Singapore: Make love, not
work By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE - Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong
has warned Singaporeans that they will either have
to produce more babies or welcome more migrants if
the country is going to sustain economic growth
and living standards.
Lee, during his
recent National Day speech, estimated that at
current birth rates Singapore will need an
additional 14,000 babies
each
year to ensure that the population is large enough
to sustain the economy.
A slew of policies
introduced two years ago to boost birth rates,
such as longer maternity leave and infant-care
subsidies, have so far had no visible effects,
with the affluent city-state's fertility rate last
year recording an all-time low of 1.24 per female.
The alternative, according to Lee, is for
Singapore to open its doors to permanent
immigrants. Last year's General Household Survey
shows that new permanent residents have risen by
8.7% to 30,000 per year between 2000 and 2005.
During the same period, the number of citizen
births rose by a mere 0.9%, or an average of
28,000 births per year.
"If we want our
economy to grow, if we want to be strong
internationally, then we need a growing
population," argued Lee.
A growing number
of Asian professionals, especially from mainland
China, India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Hong
Kong, have recently uprooted themselves from their
home countries to take up employment in Singapore.
Yet while many immigrants have taken up
permanent-residency status, few go on to become
Singaporean citizens.
Kwan Chee Wei, a
regional human-resource consultant for a
multinational company, argues that many
professionals go to Singapore hoping to advance
their careers or for the upscale lifestyle, but
are not interested in changing their citizenship.
That said, an increasing number of Indian
and Chinese nationals have recently taken up
Singaporean citizenship, creating a measure of
resentment among the local ethnic Chinese and
Indian populations, who see the new immigrants as
competition for jobs.
Lee has tried to
defuse those tensions, contending that many Asian
migrants have actually created jobs for other
Singaporeans through their entrepreneurship. "If
you get the right foreigner here, he creates
thousands of jobs for Singaporeans," he said.
He also noted that developed countries,
including the United States, Canada and Australia,
frequently headhunt and hire Singaporean talent,
often offering scholarships and high-paying jobs
to lure them away from Singapore.
"Countries know, people know Singapore.
They no longer think Singapore is somewhere in
China. But they don't know Singapore is out there
looking for talent," said Lee. "We have to promote
our immigration program overseas."
Since
Lee's speech, letters to the editorial pages of
newspapers in Singapore have been flooded with
comments - or more precisely xenophobic complaints
- about the apparent new policy toward immigrants.
One letter writer, Lim Boon Hee, said, "Be open to
foreign talent, but do not forsake our own. One
more clever foreign talent means one place less
for our local-born sons in institutions of higher
learning."
Another writer, Jimmy Ho Kwok,
suspects that employers will welcome foreign
degree-holders from such countries as India and
China so they can pay them less than the threshold
salaries offered to local graduates and
diploma-holders.
Unionist G Muthukumar
points to information-technology professionals
from India and sales assistants from the
Philippines and Myanmar as examples of employers
paying foreigners less than they would pay local
hires. On the other hand, Manpower Minister Ng Eng
Hen referred to how foreign technicians helped to
set up Singapore's aircraft maintenance, repair
and overhaul industry quickly - while it took
Singapore six years just to set up the training
courses to develop local technicians for the
industry.
The debate has since turned
focus to the politically volatile issue of the
rising cost of living and its impact on raising a
family. "Welcoming migrants to our shores is not
the solution to our declining birth rates," argued
Zeena Amir, a single sales executive in her late
20s. "What would be more beneficial to
Singaporeans and also make more sense in the long
term is to work on controlling the increasing cost
of living."
Singapore has arguably become
a victim of its own success. Over the past two
decades, the island nation has produced a large
number of highly educated young women, many of
whom now have high-powered jobs and find
child-rearing not only an economic burden but a
liability to their career development.
"Children are no longer an asset but a
liability," argued young lawyer Shirley Tan.
"Child care and education are so expensive, and I
can't afford to stay at home to look after them."
As this ambitious nation of 4 million
people tries to build further on its economic
successes, the debate on whether Singaporeans
should have more babies or more migrants seems set
to intensify. "Some view foreigners as
competition to their livelihoods," noted
ruling-party parliamentarian Alvin Chan. "We will
have to explain to them that this is not really
the case."
