Aussie o level can beat a MBA grad? This cannot happen my friend, we are not idiots. The average Singapore maybe complaining a lot but compared to lazy Aussie, Singaporean is still miles ahead in terms. One of the Aussie grad who worked in my company, took every Friday off to fly to nearby destinations for short holiday. He did take 2 or 3 times a month and when he was back on Monday, there was always backlogs and he gave all the excuses he could find. Just one fine day, he was called to the boss office and shouted at.. because he refused to support a major project, going on holidays again.

If they miss their families so much, they are more than welcome to return.

About tax rate, Singapore tax rate is half of what a foreigner would pay ie 22%. A lot of Australians are trying to escape the high bracket of 47% in Australia.

I can see you are a foreigner and successful in business, this is why a local girl would jump at you but I think you need to get your facts right. Dont come and bs us.

ha ha ha

And as a singporean plese dont think so highly of our country our government and our ministers cos you have not live here a lifetime to be able to offer and honest opinion.You ar only prevy to on side of the coin.

Perhaps if you live here long enought then and only then will you understand what all singaporeans have been talking about and why we want a change of government which we feel and no is long over due. Is really funny when you read about all the posiitve comments all these foreign talents seem to say about our country our government and our ministers. Live long long here and I bet you all will be singing a different tune akin to what we are now singing about!

Its a large place and still jampacked with people. People like sardines in a can.

I ask myself before and now i ask the You :
1. Can the Expo handle when population about doubles to 6.5million?
2. Can sg Infrastructures like MRT , Roads (as if its not jammed enuf), malls , handle? How much more expensive will ERP be thanks to more people driving cars due to population explosion?

Quality of life?

I seriously wonder if this 6.5mil is an Aspiration or a Definite target?

Can minster of nat dev tell us?
Is this of public interest? Maybe not, cos most are apathetic anyways.

Personally I don’t have anything against foreigners per se. I mean Singapore was founded by foreigners. All of us at one time or another were foreigners and our prosperity is actually founded on being open to people who wanted to make a better life here. So from that perspective, I have no issue with a PRC National or Bangladeshi worker coming here and working like a slave in order to save money to bring back home to educate kids and so on. I admire that, people with this spirit are the type of people who make host as well as original nation better.

And I also think it’s OK for us to have educated people from elsewhere. People like Indian IT professionals do have skills that we don’t have.

What is disagree with, is the fact that the government seems to assume that “foreigners” good “locals useless. Yes, be open to people but don’t kick the local in the groin.

Look at the argument that we need FT here because the locals don’t have the skills. Yes, in the short run you need to import talent but surely, won’t it be better to invest in educating the local people and giving them the skills to do the job? If local people do not have the necessary skills year after year, who’s fault is it? I mean it can’t be that all the locals are incapable of being trained? Obviously the education system here has a lot to answer for.

Then there’s the issue to National Service. Why should some people be exempt from National Service because they came in from elsewhere and chose to make Singapore their home. If you want to make a life here, you should jolly well pay the price as well as enjoy the privileges.

Chinese=Teochew language? I know only my mother tongue, i.e. Teochew. I tried to speak to prc using Teochew but you can guess their reactions! being chinese themselves and don’t know teochew?

I don’t speak mandarin, which is the national language of china, and is not my mother tongue. thus, to be fair to all races, i use english for work and when i am buying things.

so what is so bad about using english? tell me?

However the opposite is happening by the so call ‘FTs’ from the ubiquitous service stuffs to those working in constructions by depressing wages at the lower end.

At the higher end of the ladder, sg university are filled with foreigners especially from PRC competing for grades and since most of them are ’scholars’, many of them scored better grades. I admit this may increase the overall competency of of sg students, I myself have sometimes benefited from them. Yet I also have seen countless of my friends who initially in uni life put in much effort yet still unable to do well because of the bellcurve system. They gradually lost confidence in themselves which lead to a downward spiral in grades.

Furthermore in the current job market, I have friends who are as well qualified as the foreigner graduates but yet unable to secure jobs because their expected pay is higher than the foreigners. It is not totally realistic to expect sg grads to keep lowering down pay expectation. Most still have their tuition loan to pay off unlike most other foreigners.

Though overall sg grads competency may have risen, it does not translate to better job opportunies which is making many soon to be sg grads worried especially in the current job environment.

In short, calibrating the flow of FT may be a much better solution

“why you all china persons are liked that? siamed liked hell if it don’t BENEFIT you @ all..XI PUN SENG LEE (loss money business nocando) har? ”

I don’t know why you say this. I answered you about this sense of belonging question, please read my previous comments carefully.

If I have to serve Singapore NS, then go to NUS, then bonded for six years. Yes, I would not have come. If China asked me to serve NS in China, I would go to serve it. [/i]

in china it do NOT asked..every communists needs to serve includin the only son of maotsetung..the son was killed in action fightin outside china on behalf of north korea….
so your cents of belongin is no longer BELONGIN the moment if mindef served you an NS reportin little handbook right?
in the event of war/disturbances..you would abandoned singapore without a second glance..
am i right so far?
so in this topic what the HELL are you mubblin?
ps servin NS is not a choice nor option..athough we do not asked you to buy your own bullet and faced a firin squad..singapoor is not that CRUEL yet…however havin said all that even if you are in the 40s and do a 3 mile IPPT test and died of exhaustion..mindef will tell your survivin famiLEE we will do an investigation…till then your survin famiLLEE have to seek their own lodgins/debts and meals…

Guess U been away for a while to quote 20%; my figures are from official NPS data. Admit, I screwed up in some previous postings quoting 34% for 2008 until someone pointed (so nicely) to me it was 35%. But the 2009 figure is 36% (4.9m with 1.76m foreigners = 36%). So, I am having trouble keeping up too.

Trust TOC to save my bacon also, as they just put up another article at: http://theonlinecitizen.com/2009/11/by-2015-born-and-bred-sporeans-may-be-the-minority-in-spore/, which gives some hairy figures even for my standards.

On jobs, you mentioned:

“…The question is, do we want to take these jobs? Well, uh, not really. …”

Guess you are again away for some time. There is much discussion on WHY Singaporeans are seemingly not taking such jobs — it just boils down to us not having a system of min. wage & fair conditions, unless you only hear crap from our ministers. There is also the larger picture of a fixature on the GDP number, lately using more of labor injection than capital injection, etc…. Since you are in Germany, maybe you could do a comparsion of, say a road sweeper salary there vs one of ours. Then compare the Chancellor’s pay (me think it’s about USD320K) vs Singapore PM (USD2.05M).

1. Freedom of Speech – intimidation through servere no-win law suits and imprisonment through use of ISA.

2. Freedom of Assembly – new laws now even consider one person protesting as illegal assembly.

3. Freedom of Trade Unionism – all trade unions are under the direct control of the gov through a Minister appointed by the PM Office.

4. Freedom of Housing – 90 per cent of citizens have no choice but to live in gov housing, on a long-term rental (lease) for 99 years, with escalating prices dictated by HDB and paying installments for 30 years, with rules and regulations restricting what can or not be done.

5. Freedom of Parliamentary Debates – with only two opposition MPs in Parliament, the motion for any policy, law, etc proposed by any PAP Minister has always been carried, without much serious debates on the pros and cons. Using the “Whip” to ensure “Yes” votes, PAP MPs cannot vote against any motion moved by PAP Ministers.

6. Freedom of Voting for Opposition Parties – with many walk-overs, especially with the GRC concept imposed and the redrawing of boundaries, many eligible voters are deprived of casting their votes. With short-campaigning period of 8 days, and the one-sided PAP-controlled medias, Opposition parties can hardly reach out to the whole nation. With the threat of suing to bankruptcy, people are afraid of joining Opposition political parties to rise up against the ruling party.

AND NOW, with the influx of foreigners targeting to reach 6 to 7 million population, Singaporeans will lose their:

7. Freedom of Movements – the tiny island will be so squeezed that it will be very unhealthy for movements and many other physical activities. Shopping centres and public spaces will be so congested that diseases such as H1N1 and tuberculosis can spread easily and speedily.

8. Freedom of Facilities Utility – health, transportation, communication, education and sports facilities will be overwhelmed to the extent that a lot of time will be wasted in queuing up to wait for your turns. Service staff will be so bogged down that the standard of service will drop tremendously.

9. Freedom of Infrastructure Utility – the limited space means limited infrastructures; the available limited infrastructures will no doubt be overwhelmed by the immense influx of foreigners.

10. Freedom of Employment – with unlimited number of low-wage foreigners competing for jobs, the choices for jobs for the locals will be very limited.

11. Freedom of Better Standard of Living (Swiss Standard of Living promise by GCT?) – with their wages curtailed from rising to match inflation, via cheap low-wage foreign labours and cheap foreign ‘talents’, the standard of living will be severely affected. If they are lucky, they may still have a Malaysian Standard of Living. How can they even dream of a Swiss Standard of Living as promised by the previous PM Goh Chok Tong?

Therefore, in return for all the above, Singaporeans should rise up to:

MAKE THE PAP HAS NO FREEDOM OF ABSOLUTE POWER!

(Have we forgotten the saying that “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”.)

Vote for any Tom, Dick and Harry.
Vote for Opposition Parties!
Make that “Freak” Election comes True!

(Also, as an aside for those of you who think AAA’s English is “too good to be true”, there’s something called editing which really helps before posting an article, be it a comment or an essay. Practice it. It’s really a good idea, and helps keep the flaming in check, too.)

I am Singaporean, I didn’t quite enjoy my NS, though I did have some good times in there, and I am strongly *for* subsequent generations to continue doing NS. It is a problem that I am, in some ways, 2 and a half years behind my peers – my PRC and Malaysian classmates from JC have all been working for some time now, and some are doing Ph.D.s. But I wouldn’t replace NS with anything. Maybe making it shorter would be a good idea, though, but I feel it is an important part of our identity as Singaporeans.

Do I fully understand the FT/FW policies the government has been using for the past few decades? No. Did I see more and more foreigners around me in Singapore (I am currently in Germany studying for a Masters degree)? Yes. Do I have many friends who are not born in Singapore? Yes. Do I have to like the increase of FT/FW in Singapore? No. Are these FT/FW replaceable? Well, yes and no. Would Singapore be a better place without foreigners? No.

Bear in mind that without foreigners, we would still be a fishing village, part of the Johore-Riau Sultanate. That’s perhaps pulling it a little too far, but without those initial foreigners, there would never have been a Singapore. Do you think the locals then enjoyed it when more and more Chinese, Indians and Europeans came flocking to their shores, building a city-state out of a fishing village? Yet it has happened, and this is where we are now. Look at the bumiputra policies in Malaysia if you want to see a knee-jerk reaction to the influx of “foreign talent”.

The difference, I think, would be that those foreigners who came then chose to stay and weave their fates together with Singapore’s, building a nation – whereas now, foreigners are perceived as having come to make money and leave if they can, or decide to stay for various reasons. But who is to say they will not also become a part of Singapore and help to build its future?

It would be nice for some, I guess, if there were a way to look into the future and determine which of the foreigners wanted to stay and become Singaporeans before letting them in. This is something no one can do, and I believe it would be absurd to do.

@101) the forgottengeneration on November 25th, 2009 7.51pm:

I’m not sure where you got your figures, but I thought “only” 20% of our 4.9 million were non-Singaporeans. Feel free to correct me, I have to admit I haven’t been keeping track of my country’s development.

Neither do I know the definition of “new” citizens, but my mother is a “naturalized” citizen who came from Malaysia when she was young and has been working here for almost 30 years. She has a pink IC, of course.

There are definitely many jobs available for Singaporeans. Domestic help, for instance, doesn’t need to come from other countries. We can have local students working as part-time babysitters, and let the people living in the house clean their own house, cook their own meals, etc. We can have locals doing the hard work at construction sites, for instance. We can have more locals in healthcare, because it’s important to be able to speak the language and understand the culture. The same goes for F&B services, such as in cafes, bars, kopitiams and restaurants.

The question is, do we want to take these jobs? Well, uh, not really. We’re all hoping to make it through our beloved degree mills (I myself worked through NUS) and take high-paying jobs in management, engineering, business, law, and whatever else. That’s fine, but we have to accept that as a result, other people who want to take these unwanted jobs have to be let in. And sometimes they don’t stay in those jobs. Also, allowing them in gave us time and space to pursue our dreams, so no one complained then.

Influenced by the Singapore culture, they want to achieve more. They spin off their own businesses, go for language classes or technical courses in the hope that maybe they can do better, if not here then back at home when their contracts here end. Maybe an exceedingly small percentage make the jump from “FW” to “FT”. Who knows.

In your earlier post at 9.28am on 25th November, you mentioned that we should ask “Why do we need so many foreigners in the first place?” I agree, the underlying reasons need to be looked at, but whether we like the answers and we are prepared to make the changes, or even whether it’s possible to stem the flow of foreign talent, if indeed that needs to be done, is something that I don’t know at the moment.

I would suggest that we don’t have the “1% of FT that matter” not because we signed the wrong players, but because the club isn’t right for them, to use a football metaphor. If the environment were right for innovation, our locals would have come up with the solutions. But despite having a world-class education system, and universities ranked in the top X of the world, we produce workers whose main aim in life is to earn more money at the expense of others just to provide for their family, and office politics is probably the no. 1 sport in Singapore.

Might this be why we think we need inspiration and vision from FTs?

@104) Muhamad Nur on November 26th, 2009 8.03am:

In the 80s, I was still very young, but I enjoyed it very much. I have to say there were far fewer foreigners than there are now, as I remember, and yes, we were also less crowded. Of course, there was the Kallang Roar, which I also miss, but that is another story for another time.

But is it really true that we were without foreigners then? Just take our football team for instance. In the 90s, we were coached by foreigners for a longer time than the locals did. We had Abbas Saad, Alistair Edwards, Jang Jung helping to bring the Roar to the National Stadium. There are some other foreigners whose names I can’t quite recall, and Michael Vana didn’t exactly cover himself in glory, but that again is best left for elsewhere.

Granted, we were playing as a club then, and we should have been allowed foreign players to compete, etc etc, but for those few years the foreigners were as much a part of the Lions as Fandi, Malek, Kadir and David Lee. The situation now is that we see foreign athletes as prizes to be added and hopefully converted to Singapore citizens. I don’t agree with this strategy, but I’m in no place to decide the strategy by myself.

One problem that I can see is that we are simply bursting at the seams and yet more foreign talent is being welcomed. This is not right. This, [theforgottengeneration], is what we should be worried about, rather than the ratio of Singaporeans to foreigners vs Americans to foreigners. I can also say that you are comparing apples and oranges.

Reducing the number of foreign talent allowed in would probably mitigate the problem, but I’m not sure how much more appealing it would make our home for Singaporeans, who are yearning to get out. And then the ratio would change, of course, but at what cost?

I will come back to Singapore at the end of my studies, because it is my home and I want to make it better. I am disheartened to see such an outpouring of anger and suspicion against the author of the original article, whoever he may be and whatever his motives may have been. (It was established at some point that AAA was male, right?)

But in any case, I am at least glad to see, even if it is behind the anonymity of the Internet, that we have people among us wanting to say something about our country and concerned about our future. Now … if only those remarks about MM Lee and the Lee Dynasty would be replaced by more constructive opinions on how to move forward, and followed by constructive action, I feel Singapore will be a much better place to live in in the future. Regardless of how many foreigners there are, space permitting.

Good on you mate for sharing the situ in land o’ Matilda. I recall Australia has about 23% foreign-born population, even though the impression one gets is that there is a LARGE influx of immigrants into Australia. This is the highest % among developed countries to best of my knowledge, so SG at 36% is real King. Hope such relative comparison will give everyone the magnitude of the actual situation SG is facing….. Hmm, very quiet from NIC, lah.

keep this opinion to yourself and in your head. we don’t need another foreigner to tell us what is BAD for us. you know what i mean?

thank you.

‘find a Singaporean student to discuss about Chinese History, or Europeans History’

You mean south-east asia history? 700 years of temasek history? why should we know about chinese history? or european history? i am happy with south east asian history. i am happy knowing about the history of the malayan pennisula. If you can’t make a decent opinion on us singaporeans, please shut up and/or get out. we don’t need you.

1. are the so-called talents the best in the world attracted here?
Would the best come here? Are there no better place for these to choose?

2. What is the effect on the quality of workers here if these are not the best or certified talents?

3. Will top talents be paid lower wages than the best wages in the world?
What is the effect of Low Wage, Many Foreign workers on the quality of workforce here? Are foreigners here generally higher paid than locals of the same calibre?

4. Is low wage the solution for a strong economy and high talent workforce?
Is this solution sustainable? Can it stand the test of time?

Singapore itself is not going to be good for the future as far as its’ outlook is concerned.

However, it will be worse if aliens are allowed to occupy this compact little city.

And with or without aliens, time is closing on its’ destiny.

Will You(AAA) kindly tell us here, are You prepared to be a Singaporean yourself?

patriot

Another flaw of the goverment in its policy is that the preservation of the locals’ job and their finance capability! Bear in mind that Singapore doesn’t have fair employment regulations unlike Australia, which guarantees min wages and employment fairness. It is very true that business are run to generate profit by max. revenue and min. cost. With no min wages law to protect the locals, its a matter of who is willing to undertake a lower salary. Many of the chinese stills has a lower standard of living, China to return to. What about Singaporeans? Its has been instill in us by our goverment to study hard and get an office job, Hence, no many locals are willing to undertake sub average pay works like cleaners and construction workers. With Shenton way being only that big, our finance sector is limited and competition is getting very real.

The biggest flaw by far is the lack of justification for this sheer number of 6.5M. Rather spending effort in reviewing the decline in child birth attributed by the fast and high living standards, the gov/t opted for a quick fix via migration. Look, the entire Western Australia which is at least a quater in mass of Australia only has 3.5M. Our financial position is in greater despair as compared to Singapore, which has a reputation of a regional Biz hub of Asean countries. But the government has a policy to limit and expand its population here ensuring that there is a balance in lifestyle preservation and economic expansion. It is nature to place self interest above all but as the locals here can see us migration coming and contributing in a positive manner, many Australian welcomes us to their door. A less harried expansion plan would have been more acceptable in my opinion.