A few days ago you spoke at a ceremony for 200 new citizens. You trotted out the usual cliches about immigration being essential, indeed existential, to Singapore’s survival. and how we must remain open as a global hub for talent from around the world. You say this is how we became a “shining red dot”. Your government says this every year and will no doubt reiterate it many times in the impending GE. You say that we need new citizens to top up our numbers and keep the economy growing. It’s revealing that you say one of the objectives of increasing the population, including citizens, is to boost the growth rate because the rises over the last couple of years have allowed you to generate relatively high growth rates despite a decline in real value added per hour worked over the same period. I have been saying for many years that increasing the size of the population has been used as a way of masking mediocre productivity growth.

But it’s not true that you’re just topping up numbers. Your government is still increasing the total population quite rapidly. We surpassed 6 million in 2024, an increase of nearly 2% on 2023, which itself increased by 5% from 2023. So population growth is much faster than in most developed countries. The number of new PRs increased faster than that of citizens, meaning that the potential pool for new citizens in the future is that much larger. You say that we have 30,000 citizen births a year and create 22,000 new citizens a year. I checked on the Singstat website what the number of deaths was and found that there were about 24,000 citizen deaths a year. So even if there was no immigration there would still be more births than deaths per year but this is undoubtedly because of the new citizens created who will undoubtedly have a much younger age structure than the general population. In September 2024 speaking in Parliament Indranee Rajah said that the number of citizen deaths could exceed the number of citizen births by the early 2030s but it undoubtedly would have happened already if your government was not busy creating so many new citizens.

Alarmingly you reveal your government’s true Social Darwinist colours and contempt for second and third generation Singaporeans when you say that “Immigration will bring more competition and put pressure on Singaporeans to work harder and meet higher standards,” This is just a watered down version of your father’s sentiments in his National Geographic interview where he said that “the ethnic Chinese and Indians here” had become “less hard-driving and hard-striving” and needed “spurs stuck on [their] hinds”.

So when you talk about immigration being essential to Singapore’s survival who exactly are you referring to? Ir can’t be to the current generation of Singaporeans born here and the children or grandchildren of former immigrants. You view the continued iarge-scale influx of new citizens as competition and a means of holding down wages and keeping hours worked way above international norms for developed countries at our level of income. You do not even make the pretence of providing a level playing field as between new and old citizens as your government exempts them from NS. Ir’s very diifficult for Singaporean men to compete with their foreign co workers when they have to give up two years of their lives and thus find themselves way behind in terms of educational qualifications at the same age. Meanwhile your government fails even to pay NS men a wage in any way comparable to the opportunity cost of the lost years of employment. In many cases the children of new citizens are able to avoid NS and live in. Singapore by holding on to their parents’ original citizenship and yet are frequently allowed to work in Singapore later. How can that possibly be a level playing field? You talk. abotu competition but you insist on tying one hand of Singaporeans, at least the men, behind them.

Then there is the hypocritical pretence your government makes that it’s safeguarding the reserves for furure generations when most of the future generations will be made uo of new citizens who did not contribute to building up the reserves in the first place. While you refuse to tell us what the reserves are I have inferred that they are at least $3 trillion and maybe as much as $4 trillion. We should be able to spend another $50 billion a year and afford universal health care, old age pensions and much better help for families with children. Yet your government feel they can get away with a few billion in handouts every year precisely because you can continually augment the citizen pool with grateful immigrants. The current generation have endured decades of austerity to build up the reserves and your government needs to come clean and provide an accounting of what we can afford to spend and it is certainly much higher than you are spending at the moment. Immigration helps to push up property prices and thus swell the reserves while most Singaporeans live in HDBs on 99 year leaseholds and thus will see their wealth transferred back to the government and tp new citizen buyers will pay less than they otherwise would

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not against immigration. Some level is undoubtedly necessary. Singapore has been. built by immigrants going back a few generations. But it has to work for everyone in SIngapore, and especially those on low incomes struggling to survive because your government has failed to bring in a minimum wage or protections against being replaced by foreign workers. When you wax eloquent about the benefits of immigration I get the feeling that you aren’t talking about ordinary Singaporean but rather about your fellow Ministers and plutocrats, many of whom have become centimillionaires on the back of policies that make it easy for wealthy foreigners to acquire citizenshiip and lhus landed property in the form of GCBs. Mr SHanmugam is now a centimillionaire, to name just one minister who has got obscenely rich, and you and your wife are no doubt billionaires, perhaps even multi billionaires as a result. I exclude from that of course her earnings as CEO of Temasek which you and your government continue to keep secret from the Singapore people.

The GE will shortly be upon us. Singaporeans need to realise that the PAP have no plan to make them richer only, as LHL admits, to force them to work harder in a race to the bottom. Meanwhile their votes will continue to be diluted as much as possible. Why continue to vote for a government that does so little for you? It’s time to take back your rights as citizens of a free country. Take back what belongs to you.

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam