15 - Immigration Policies and Programmes

Summary

The national population policies in Singapore have been dominated by fertility policies in the form of antinatalist measures commencing from the mid-1960s and postnatalist measures from the 1980s. The recent recognition that, despite the introduction of a comprehensive postnatalist policy, fertility will never return to replacement level to sustain the population size in the future resulted in a big shift in the national population programme towards immigration as the key answer to replenishing the population in the years ahead. Not surprisingly, immigration rules were expanded and relaxed to attract foreigners, especially professionals and businessmen, to relocate to Singapore and become permanent residents. Citizenship laws and procedures were liberalized to make it easier for those who had become permanent residents to take up Singapore citizenship by naturalization. The various schemes designed to lure foreigners to work and settle in the country resulted in a surge in the foreign population and, consequently, frequent grumbling about the city-state becoming too overcrowded. Lately, some of the rules meant to attract foreigners were tightened.

NEED FOR IMMIGRATION

If a population is closed against migration and is subject to a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 and a constant mortality indefinitely, the population will eventually reach a state where it will experience a rate of population growth equivalent to zero. At this point of time and thereafter, the population is said to be a stationary population possessing certain inherent properties. The size of the population willremain constant, the annual number of births and deaths will remain not only constant but equal, the age structure will be invariable, and the crude death rate equal to the inverse of the expectation of life at birth. We have observed in the previous chapter that the total fertility rate not only remained below replacement during the last forty years, but moved downward over time to touch the low of 1.2 in recent years. We also showed that this below-replacement fertility had resulted in a shortfall in the annual number of births, which would not allow the population to replenish itself in the future.

Indeed, the results of population projections prepared by the author in the 3rd edition of his book entitled The Population of Singapore revealed that the resident population of Singapore would begin to decline by around 2025 or 2030.