Immigrants and nation-building in Singapore

Olympic medal tests Singapore model

By Jeremy Grant, Published The Straits Times, 10 Aug 2012 

WHEN Feng Tianwei scooped bronze in the women's table tennis competition in London last week, it was Singapore's first individual Olympic medal in 52 years.

Yet amid the outpouring of pride in the city-state of 5.2 million, a jarring note of resentment has surfaced from within the winning nation.

Comments on social media sites were quick to point out that Feng was born in mainland China, and did not get Singapore citizenship until 2008. Meanwhile, 77 per cent of respondents in an online poll conducted by Yahoo Singapore said they were "not proud" of a "foreign import" winning an Olympic medal.

"Honestly, I cannot bring myself to feel proud for a foreigner to win a medal for us, although they carry our Singapore flag," one person wrote on Yahoo's Facebook page.

As Singapore yesterday marked 47 years since its founding - under the slogan Loving Singapore, Our Home - the reaction to Feng has highlighted mounting social friction over immigration. Much of it is focused on the wave of mainland Chinese immigrants who have landed in Singapore over the past two years.

After two Chinese workers were last month found dead in waist-high concrete after an accident at a construction site, Singapore's blogosphere was divided between those calling for compensation for their families and others expressing resentment at a rising tide of foreign labour perceived to be taking jobs from Singaporeans.

Ironically, most of Singapore's Chinese population - its largest ethnic group - are descendants of immigrants from the Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong.

Immigration has led to overcrowding on public transport and competition for lower-paid jobs, escalating housing costs and widening income disparities. Of the 5.2 million population, 1.5 million people are immigrants. Half of those are classified as "work permit holders", many of them migrant workers from Bangladesh and China.

Resentment at the arrival of wealthy mainland Chinese, too, flared recently after a young Chinese businessman crashed his Ferrari at high speed into a taxi in May, killing himself, the local taxi driver and his Japanese passenger.

This is all causing a headache for the Government, which is trying to balance a falling birth rate with the need to maintain a degree of population buoyancy to keep the country's five-decade economic miracle on track.

The Government projects the economy will grow by 1.5 to 2.5 per cent this year, compared with 1.7 per cent last year. But Singapore is increasingly dependent for growth on lower-income immigrant workers to help build infrastructure and foreigners working in value-added areas like commodity trading.

"Immigration is the big thing now," says law professor Eugene Tan at Singapore Management University. "It impacts everything: property prices, rental, the cost of living and the sense of belonging and what it means to be a Singaporean."

In his National Day speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said a feeling of belonging and identity for Singaporeans had become "harder to nurture when we have new immigrants and foreign workers".

Alarm bells were rung earlier this year by his father, the 88-year-old founder of modern Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who warned that increasing the birth rate is the country's "biggest challenge". He pointed out that 44 per cent of men and 31 per cent of women between the ages of 30 and 34 in Singapore are still single.

The Government's response has been a mixture of tightening up on the inflow of foreign workers, information campaigning and, last week, the creation of a new ministry of culture, community and youth that the Prime Minister said would focus on "deepening the sense of identity and belonging to the nation".

PM Lee's office has also reminded would-be parents of their entitlement to a "baby bonus" of $4,000 in cash for each of their first, second and third child.

Mentos, the candy maker, has even issued a call to action in the bedroom, urging Singaporeans in a video to give the country a "population spurt".

With Singapore's relatively open economy unlikely to escape the current global slowdown, the ruling party knows the stakes are high.

Mr Lee has warned that while per capita GDP is impressive - well above Britain, for example, at US$50,000 (S$62,200) - Singapore is "beyond the phase of effortless (economic) growth".

"Today Singapore is a success story, but the world is not standing still," said Mr Lee.

"The next two decades will be very different."

THE FINANCIAL TIMES LIMITED