Singapore has changed in its openness to ‘foreign talents’. In sharp contrast to the late 20th century and the 2000s, the Singaporean government of the 2010s grant EPs less easily. Yet, any visa status ‘below’ that of an EP comes with a salary too low to maintain a living standard comparable to the one these middle-class EU citizens enjoyed in their home countries. Moreover, the criteria for an EP have been rising, and thus migrants are required to upgrade their skills constantly to guarantee the renewal of their visa. Young Europeans who often arrive in Singapore with little work experience try to build a professional profile and measure themselves against objective markers of success, such as title or salary increase. Through these practices, they either claim legitimacy of the ‘foreign talent’ label and thereby secure the flexible, mid-term residency status that comes with an EP or deliberately carve out a path for future employment elsewhere.

Their strategies accentuate that, in fact, the migrants are often not professionals in any given job from the outset but might become ‘talents’ along the way of what I call here ‘professionalising’ themselves. There is a crucial difference in the quality of the two terms without denying their overlap at times. Arguably, neither the concept of (high) skills nor that of talents is unproblematic. While scholars agree on the constructed nature of ‘skills’ and have demonstrated that skilled migration regimes are the outcome of governments’ balancing of social, political, and economic considerations (Sandoz, 2019; Liu-Farrer et al, 2020), ‘talent’ in the context of Singapore has very specific connotations. As outlined in Chapter 2, Singapore’s foreign talents have come to signify a highly contested category since the late 2000s. Given the rising resentment and online xenophobia against foreign talents, the increasingly tightened access to EPs as well as to PR and citizenship, EP holders in Singapore feel the need to prove their professional skill sets, similar to aspirational migrants of the mid-level skill category in Singapore (Baas, 2017).

Beyond Singapore, the concept of ‘talent’ has received attention in studies on changing values and work attitudes in what Sennett (2006, p 115) calls the ‘culture of the new capitalism’.