Wednesday, September 1, 2010

The Numbers Game

As I had said on several occasions, the issue of foreign workers in Singapore is a sensitive issue in Singapore. Knowing that, and with an election coming, it's no surprise that the Singapore government tried to spin numbers to their advantage. In their latest bid to pacify Singaporeans, the Singapore government released info that the population increased at its slowest pace in six years.

However I’m not so sure how “assured” Singaporeans will be by the data. According to the data released, Singapore’s population crossed five million this year and more importantly, over a third of the total population are foreigners. In a country of just over 5 million people, only 3.77 million are Singaporeans and permanent residents (PRs).

That’s 3.77 million Singaporeans and PRs (who are basically foreigners also) to 1.23 foreigners. A few years ago, there were like 5-7 Singaporeans for every foreigner in Singapore. About 2 years ago, I read that there were 4 Singaporeans for every foreigner. Now the rate of Singaporeans to foreigners is below 4 to 1. At the rate we are going, it will soon be 3 to 1 as the rise in the number of foreigners continued to outpace that of Singaporeans.

In short, these are numbers most Singaporeans will not be happy about.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Personally, i don't believe in those statistics as thay are subjective. I am pretty sure the dust has not been settled and it will become an issue of our concern during the upcoming election.

What I don't feel comfortable with is the manner in which the migrant program is being conducted. Basically, it is behind the closed doors type of structured program and majority of us are in the dark.

As we all can see, authorities are trying to put in place the damage control measures knowing of the consequence of the issue if left unchecked.

Anonymous said...

Don't forget the target is 8M. With limited land areas, building underground cities or relocation for some are their main issues.

Ghost said...

Personally I don't why these stats cannot be trusted. They look good enough, and besides if the government wanted to 'clean' up the stats, they surely could have come up with something better