Sentiment analysis and other analyses were conducted on 1,073 posts from eight Subreddits relating to immigration on Reddit.
Main Findings
- The Top 100 words (visualised in a WordCloud) for the dataset included expected terms like “Singapore”, “China”, “Local”, “Citizen”, and “Country”.
2. 5 Topics/Themes could be found through topic modelling (Genism and pyLDAvis). Interpreting the topics, we can see that: 1. Topic 0: Singapore and citizenship (“new_citizen”, “immigrant”) 2. Topic 1: Attitudes (perhaps concerning informal posts: “Shit”, “lol”) 3. Topic 2: Jobs ( “foreigner”, “job”) 4. Topic 3: Chinese immigrants (“Chinese”, “China”) 5. Topic 4: Attitudes toward migration (“nonsense”, “easy”, “overseas”).
3. Discourse surrounding immigration was highly fragmented as seen from my user-user reply network, suggesting that they happened within individual threads rather than occurring throughout.
4. Conversations revolved around “OkAdministration7880”, who was the most active engager. The structure showed a core-periphery pattern, where there were a few highly active nodes (users) who anchored discussions, surrounded by less-active users.
5. There was a significant minority of negative responses at 17.2% surrounding immigration-related discussions. Expected, due to the topic’s polemic nature. Notably, there was a substantial portion labelled neutral, meaning that locals may be undecided when it comes to immigration (i.e. on the fence).
Recommendations
- Keep its word: Minister Indranee Rajah stated that the population was likely to be significantly below 6.9 million by 2030 (Rajah, 2023; as cited in NPTD, 2024 ); if immigration skyrockets past that by 2030, then the government will lose Singaporeans’ trust, leading to discord.
- Leveraging integrative policies (prioritise Chinese immigrants) : immigrants should be encouraged to mix with locals (especially non-Chinese speaking groups like Malays) through dialogue sessions and community activities.
- Strengthening job security: fresh graduates are facing a shortage of jobs, leading to blame being attributed to immigrants. Hence, the government must create more jobs via traineeships, host more job fairs and career counselling, and ensure fairer hiring processes through stricter laws and monitoring.
- Driving educational awareness: use online influencers to debunk ‘job-stealing’ myths about immigrants via two-step flow of communication, adopt episodic framing to showcase immigrants’ lives for greater empathy, leverage religious leaders to dialogue with disgruntled locals, and stem early signs of xenophobia through Character and Citizenship Education classes in schools.
- Continuing to monitor online sentiment: track sentiment shifts and whether long-term policies are successful.
Full Code, Scraping Process, Dataset, & Paper
Scraping process: https://github.com/Keith-LJY001/NMC5342_A0234542L/blob/main/Dataset_(Scraping).ipynb
Full Code: https://github.com/Keith-LJY001/NMC5342_A0234542L/blob/main/NMC5342_A0234542L.ipynb
Dataset: https://github.com/Keith-LJY001/NMC5342_A0234542L/blob/main/scraped_Reddit_Dataset.csv