MM Lee has a very upbeat assessment regarding the foreign talent policy. He feels that even if just 30 percent to 40 percent of foreign talents who come into Singapore eventually stay, Singapore would benefit tremendously.

Well, that is a fair statement to make except that I don’t exactly have the necessary statistics to agree with him. Do we actually have such a high rate of foreign talents who choose to make Singapore their home, or do most of the foreign talents take Singapore as a nice, sheltered parking lot?

Besides, is it easier to convince a foreign talent to make Singapore their home, or is it easier to convince local talents not to make somewhere else their home? The CIA World Factbook stated Singapore’s net migration rate in 2002 to be an estimated 26.11 migrants per 1,000 population. It’s a sobering figure.

Of those, this figure appears to be extraordinarily high and I have no idea how it’s computed but there is no doubt that a good deal of Singaporeans are giving up their pink ICs and red passports. I have to say that I do not know the exact demographics of Singaporeans who migrated but I do think they are probably highly-educated, talented folks who are either attracted to better opportunities elsewhere or are just too sick and tired of life in Singapore. If you are not highly-educated nor talented enough, you are probably too busy with just making ends meet, let alone consider migration.

It’s perhaps much more effective to stem the emigration rate compared to increasing immigration rate and hoping immigrants will stay. Those who choose to emigrate probably lived in Singapore for a large part of their life. They would have made many friends here and they probably have many cherished memories of times in Singapore too. Would it be easier to persuade these people to stay compared to foreigners who are new to Singapore shores? The foreign talents probably feel more of an emotional attachment to their own hometown than to Singapore.

One might argue that Singapore is a state made up of immigrants and that if my logic above holds, there should be no Singapore today. That may be true, but the immigrants of yesteryear are usually poor and less educated than immigrants of today. The modern Singaporean immigrant is highly educated, probably well-to-do and certainly very mobile. It will take much more to convince these people to stay compared to the immigrants of the past.

However, encouraging Singaporeans not to emigrate is not exactly easy either. While emotional ties might be a useful leveraging tool, there’s only so much that can be leveraged without corresponding tangible actions addressing the reasons why these Singaporeans choose to migrate. Sometimes, it might not be in the interest of the government to address these issues. Perhaps the key consideration for the government really isn’t a question of whether it is more effective to attract foreign talent or retain local talent but rather, which option doesn’t disrupt the status quo.