“If we are not able to bring in immigrants to top up the population then we are in structural decline, and eventually the population will decline, the workforce will decline and Singapore will decline,” Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said at the Reinventing Destiny conference on Monday.
Singapore has suffered the tribulations of many other highly-developed economies, including a declining birth rate. Last month, the latest figures released by the Singaporean Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) showed that Singapore’s birth rate hit a record-low in 2022, including a 7.9% decrease in live births just from the prior year.
Indranee Rajah, who serves as Minister in the Prime Minister's Office, told a parliamentary committee at the time that the decline was in part because it was the Year of the Tiger "in the lunar calendar, which is generally associated with lower births among the Chinese," who form 74% of the country's population.
However, critics noted that the skyrocketing prices of homes in Singapore was a major factor, since it limits the ability of couples to set out on their own, requiring them to spend more of their lives saving money to get their own home.
Fertility encouragement is nothing new in the Southeast Asian city-state, which rolled out its first such policies in 1987.
About 3.5 million of Singapore’s 5.5-million-strong population are citizens, with another 500,000 classified as permanent residents and 1.45 million classified as non-residents - nearly all of whom are migrant workers, but in which foreign students are also included.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), this vast class of labor is necessary to fill roles in Singapore’s industrial sector, but is also highly prevalent in domestic work.
“Migrant domestic workers are excluded from Singapore’s main labor law, resulting in unregulated working hours,” the UN-affiliated agency wrote in a 2020 report. “Singapore does not have a minimum wage; women migrant workers are deported if found pregnant; and Singaporean employers often restrict movement of domestic workers, resulting in isolation and restricted ability to seek help when needed.”
Speaking on Monday, Wong noted that Singapore is controlling the number of immigrants who will be allowed to work.
“At the end of the day, the numbers are constrained by how much we are able to integrate the new arrivals” and how the migrants “embrace our values and way of life,” he said.
“We will not have the ability to integrate all of them into our society,” he said. “A small proportion will come in as permanent residents and it’s gated, it’s regulated. And we want to make sure that those who come in as permanent residents and eventually citizens are the ones who have the best chance to integrate into our society.”
In 2022, just 23,100 people were granted Singaporean citizenship and about 34,500 new permanent residencies were granted.