Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong made an important speech at a dinner hosted by various Indian organisations in Singapore on Jan 11.
“Immigrants and foreign workers raise political sensitivities in many societies,” he noted. “Singapore relies heavily on them to top up our population base and talent pool.”
Then he made a key point: “Therefore, we must manage the inflow and integration of new arrivals with the utmost sensitivity and caution, to ensure that the flows are balanced and sustainable. But we must also stand firmly against nativism and xenophobia, and welcome the new arrivals to become part of our extended family.”
As I read his speech, three things struck me. First, the issue of balance.
Balance, to me, would mean maintaining the equilibrium of interests that has been struck – and must be preserved – between the needs and aspirations of settled Singaporeans and those of arriving immigrants. The balance involves not just raw numbers but also how immigrants affect the employment, educational, healthcare and housing prospects of existing Singaporeans.
Second, the issue of sustainability. For a balance to be sustainable, it must be upheld by its key stakeholders. For immigrant stakeholders, the key need is for them to not import their ethnic instincts, impulses and affiliations into Singapore. Immigrants owe it to their prospects here to ensure they do not replicate the sharp religious and racial distinctions and practices that they accepted in their home countries.
This country has struck a fine multiracial and multi-religious balance among its many communities. It is a man-made balance, created by wise leaders and intelligent citizens over decades, that is seen in a range of integrative policies at work across realms that stretch from public housing to national service.
What is made can be unmade. Singaporeans simply will not allow arriving foreigners to dismantle, in however small, incremental and seemingly innocuous ways, the architecture of multiracial peace-based economic prosperity that defines this nation.
This is not to say that immigrants need to cease what they were in their home countries so as to find their place in this host country. Absolutely not. The strength of Singapore is that its social system is integrative but not assimilationist. Had it been so, immigrants would have had to join locals in becoming honorary Chinese because the Chinese form the majority. Indians arriving in Singapore remain Indians.
However, arriving Indians in Singapore, like people arriving from anywhere else, would need to understand that they have to become a part of a new national balance. The onus falls on immigrants therefore to not seek to co-opt the balance into old ways of thinking that reflect the imperatives of their original nations.
Third, Singaporeans are the other, and most important, stakeholders in this integrative process. Xenophobia would help no one because Singapore needs people from abroad to ensure its demographic and economic heft. Without that heft, it simply cannot punch above its weight in world affairs. Without that heft, this place would be poorer for all, particularly its citizens.
It is in that spirit of enlightened self-interest that citizens need to reach out to arriving foreigners to tell them that they made the right choice in coming to Singapore. Some of those citizens, and certainly many of their forefathers, were themselves immigrants once. The same logic of history that brought them here has brought in new immigrants.
The good news is that immigration and integration are working well on the whole. Since the arrival of Stamford Raffles in 1819 to found contemporary Singapore, proto-Singaporeans and their descendants have developed what are called “habits of the heart” that make it possible for them to see foreigners not as inevitable intruders but as potential neighbours. That capacity has served succeeding generations of Singaporeans well.
The key point, though, is that foreigners have become Singaporeans. Singapore has not become a foreign land to its own. It is this historical logic that needs to be managed with the utmost sensitivity and caution as newer immigrants seek to make Singapore home.
