Why Singaporeans need to generate more babies
The most common reasons cited by Singaporeans for not wanting to have more children are that they are too busy with building a career and that it is expensive to raise kids in Singapore. It is clear that economic realities of living in modern day Singapore makes couples think a lot more about having kids. However, the other costs of a low national fertility rate to the native Singaporean is much higher.
The main reason is simple. Low birth rates means that the government will continue to be more liberal in allowing foreigners to come here as PRs or citizens. And, unlike the times of our forefathers, Singapore today is unlikely to allow the naturalization the peasant, the construction worker or the cleaning lady. The Singapore government wants talents, or in the absence of talent, rich people.
The natural result is that native Singaporeans get squeezed in the job markets and the housing markets. Young Singaporeans like myself are now squeezed particularly hard in the housing markets because these PRs or new citizens come in either not knowing the local real estate market or having too much cash to burn, start offering high prices for property, driving property prices upwards. As for the employment landscape, that doesn’t need much explaining; it’s a demand and supply problem.
It’s not just the jobs and ever rising property prices. Later on, the kids of native Singaporeans are going to face fiercer competition for good Singaporean schools. Parents will have to end up forking more money for tuition classes and other enrichment classes to improve the odds of their kids getting into a good school. The PRs and new citizens will probably do the same thing too, so the only winners will be tuition teachers.
I am not against a liberal immigration policy, nor is this blog entry intended to engender any form of discrimination against PRs or new citizens. In fact, I like a more diverse Singapore, but the speed at which we are allowing immigration in order to counter low birth rates is certainly detrimental to native Singaporeans, especially those on the lower rungs of the education ladder or the workforce, and the best solution is to bring Singapore’s fertility levels back up.
So, if you want your kid to have a better chance of going into a good school in future, to have more affordable HDB flats and to get good jobs, do him or her a favour by giving your kid a few more brothers and sisters.
You seem to be a reasonably intelligent young man…
Yet you seem to think bringing in a 35 year old technician or a 40 year old cleaner is a logical alternative to a lack of babies!!! Common sense would tell you that if we are short of babies, we need to import babies. We are certainly not short of 30-40 year olds!
The birth rate in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s when those 30 and 40 year old “foreign talent” were born was one of the highest in the world! KKWCH had the world record for the highest number of babies born in one hospital in 1966.
The low birth rate has nothing to do with the “foreign talent” policy unless you are referring to the ethnic quotas.
Do not fall into the trap of mixing the two up
Hi Paul,
You will disagree, but I do think that a significant reason behind more liberal immigration policies is because we are not producing enough Singaporeans as ‘fuel’ for our economic engine. If our birth rates were not that low to begin with, there would be much more young, native adult Singaporeans and there will be a less compelling reason to bring in foreigners.
Besides, if we lack babies, it doesn’t make sense to just bring in babies. Who’s going to take care of them? Of course you want to bring in parents with lots of young kids.
Isn’t there a free rider problem to your proposed solution?
Hi Ringisei,
An early Merry Xmas to you!
You are right; there’s a free rider problem. But thinking about it, can we have a real life situation where there’s no free rider problem? Probably not.
In anycase, the government probably has enough money to burn such that the free rider issue isn’t one that’s too big. I think the bigger concern is PRs and new citizens flush with cash and coming in to spend them pretty indiscriminately compared to native Singaporeans, thus squeezing us.
I’m not quite sure if I answered you sufficiently, so please do follow up if I didn’t.