The church, the state and the migrant in Singapore

Migration theorists have persuasively highlighted the experience of human mobility as a highly variegated terrain. Foregrounded in the research is how transnational migrants face conflicting experiences as they are caught in webs of asymmetrical relationships of power in various stages of the migration process (Salazar Parranes, 2008; Oishi, 2005; Yeoh et al., 2004). In exploring the migrant perspective, scholars have insisted that invariably the migration process intersects with experiences of disruption, conflict and pain and, in some instances, is compounded by the physical separation of the migrant from home and family (Salazar Parranes, 2005; Sobritchea, 2007; Chambers, 1994).