In the Asian extreme, the tiny island state of Singapore is one of the richest in the world, the Gross Domestic Product is among the top five on the planet: one in six families has more than a million dollars. However, the engine of the economy in Singapore, which many experts have among the largest tax havens, is driven mainly by foreign and precarious workers: one in four workers is an immigrant with temporary permits.

“Few of the 30 comrades living with him in this Singapore barracks know that MD Sharif Uddin writes. Uddin, owner of a bookstore in Bangladesh, came to Singapore in 2008 to work like thousands of other countrymen in construction, paying $10,000 to an agent in exchange for that honor.” Nikkei Asian Review Peter Guest has begun the chronicle “Singapore has collected the literary harvest of immigrant cultures”, in which it has presented immigrants who have received literary prizes in the country.

Mohammad Sharif Uddin won the Singapore Book Award among non-fiction works with his book “Stranger to myself”, which brings together those who have lived for ten years in the barracks of construction workers. “I have decided to write this book so that the Sigapeses know that this country has not changed overnight, that it has not been a miracle, that there are people behind buildings and infrastructure and that other citizens also have to know their history.”

When he got home again, he earned 18 dollars a day, from which he could send as much as he could to his wife and baby. After 12 hours of work, it was done with the title of safety monitor in construction and today it earns 60 dollars, always working for 12 hours. And it has short breaks to take notes or write poems.

The event has been held annually since 2014 and is promoted by writer and photographer Shivaji Das, founded in India. After publishing, literary critic, poet and graphic artist Gwee Li Sui has been in charge of writing the introduction to this book. “Shafi realizes that the life of the migrant worker is not natural. It's produced by elementary violence. The worker is part of a confused community, twice removed from his country of origin and from the host country. His mind and body have been distributed between two places, with a new conscious character. (…) The image of the volcano, which he quotes again and again, symbolizes the instability of its interior. As the dreams of a better life become tarnished, it becomes more cynical and yet finds forces to keep pushing, it is clearer in the sense of mind and safer in the sense of cholera. We also feel the pain of their change, loneliness, nostalgia and impotence. We see that Singapore has become a executioner and a professor.”

Among the prize finalists, How Weik writes Chinese classical poetry, Ramasamy Madhan, in addition to poetry, films on dark and difficult issues, Indonesian Menik Sri Suyati sings dangdut-style music of Indian and Arab roots and Sy Lhen Husband treats erotism in his literature: “If white people can do it, why don’t we do it?”

Journalist Peter Guest, also a foreigner in Singapore, sincerely states: “My documents give me a huge privilege. I’m white, educated in college and exercising a profession that gives you a certain status; so, more than an immigrant in Singapore I’m an expat, I’m not a worker who has come through a temporary permit. I'm a digital nomad. But, however, the experiences that we share become unknown to me: the sadness that increases remoteness and boundaries, the strange joys of living in two places at a time.”

Once the dreams have died, he writes

Singapore has 5.6 million inhabitants, of which four are native and four are foreigners with unlimited residence permits. The majority, 1.4 million, of immigrants imported from abroad. Among them, one million workers are incalised, including about 400,000 construction workers, from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and China, and about 250,000 household workers, mostly women.

In a country where no legal minimum wage is established, the wage gap between qualified professionals and foreign workers engaged in cleaning, housework, etc. It's really huge. CNN, quoting Deutsche Bank as a source, has shown that Singapore ' s average salaries are at $3,077 (EUR 2,743), while employees from Bangladesh and India charge between $400 and $465 (EUR 356-410).

Despite the fact that 17% of the population and a quarter of the workforce are made up, the workers remain in the shade in the brilliant Singapore that teaches the propaganda and the tourists who visit a family member who may be of a skilled occupation, barely mention it in the reports of his trip to the Island State. The workers who have spent fortunes and arrived in debt to Singapore live in the prison of an unskilled trade they have achieved there, to which they have the residence permit, which makes them even more under the control of the agency that has brought them and their working pattern.

Frauds in labor relations, the decalogue of agents in the country of origin and the duty to silence by charging three in it, the lack of salaries for months, the lack of time control, the tremendous prices of barracks or rooms that live forced... Without tools to combat them, in the eyes of Singaporeans, foreign workers are for ever temporary. Even after getting a family to complete the second after a generation by chaining contracts. Contracts in Singapore are relentless: he works and then -- out of here.

The experiences of writers amidst the mass of precarious immigrants in Singapore are becoming more and more universal, says Guest. Temporary work, in all kinds of trade, is a general issue throughout the world and will be multiplied more by the jumps of technology and the displacement of populations.

In the immigrant writers' competition, the prize for fiction was for Sugiarti Mustiarjo, with a piece about sexual abuse and told the journalist: “Creating is our way of telling people that we are something other than migrant workers. There is something else behind the work permit: writer, singer…”.