The topic of TFR (total fertility rate) has been surfaced umpteen times and the government has also explained their position of adding immigrants to Singapore's population. However, I felt everyone is missing the whole point of the complaint. The root cause I believe is not due to the foreigners immigrating to Singapore.
Why do I say that? I have many good friends who are permanent residents (PRs) and foreigners on employment passes. They are decent folks and good friends, and some I will say are more Singaporean than the ones I know. The root of the problem is that the government is importing immigrants into Singapore before Singapore is ready for them.
What/where is the evidence? Overcrowding in public transport, strong demand for housing and primary schools. All these are evidence that we're putting the cart before the horse. Singapore is not yet ready for such a huge influx of immigrants because the backend infrastructure is still not ready.
More people are granted permanent residency before taking into account if the number of flats are sufficient to absorb such a demand. Ditto for the number of educational institutes like primary schools. Public transport system is overcrowded even when our TFR has been dropping over the years. Why? Again it did not cater for the huge population growth due to the immigrants.
The problem is not with the foreigners so let's stop focusing on that. The problem is that our infrastructure is just not ready for such a huge explosive population growth. Drawing an analogy, what happens if you take a standard HDB block with about 160 households and only give them one lift for the entire block?
You'll be mad. A no brainer.
3 comments:
Having a big squeeze in housing, transport, health services and others is good for GLCs' bottom line and government revenue. Just think of the COE, ERP, land sales, hospital charges and transport companies' profits and the GDP growth. They get good bonus and salary increase while you die, it's your business.
They used to claim that they brought in FTs to create jobs for Sinkies, now they go one up bettter, FTs will look after Sinkies in old age! They forgot that one of their minions was touting JB as affordable paradise for your parents.
Saycheese
Just imagine you have someone in your team. Not performing, causing you to cover for this member, adding onto your workload. Will you want such a member on your team? Personally, I have seen both foreigners and Singaporeans being in that role.
Therefore to me, if you see foreigners occupying most of the jobs in a particular organization and they are not performing, causing others to cover for them, then the problem is with the boss of that organization, and not with the policies.
I would then suggest finding another company that treasure your talents.
I do agree that the policies for immigration seems to be lax previously but I felt that it had improved since 2010. Were we taken for a ride previously? Obviously and we were treated as noise. However, I felt that steps were taken though to address that. I just hope it's not a temporary post election syndrome.
I believe the big squeeze was the overzealous effort of improving productivity. This word is quite overused and does not take into account quality. I prefer quality work instead of productive work.
Why no emphasize on quality. Difficult to measure I guess.
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