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Comment by brisance | Hacker News Reader

As a Singaporean, I laugh at these low immigration numbers. 150K per year out of 9.8 million residents, that's a drop in the ocean.

According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident.

And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2]

[1] http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ [2] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapor...

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So that we are talking about the same thing, from where is the immigration coming from? Is it primarily neighboring countries with similar language, culture, and religion, or is it like Sweden where commonality in culture is the exception rather than the norm?

As of 2014, about 55% are from other South-East Asian countries. But the government has a policy of maintaining a stable "ethnic mix" which means that there are now a lot of mainland Chinese. And while I'm also Chinese by ethnicity, you can ask other ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Malaysia what they think about the nouveau riche from China. :)

Source: http://www.nptd.gov.sg/portals/0/homepage/highlights/populat...

Singapore is very different though, with a long history of immigration.

Additionally, my understanding of Singapore's immigration laws (I looked into migrating there myself a few years ago) is that it's difficult to do so for anything other than economic reasons - you have to prove you have a job offer or can contribute substantially to Singapore's economy.

You are right. As long as you can demonstrate an ability to generate income for yourself and thus by extension taxes for the government, you are welcome here.

Needless to say, this one-dimensional measure of a person's "worth" unfortunately attracts exactly the sort of pompous ass that everyone dislikes.

Edit: I re-read my post and realized it could be misconstrued to mean that you are not welcome. I apologize if this was your interpretation. I meant to say, using "economic indicators" as a basis for assessing whether an immigrant is "worthy" to join the tribe is misguided.

> 38% of the population were not born in Singapore

How many of these are out of work and lives on public welfare?

If you're a foreigner in Singapore and you are not:

a) a tourist, b) a spouse of a Singaporean, c) a student enrolled in a Singapore school, d) gainfully employed by a Singapore-registered business

Chances are pretty good you are an illegal immigrant. So to answer your question, foreigners who are out of work are deported to their country of origin at the earliest opportunity.

But that's not the problem. The growing problem is that the immigrants do not assimilate well, form their own enclaves and are hiring their own countrymen at the expense of locals. Recently there was a report where the IT and HR departments of a Singapore firm, being run by predominantly foreigners, colluded to bring in their own countrymen and discriminated against Singaporean job applicants. They received kickbacks but got caught because the Singaporean owner, being IT savvy, had been monitoring the situation and thought something was amiss in the low number of Singaporean applicants.

OP mentioned 26.8% for Sweden. That is not low compared to Singapore.

That's 26.8% that either weren't born in the country _or have at least one foreign-born parent_. That's a pretty significant difference.

I was born in Sweden and can trace my direct Swedish ancestry back at least 400 years and I still fall into that 26.8%.

Fwiw, some foreign-born numbers: 15% of the Swedish population is foreign-born. Of those, about 1/3 were born in another EU country, who are immigrants but not really what the current controversy is about (the largest single foreign-born group in Sweden are from Finland, constituting about 1.5% of the population). The remaining 10%, born outside the EU, are what "immigration politics" is mainly talking about. (The comparable figure for Denmark is a bit lower; around 5-6% of the population are born outside the EU.)

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