Foreigners at the Gates, Ooops, Inside Already, Too Late!

More Tiongs, Banglas, Ah Neh, Pinoys coming! As long not those white trash ones who beat up a local cabby at the Durian and run road, or those Tiong drivers who strike, they are welcomed, in a way. Small  and medium businesses are happy as there would be a steady pool of foreigners to hire and fire, especially if the blue-collar foreigners are cheaper, experienced, work longer and harder.

You ask any towkay about the need to employ foreigners as cleaners, cooks, labourers, sales staff, service staff, they say that there is a shortfall of local workers coz no locals want to do the job. Service jobs are shunned and scorned by locals. There is no denial. Well, some are denying!

Minimum wage is the answer, some people loftily complain, so that Singaporeans can be hired to do the job instead of hiring a foreigner. Any of those critics actually had the balls and entrepreneur spirit to run a family business? Why pay a bad attitude local $2000 to clean the floor and or run the shop when a foreigner can do the job for half the price? How to run business like that if labour costs so high if employ Singaporeans? The ones who whine are usually employees who bitch that their jobs were taken away by foreigners. No, your job was taken away by someone who could do a job better than you and cheaper, not because the replacement has a different passport, speaks Mandarin with that loud accent or English with that Pinoy drawl.

You know who are the foreigners' only competitors? The Singapore old aunties and uncles doing cleaning and serving crew at McDonalds and SPC petrol pumps etc coz these pre-65 citizens know what hard work is and aren't scared of it. They strike fear in the hungry Pinoy or Tiongs' hearts as these tough old timers, they are of different era.

The resentment towards foreigners is very typical of the local who see obstacles instead of opportunities. The population in Singapore is expected to be 7 million by 2030, a 30% growth! Fucking hell! I'm going to buy as many rental residential properties of all kinds as I can afford to take advantage of this news! Overpriced D'Leedon, here I come this weekend to take milk the easy credit despite CM7! Also a walk-up in Serangoon to convert into a worker dorm .. oops should not have said it aloud! I'm going to get some and rent it out!

January 29, 2013 1:15 pm
Singapore calls for 30% population growth

By Jeremy Grant in Singapore

Singapore’s government has laid out a vision for sustaining the tiny city-state’s economic growth, predicting that it will have to accept a continued influx of foreign workers while it tries to persuade its citizens to have more children.

In a long-awaited white paper published on Tuesday, the government forecast that its population would grow by up to 30 per cent, to 6.9m by 2030.

Of that, up to 36 per cent, or 2.5m, would have to be made up of foreign workers, or what it called “non-residents”, as Singapore tries to balance a shrinking working-age population and low birth rate with the need to have enough workers to maintain economic growth.

Yet that influx comes as Singapore’s ruling party is already grappling with one of its biggest challenges in decades: persuading a population uneasy with a growing number of foreigners and ballooning housing costs, in an country only slightly larger than London, that some level of immigration is needed to sustain the economy.

At the same time as it says it needs more foreign workers, the government has recently curbed the number of foreigners allowed to work in Singapore. Those limits – which have intensified in recent months amid popular unease and a series of hard-fought local elections – have started to hit foreign investors.

Foreign workers currently make up 28 per cent of a total population of 5.3m.

Some foreign companies have reported difficulties obtaining approval for employment passes for non-Singaporeans. The European Chamber of Commerce has just completed a survey of its members on the issue, with results expected within weeks.

The government is also trying to boost worker productivity and to encourage its citizens to have more babies, warning of a “hollowing out” of the island nation’s population if the birth rate does not rise.

Last week, it unveiled a S$2bn ($1.6bn) package of incentives to encourage people to marry and reproduce. That was a 25 per cent increase on an existing package of similar measures.

Such issues have become a challenge for the continued legitimacy of the ruling People’s Action party (PAP), after years in which Singapore’s electorate has generally rewarded the government’s management of the economy at the ballot box.

However, last weekend, the PAP suffered a shock defeat in a by-election. The PAP’s candidate lost heavily to the main opposition Workers’ Party, whose campaign blamed the government’s immigration policy for high housing prices and breakdowns on congested public transport.

The government’s white paper warns that the number of citizens aged 65 and above will triple by 2030 and the number of those of working age, between 20 and 64, would decline from 2020.

“It will become increasingly difficult to grow our workforce through our citizen population alone, unless we succeed in reversing the declining fertility trend,” the paper, produced by the office of prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, said.

A shrinking working-age population would mean “a less vibrant and innovative economy”, while companies might not find enough workers, the paper said.

“Business activity would slow, and job and employment opportunities would shrink,” it added.

Michael Wan, economist at Credit Suisse, said that with the government projecting gross domestic product growth averaging 2-4 per cent over the rest of the decade, Singapore had “set itself an ambitious target” of 2-3 per cent annual productivity growth from 2010 to 2020.