While scholarship on migrant precarity has largely been framed around individualised experiences, this paper draws upon the narratives of Indian skilled migrants in Singapore to argue that their subjectivity as parents notably inflects how they navigate their temporary migration statuses and truncated socioeconomic entitlements within the host country. Introducing the concept of ‘relational precarity’, I highlight the role of linked lives in evoking, intensifying, and perpetuating migrants’ sense of insecurity and vulnerability within a restrictive immigration regime. Findings suggest that parental aspirations for children’s well-being, perceived in terms of residential stability and meaningful socio-spatial attachments, shape their citizenship aspirations, willingness to endure transience-induced precarity, and attempts to mobilise diverse privileges to mitigate unfavourable repercussions on their children. This paper speaks to wider debates on neoliberal migration governance and immigrant parenting by emphasising that relational concerns can evince the emotional dimensions of precarity that exceed the political and socioeconomic domains of migratory experiences and thereby render a growing proportion of skilled migrants precarious.
SREETAMA BHATTACHARYA (Sat,) studied this question.