This particular project has been slightly over a year in the making (July 2021—October 2022), but most of us on the team have been involved in some form of migrant justice work for some time prior. The Migrant Death Map is a development of the work we were already doing—it was born of inspiration, necessity, disbelief, and the desire to commit the names and lives of these workers to a nation’s collective memory. 

It is also for this reason that we choose to remain anonymous on this website. We see our activism as cumulatively bearing witness to—and testifying against—systems of violence; all we seek to do is be conduits for work and action that can centre migrant workers, their families, and their stories. 

The map—which is the centrepiece of this website—is inspired by the Migrant Worker Solidarity Network’s Resistance Map. They are a self-organised group of individuals from India whom some of us spoke to during the height of India’s COVID-19 crisis in June 2021. We were moved by how acts of resistance across the country had been documented and visualised, and wanted to do something similar for Singapore. At the crux of the Migrant Death Map are questions about the archival, truth and memory: Who archives? Who is archived? What belies data and what is true? How does the state and various arms of the media amplify some stories and silence others?

These are issues that need meaningful reckoning with. Migrant workers have blurred into our landscape through the normalisation of unacceptable things: from the transportation of human beings like cargo, to the ubiquity of domestic worker abuse. None of these things are normal, and none of them are inherently invisible. The lack of regulatory practices tend to be justified by appeals to economic constraints and attractiveness to a global market; this rhetoric depersonalises and depoliticizes such issues, positioning them as forgone conclusions, beyond our scope of visibility and ethical responsibility. 

But as citizens we have the power and duty to do and demand better. Migrant deaths and the conditions surrounding it must no longer be concealed behind massive sound barrier canvases on construction sites, the confinement of domestic workers to their workplaces (some of which are abusive homes), the lack of meaningful oversight by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), biassed reporting by state-controlled media, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that treat symptoms instead of problems, or parliamentarians who extend platitudes and goodie bags for photo opportunities. 

To Archive

This website began with the painstaking work of manually collecting data. We have probably read through more than a thousand articles to find mentions of migrant death, a task that’s mentally and emotionally demanding, not just because we spent months reading about death & unimaginable inhumanity, but because we had given ourselves the task of organising and reconstructing a canon of information that reveals the violent, devastating nature of nation-building; information that is often deliberately obscured. 

Committing to the task revealed parts of Singapore that have been papered over in what is the palimpsest of life in this country; they are stories of death that we vaguely remember reading about—the migrant worker who died in the Kallang slashings, the Burmese domestic helper who was abused to death, the many cases of helpers who fall from their flats. The more we read the more questions we had, but we were also fearful of what those answers might be and what it would render visible: the blood spilt in homes, on roads, in city-wide infrastructure, in Parliament. 

By creating this dataset ourselves that the state has neglected to provide, we reclaimed the power to document injustice. But we seek to go further and expand beyond the narrow, colonial limitations of an archive. Our movement beyond a map and into a long-form, multimedia piece is our way of slowly resisting those limitations and choosing to build an alternative archive of stories and experiences that have not been verified or validated by news media—one that speaks back to power and redresses the violence that obscures injustice with colourful banners and statistical numbers. In centering migrant voices and decentering privileged versions of recording history and the truth, the project took on a life far more collaborative and comprehensive than any of us could have imagined.  

Towards Truth

It was very important to us that we made this piece as emotive and affectual as possible. So much of our lives are ordered and organised by regulation, policy, and thought. So much about how we think about migrant workers has been fed to us by non-migrant workers. How could we make this different?

We often confronted words like ‘reportedly’ and ‘allegedly’ in articles, signalling a certain unreliability of information. But these two words create space for oral accounts and marginalised narratives—truths that are unverified because they have been deemed illegible by authority. 

Bhing, Sharif, and Maw Lwin’s sharings, like oral history traditions, held the key.

Our hope is that these stories can expand beyond the limits of fact and evidence to encompass the realities of the “unverifiable”. The inflection in a voice, the raised hair on the back of a neck, a scrunched forehead, an unsteady hand—all truths.

To Remember

It is easy to forget, to close an eye, to ignore those who have been made powerless. But we insist on remembering. 

With this map acknowledging each worker, their lives become tangible to Singapore again. They are here. As a nation that constantly exports these deaths and bears no responsibility when it comes to housing their bodies or remains, we have a duty to wonder about and recognise their lives, not just their deaths. In a way, this gestures towards a new world where no one else suffers their same fate. We must also consider those who are not here: those whose deaths were unreported, those who were not named, those who are repatriated with terminal illnesses or grave injuries and die at home, those whose lifespans are shortened considerably after their time here. 

This project will never be able to capture migrant injustice in its totality, but it is a visible, tangible marker of how we can begin to remember. These workers' names and beings must be etched somewhere—visible, unforgotten. 

The profile videos of Bhing, Maw Lwin, and Sharif were filmed in July 2022 and the text on this site was completed in Aug 2022. Our team took great care and attention to making sure every listing on our sheet and detail on our site is accurate, backed by sources, and respectfully conveyed. However, there may still be areas of improvement for our site. Please write to us if there is anything at all that can be improved, updated, or requires editing. Our team is dedicated to making sure everything on this website is conveyed in the best way possible. You may email us here.