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, Amos Chen, one of the campaign's members, told The WorldPost Friday. Other members of the group, all students at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, are Andrea Lim, Kenji Kwok and Shahrin Izhar.
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.
This article has been updated to include names of the Familiar Strangers members.