Challenges Of Immigrant Study

Words: 1541
Pages: 7

With human beings today being increasingly mobile in our globalised world, many people now reside outside their country of birth. Migrants do not typically cut off all links with their homeland, however, and existences that transcend spatial boundaries are now commonplace. Such groups of people form transnational communities, where active ties are formed with both the home country and the host country. The nature of these communities vary depending on type of migrants involved, such as whether constituents are skilled or unskilled labour; or whether they are voluntary or forced migrants. This essay will look at four such groups of migrants, and explore the nuances of how such lives stretched across space are managed. The movement of skilled …show more content…
While pursuing a university degree overseas is relatively commonplace, some Chinese families take this practice a step further by sending their children overseas for the entire duration of their formal education. The Chinese education system has proven to be overly stifling and competitive for many parents, who decide to send their only child overseas to engage in an English based education in countries like Canada and Singapore. These children would often be accompanied by their mothers, who gave up their careers in China in order to provide a parental presence for their offspring in the destination country. These accompanying parents are known as ‘study mums’ in Singapore, and face a number of challenges, being suddenly thrust into the role of a sole parent in a new environment. The inability to find a job in a society that demands English and the loss of personal support and social networks are similarly experienced by almost all the accompanying mothers. In addition, the women had to struggle with confronting an education system they did not understand, while being the pillar of support for their vulnerable child. Because their goals for their children’s futures conflict with other aspects of family and personal life, the study mothers have been primarily the ones who have had to give up their identities as career women and wives for that of motherhood (Huang and Yeoh, 2005). While their children struggle with the foreign language and education environment, the mothers are the ones who sacrifice life as they know it to secure the future of their only