Integration and immigration: Copying the US won't work
BASING our integration and immigration efforts on those of the United States, as Mr K. Kesavapany suggested last Saturday ('Integrating immigrants: Learn from American experience') may not help Singapore. Our experiences are different and based on contrasting paradigms.
Improvements to the demographic profile of the US are not due to its immigration policy but the result of some two centuries of nation building by prudent leaders who enjoyed the advantages of a large country with rich natural resources and a fundamentally strong industrial base buttressed by a critical mass of home-grown citizens.
The US does not suffer from the problem of economic migrants. Also, the comparatively small number who want to make America their home must assimilate, and not the other way round.
Singapore is different. In just 10 years, the population jumped a mind-boggling 25 per cent, to four million in 2000.
Here is the nub: The Singapore Department of Statistics in 2002 showed that in 2000, 63 per cent of all ethnic Singaporean groups aged 35 to 44 years attained only secondary level education. Can these groups compete with well-educated foreign migrants for high-paying jobs created by sophisticated multinationals? Are we creating a poverty trap for low-income Singaporeans?
My understanding of Mr Ngiam Tong Dow's commentary last Thursday ('Lest we become strangers in our own land') is that he wants to remind our population planners to rethink an immigration scheme precisely because Singaporeans face unequal competition from a massive influx of economic immigrants.
In large developed countries with solid home-grown global industrial bases like the US, economic migrants are insignificant and their function is to boost the American economy.
They cannot influence America's social system radically.
Can Singapore's economic model - based on global trade and foreign multinationals - continue to retain the brightest and the best to call this country home?
With 6.5 million people, can we integrate more than three million new citizens over one or two generations successfully through an open, meritocratic system that will not fundamentally affect Singapore's social fabric?
If we fail to integrate our new citizens, the mistake will be irreversible and we will become strangers in our own land.
Paul Chan
BASING our integration and immigration efforts on those of the United States, as Mr K. Kesavapany suggested last Saturday ('Integrating immigrants: Learn from American experience') may not help Singapore. Our experiences are different and based on contrasting paradigms.
Improvements to the demographic profile of the US are not due to its immigration policy but the result of some two centuries of nation building by prudent leaders who enjoyed the advantages of a large country with rich natural resources and a fundamentally strong industrial base buttressed by a critical mass of home-grown citizens.
The US does not suffer from the problem of economic migrants. Also, the comparatively small number who want to make America their home must assimilate, and not the other way round.
Singapore is different. In just 10 years, the population jumped a mind-boggling 25 per cent, to four million in 2000.
Here is the nub: The Singapore Department of Statistics in 2002 showed that in 2000, 63 per cent of all ethnic Singaporean groups aged 35 to 44 years attained only secondary level education. Can these groups compete with well-educated foreign migrants for high-paying jobs created by sophisticated multinationals? Are we creating a poverty trap for low-income Singaporeans?
My understanding of Mr Ngiam Tong Dow's commentary last Thursday ('Lest we become strangers in our own land') is that he wants to remind our population planners to rethink an immigration scheme precisely because Singaporeans face unequal competition from a massive influx of economic immigrants.
In large developed countries with solid home-grown global industrial bases like the US, economic migrants are insignificant and their function is to boost the American economy.
They cannot influence America's social system radically.
Can Singapore's economic model - based on global trade and foreign multinationals - continue to retain the brightest and the best to call this country home?
With 6.5 million people, can we integrate more than three million new citizens over one or two generations successfully through an open, meritocratic system that will not fundamentally affect Singapore's social fabric?
If we fail to integrate our new citizens, the mistake will be irreversible and we will become strangers in our own land.
Paul Chan
