Friday, January 22, 2016

Powerful Video Shows Migrants Reading Mean Comments About Them

Standard

A powerful video of migrants to Singapore reading out local residents' comments about them shows how much words matter.

Familiar Strangers, a student-run campaign to share the stories of the country's migrant workers, published a video Sunday featuring four migrant workers from China and Bangladesh. 

The campaign collected positive and negative comments about migrants from Facebook posts dating back to 2008, and from a survey of 300 Singapore residents aged between 21 and 35, one of the campaign's members told The WorldPost Friday. (The member, one of the four students behind the campaign, asked to remain unnamed so as not to appear to be taking undue credit for the group's work.) 

There are over 1 million migrant workers in Singapore, a country of 5.5 million people. A migrant workers shields himself from the sun in Singapore.

The group translated some of the comments and filmed the migrants reading them. 

"It's not safe to be around [migrant workers]. Women and children should stay away from them," went one comment, read out by Wang Si Liang in Mandarin Chinese. 

"Why would someone say this?" Wang responded. "I don't really get it. I'm not sure how to react to it."

Later, the workers also read messages from Singaporeans thanking them for their hard work.

"At least after seeing this comment, I feel more comforted," Wang said, with a smile. "Reading this makes me happy."

In 2015, Singapore's labor ministry recorded over 1 million migrant workers in the country, whose population is 5.5 million.

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