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While there has been much debate on Singapore’s migration policies, a ‘black box’ continues to surround policymaking decisions. This article examines the dynamics of migration policy reforms in Singapore, using the case study of the mandatory weekly day off policy for migrant domestic workers. Designing our analysis around the three ‘Is’ – ideas, interests and institutions – we argue that the inclusion and formalisation of migrant rights in the policy sphere entails the framing of migrant rights in a manner that appeals to Singapore’s institutional logics and cultural repertoire; prioritising the needs and interests of citizens in the policy calculus; and institutional readiness and conviction to the cause.

Scholarship on civil society in Singapore has tended to emphasize the structural and institutional constraints on civil society space. Conversely, little attention is paid to the broader cultural and discursive realms in which civil society and state actors operate. This article seeks to address this gap by analysing the day‐off campaign for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. We demonstrate that by employing the cultural mediation strategy of vernacularization, civil society was able to frame migrant rights claims in a manner that resonated with the institutional logics and cultural repertoire of Singapore society. Civil society actors gained headway by adapting the discourse on migrant rights to Singapore's socio‐cultural and political context in three ways: by reframing rights claims into a moral appeal; by appealing to the cost‐benefit logics of Singaporean employers of migrant domestic workers; and by situating the provision of migrant labour protections as a relative market position.

Although migrant women from neighboring Southeast Asian countries fill crucial care gaps in Singapore households as live-in domestic workers, their social protection remains uneven, uncertain, and indeterminate. Framed as unskilled work shunned by citizens and characterized by isolation in the privatized sphere of the home, domestic work has invariably become low-status, low-visibility, and low-pay work performed by foreign women engaged on private contracts. The access of migrant domestic workers in Singapore to social protection has thus triggered concern among international organizations, governments, and civil society. Using data derived from a survey of Indonesian domestic workers, interviews with key stakeholders, and archival research, this article adopts a transnational social protection research agenda by mapping how institutionalized practices that aim to reduce the vulnerabilities of migrant domestic workers in Singapore have shifted in the past decade. We begin by addressing the circumscribed impact of international conventions and origin government policies. Following our premise that the social support and protection of migrant domestic workers still depend largely on the host society, we focus on two interrelated developments in Singapore. First, we examine the reach of immigration, labor, and criminal law in recent “maid abuse” cases to reveal how criminal law in particular has broadened to account for the specific vulnerability of domestic workers and, relatedly, the culpability of errant employers. Second, we consider how civil society’s campaign for a “mandatory” rest day offers insight into both the success and limitations of developing transnational advocacy for domestic workers in Singapore.