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.