Singapore welcomes foreign professionals and their families to settle and seeks to rotate less-skilled migrant workers in and out of the country. About 30 percent of the almost 3 million workers in Singapore are foreigners (including Singapore Residents), a 10-fold increase from 1970.
Migration policy welcomes the skilled and rotates the less-skilled. Foreign professionals, many from China, India, and Malaysia, arrive in Singapore with their families, achieve permanent residence status after two years, and can naturalize after two more years. Less-skilled migrants may not bring their families and do not earn an automatic right to settle in Singapore even by marrying a Singaporean citizen. Employers of low-skilled migrants are subject to dependency ceilings that regulate the mix of foreign and Singaporean workers and a significant levy or tax on the wages paid to foreign workers.
Singapore’s policy of welcoming foreign talent is echoed in the point systems used to select immigrants in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, in the US H-1B and first and second employment-based immigration preferences, and in the EU’s Blue Card. In Singapore and the other countries competing for “global talent,” a major immigration route is to arrive as a student, earn a degree, find a local job, and make the transition from foreign worker to immigrant.
Singapore in 2009 is having some of the same debates as the US. Does easy entry for foreign students and professionals discourage some local students from studying S&E, so that dependence on foreigners to fill IT and engineering jobs rises over time? Does easy access to low-skilled foreign workers slow productivity growth in construction and other jobs? What are the social costs of a large foreign presence in the economy and society? How can Singapore manage migration to achieve its goals, such as incentives for local students to study science and engineering, ensuring productivity increases despite large shares of foreign workers, and maintain a vibrant, cohesive society.
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