime in which control remains fundamental’, using only ‘inclusion’ in a way minimises many migrants’ experiences of the difficulties of arriving and living in the places they moved to or through.

Then again, the inclusion and exclusion debate often primarily tends to focus on externally steered processes and structures of migrant incorporation or expulsion and to a lesser extent looks into migrants’ own agency, experiences of belonging and endeavours to be included or else to withdraw (Alinejad and Ponzanesi, 2020). This article makes a point for considering contradictory and entangled ways of inclusion and exclusion as part of migrants’ situatedness in complex everyday (trans-)local spaces. Altogether this leads to dynamic, non-linear processes of inclusion and exclusion. Hence, while in this article a particular light is shed on the role of digital media and of friendships in regard to inclusion and exclusion, I strive to contextualise migrants’ situatedness in complex everyday (trans-)local spaces in this process.

When looking into the role of digital technologies in processes of inclusion and exclusion, among others, digital geographers as much as communication scholars have underlined their important role in ‘sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment’ (Elwood, 2021: 209). These studies have shown how axes of inequality related to origin, race, gender, age and/or sexual orientation are reproduced through socio-technological codes and algorithms (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2018; Valentine, 2006). Cover (2016: 112) pointed out that ‘diversity online remains problematic. […] the Internet and other digital sites of interactive engagement tend to be dominated by a more narrow set of representations’. The repetition of such representations by dominant groups is ultimately reflected in identity attributions, stereotypes, prejudices and the exclusion of non-dominant groups.

The digital migration scholarship has emphasised that digital media’s affordances can come with ‘uncomfortable’ impositions (Awad and Tossell, 2021) and produce new challenges and costs in migrants’ everyday lives. Digital platforms can be sites of rigid peer culture and pressure (Mainardi, 2020), make people feel entrapped (Awad and Tossell, 2021) and can extend social obligations and expectations into spaces of absence. Data extraction and biometric categorisations allow surveillance and monitoring of migrant bodies and result in their differential exclusion and harm (Madianou, 2021; Ponzanesi, 2020). Yet, Collins (2021: 869–870) underlined that socio-technological infrastructures as a ‘middle space of migration’ – which can also ‘include heterogenous actors, institutions and technologies that may not necessarily be targeted towards migration itself’ – can affect migration in diverse ways, possibly leading to its enabling, conditioning or control. Taken together, the summarised existing research suggests that digital technologies add to the complexities of migrants’ inclusion and exclusion. The findings section exemplifies how this results in entanglements and non-linearities in migrants’ inclusion and exclusion.

Migrant-led diversification versus migration management and the position of highly skilled migrants in Singapore

Given Singapore’s history as a trading hub with an active trading community, migrant-led diversification has been an integral component of the later city-state’s path from its very early beginnings (Yap, 1999). Shortly after Singapore gained independence in 1965, the Singaporean government began to promote immigration in order to boost economic development. In international comparison, the approach to migration that Singapore developed became one of the strictest regimes of migration management. It establishes forward-looking control of the inflow of migrant subjects, and strongly manages the various migrant groups once they arrive in Singapore with a flexible and targeted regulatory policy (Gutting, 2016; Yeoh, 2004, 2006).

Based on education level, professional field and income, migrants can apply for different temporary residence passes, while the rights and restrictions connected to each pass category vary substantially, with huge consequences for migrants’ individual freedoms and livelihoods (see Bork-Hüffer and Peth, 2020). Highly skilled migrants are eligible to apply for employment passes. They are separated from lower-qualified so-called ‘foreign workers’, who are issued work permits, as well as from skilled workers staying on S-passes (see Yap, 2015; Yeoh, 2006). Highly skilled migrants are privileged regarding the facilitation of their immigration procedures, access to local social services and their personal freedoms (e.g. having a choice of place of residence, the right to marry, whether to have children, etc.) when compared to the wide continuum of work-permit and S-pass holders (Baas, 2017).

Since the end of the 1980s, a succession of measures has been initiated to promote the migration of highly skilled migrants, referred to as ‘foreign talents’, to Singapore (Iwasaki, 2015). As they were seen as key to the country’s pan-Asian and global economic competitiveness and the creation of new job opportunities, they were also encouraged to acquire citizenship or permanent residency (Beaverstock, 2011; Ho, 2006; Yeoh, 2006). Starting from the 2010s, and particularly after the publication of the ‘Population White Paper’ in January 2013, the public stance regarding immigration changed. In it, the government laid out plans to further promote immigration to accommodate economic and demographic demands (National Population and Talent Division, 2013: 6). This elicited growing resentment among the citizen population, especially expressed on social media platforms due to the restrictions placed on freedom of expression and the press (Bork-Hüffer, 2017; Gomes, 2013; Lai, 2012; Yeoh and Lam, 2016). Responding to public resentment, the government announced a ‘Singaporeans First’ strategy, which led to immigration and residence conditions for highly skilled migrants in Singapore being tightened up (for a detailed account of the measures see Bork-Hüffer, 2017).

As Zhan and Zhou (2020: 1668) note, the result of this was a significant narrowing of pathways to permanent stay. Despite their privileges in comparison to work- and S-pass holders, highly skilled migrants also face limits on permanent stay and inclusion in Singapore. They have a broad range of incomes and contracts that may or may not include economic benefits such as housing or school allowances. High prices in the private housing market, limited access to public schools and high tuition fees in international schools are a burden for highly skilled migrants – particularly those with children – whose incomes are close to the boundary line for employment pass-holders and who do not receive allowances (Bork-Hüffer, 2017). Furthermore, termination of contracts or unemployment leads to immediate cancellation of temporary passes. Such demands on the flexibility of labour create employment insecurity and settlement uncertainty as well as ‘new conditions for exploitation and exclusion regardless of skill levels’ (Zhan and Zhou, 2020: 1657). Furthermore, Singapore’s specific biopolitics of identity and belonging (Amin, 2012, 2013; Hall, 2013; Solomos, 2013) mean that highly skilled migrants too experience forms of institutional exclusion and social discrimination (Bork-Hüffer, 2017; Yeoh and Huang, 2011). All these factors relate to their prospects for staying and to their practices of establishing friendships, as will be explained in the following sections.

Research design and methodology

The empirical data were collected as part of a larger research project, which examined the interplay of (im-)mobilities, digital media and the sense of place of migrants in Singapore. The study applied a qualitative multi-method design and included 50 transnational highly skilled migrants of different origins who migrated to Singapore, who stayed on an employment pass or who obtained a permanent residency. It combined elements of narrative-biographical and in-depth interviews with the smartphone interface method, cognitive maps and repertory-grid as elicitation strategies. The three additional methods helped deepen the conversation in regard to mobile media (non-)appropriation and patterns of use (smartphone interface method) and socio-material spaces of particular social and emotional importance (cognitive maps and repertory grid). The smartphone-interface method (Kaufmann, 2019) helps to prompt conversation about mobile-devices applications that migrants interacted with regularly, including those for communicating with and relating to others. Cognitive maps provided insight into and stirred conversation about the study participants’ everyday spaces, including meeting spaces and places of emotional attachment. The repertory-grid method, following Tan and Hunter (2002), prompted participants to make spontaneous associations with places of importance. Overall, the triangulation of these methods pursued the goal of an open, explorative and non-media-centric approach to researching migrants’ inclusion and exclusion.

The sampling took place using a combination of snowball and purposive sampling strategies. I made sure to include interviewees working in various occupations representative of highly skilled migrants in Singapore. Interviewees thus were employed by multinational companies (MNCs), local companies, government or educational institutions from Singapore or the countries in which they held citizenship, non-governmental institutions (NGOs) or were self-employed. The dates of their respective migrations to Singapore ranged from several decades to just several weeks prior to the interviews. Interviews were conducted in German, English and Chinese and quotes used in this article were translated into English. Pseudonyms are used in the presentation of the results. I met some of them repeatedly to gain a deeper account of their migration processes, their media use and entanglements in everyday spaces as well as how they had changed, so that the total time I spent interviewing the participants ranged from 30 minutes to 6 hours. At the time of the study, all participants owned a computer, almost all had a smartphone and many had a tablet. The media they most frequently used for reaching out and for developing and maintaining friendships were WhatsApp, QQ, WeChat, Facebook, Skype, SMS and email. These offered different ways for communicating through text-based webpages, videos, chat and instant messaging, voice-over-Internet Protocol (IP) as well as text-based emailing.

A two-step process guided the analysis and interpretation. In the first step, Mayring’s (2000, 2005) ‘inductive category development’ helped with identifying sequences within interviews with direct relevance for the focus on friendships out of the large data sets collected, and for identifying the breadth of differences in answers (e.g. in regard to the types of friendships and digital media used). In the second step, I employed narrative analysis (see MacKian, 2010; Wiles et al., 2005), which is suited to revealing the entanglements of subjectivities, trajectories and historicities (Wilson, 2016). Its aim is maintaining the ‘many layers of meaning at which an interview operates’ by connecting the ‘intimate details of experiences, attitudes and reflections to the broader social and spatial relations of which they are a part’ (Wiles et al., 2005: 90). In order to meet the demands of situating the role played by digital media and friendships in inclusion and exclusion in the complexities of migrants’ everyday lives within the frame of this article, in the subsequent presentation of results, I exemplify my arguments by describing the trajectories of selected participants, while repeatedly comparing these to the overall sample.

Results

Discussion and conclusions

In this article, I analyse the role that digital media and friendships play in migrants’ subjective feelings of inclusion and exclusion. For the subjective feelings of becoming included as well as having ‘socially arrived’ in Singapore, the successful establishment of friendships was decisive for my study participants. While the importance of friendships and the role of digital media in supporting the complex process of emotionally and socially arriving in a place that migrants move to and through have been found to be of relevance in other studies, this article contributes three additional insights.

First, as part of migrants’ situatedness in complex and contested (trans-)local everyday spaces, their inclusion and exclusion are constantly (re-)negotiated, which leads to entanglements and non-linearities of inclusion and exclusion. As I have shown with the case of Lifen, digital media contribute to non-linearities in this process. Her shifting practices of reaching out to translocal contacts outside of Singapore and strategies for building friendships in Singapore through digital media resulted in a non-linear process of inclusion and exclusion in Singapore. Furthermore, her story exemplified that migrants’ subjective emotional sense of inclusion is not necessarily (only) bound to the (temporary) migration destination but composed out of their overall translocal social situatedness. Digital media’s potential to steer intense emotional-affective awareness of co-present others (Madianou, 2016) is central here. This finding once more challenges integration-focused perspectives that underline the necessity of migrant-local relationships for migrant incorporation and that focus only on inclusion in the migration destination. As Ponzanesi (2020: 8) argues, the current discourse must still more fully take account of ‘the rise of the digital and digitalization, which are profoundly changing the importance of the nation-state for people in terms of belonging, zones of association, and everyday contact’.

Although digital media’s subtle and banal structuring of everyday encounters and relationships has become an intrinsic element of migration, it is only one factor influencing migrants’ entangled and non-linear inclusion and exclusion as part of their situatedness in messy everyday spaces. Other factors that together contributed to dynamic and non-linear processes of inclusion and exclusion were state-led migration management and the prospects for staying in Singapore and in other potential destinations, variegated (trans-)local experiences with institutional inclusion and exclusion, migrants’ own intentions to stay or move on, expectations of families and relatives and everyday social encounters and experiences of discrimination. Highly skilled migrants have been more the focus of state-led endeavours to increase inclusion in Singapore than migrant workers and S-pass holders. Yet, their temporary status in particular, and also for some the financial constraints on sustaining a family, mean that most do remain excluded from settlement (see also Zhan and Zhou, 2020), with implications for their endeavours to make friends locally.

Second, my research shows that it is crucial to understand the role of polymedia in migrants’ experiences of, and also their own practices of, differential inclusion and exclusion in the process of friendship-making. While digital media, through their ubiquitous availability and accessibility to highly skilled migrants, on the one hand offered a way of bridging constructed boundaries and categories of difference, on the other hand those same media spaces were often still inherently structured according to just such boundaries and categories. Migrants were simultaneously engaged in a variety of online platforms, through which they connected with a more diverse set of friends. However, the – at least partial – structuring of digital spaces according to origin has an effect on the forms and qualities of relationships: each digital medium comes with different affordances and possibilities for relating to others. This can affect the qualities and depth of digitally-mediated relationships that subjects have with their contacts based on origin. The strong alignment of friendships according to class boundaries that my research found is in line with other studies on friendship and homophily (McPhail and Fisher, 2015). In the case of Singapore, migrants’ boundary-drawing according to constructed categories of origin, ethnicity and class thereby strongly resonates with state-steered discourses of difference-making in the city-state.

Third, beyond their subtle and mundane entanglements with migrants’ social relationships and everyday lives, digital media, particularly smartphones and specific applications, serve as more overt material and symbolic signifiers of (differential) inclusion and exclusion. These findings once more exemplified the tight entanglements of inclusion and exclusion, when such media and related artefacts were employed as signifiers of inclusion among those who know and use them and markers of exclusion of those who do not have smartphones in the first place or who do not try out, know and/or use specific applications. Digital devices or specific applications could be interpreted as markers of different cultural approaches to relating to others, and discursively separated from other types of sociability that migrant subjects were acquainted with and perceived as desirable.