well there's an easy answer to that question! Singapore is a city-state that aspires to higher and higher levels of GDP. Such is ideology in Singapore. Any government that is prepared to have a 26% foreigner population in the first place - more than a quarter - is not nationalist to begin with. You with the pink card don't look too different from the other guy with the blue card.
One problem is that the government's indifference to Singaporeans is reciprocated. Foreigner students do pack up and leave. So do local students, and there are already virtually no instances where a foreign student receives more funding than a similar local student. The underlying message here is that government suspects that its own people are only slightly less likely to leave, if they can afford it. Bluntly, the only people who stay, local or foreign, have either drunk the National Education koolaid or are second-class talents (as you put it). Or are too poor to realistically emigrate, in which case the government knows you're stuck here anyway. As such, scholarships are written with the international market of students in to begin with.
I mean, they hand out President's Scholarships to PRs, without any preferential treatment for citizens. From a scholarship board designed to find new generations of civil servants to work in government. Does this really suggest any nationalism to you? At all?
This sort of cynicism tends to pervade the rest of current policy thinking. It used to be the case that PRs and foreign workers could not buy HDB flats and were also subject to many other restrictions (e.g., PRs could not leave Singapore island for the first three years or some similar rubbish). Eventually they realized that potential PRs just took this into account and didn't go to Singapore at all. And in the meanwhile Singapore was busy shedding its upper-middle class to Australia. Clearly Singapore is not as inherently attractive as it thought it was, so either Singaporeans need to be hampered more in their attempts to leave, or foreigners who deign to come at all must be offered more carrots and less sticks.
The SDP currently likes to taunt the PAP for being unable to hold on to Singaporeans, so the govt is reluctant to publish detailed emigration statistics. But emigration is roughly twice the world average, even though Singapore has the highest net migration rate in SEA. Clearly Singapore's millions of citizens don't necessarily think of Singapore as a home.
Of course the solution to such a indifferent govt is to hold a blue card =p.
I mean, the only difference is that
1. You can't be a taxi driver 2. You can't buy more than one HDB flat 3. You lose out on a few hundred dollars of "Progress Packages" 4. You can't rent those hawker stalls 5. You can't vote (hahaha)
One problem is that the government's indifference to Singaporeans is reciprocated. Foreigner students do pack up and leave. So do local students, and there are already virtually no instances where a foreign student receives more funding than a similar local student. The underlying message here is that government suspects that its own people are only slightly less likely to leave, if they can afford it. Bluntly, the only people who stay, local or foreign, have either drunk the National Education koolaid or are second-class talents (as you put it). Or are too poor to realistically emigrate, in which case the government knows you're stuck here anyway. As such, scholarships are written with the international market of students in to begin with.
I mean, they hand out President's Scholarships to PRs, without any preferential treatment for citizens. From a scholarship board designed to find new generations of civil servants to work in government. Does this really suggest any nationalism to you? At all?
This sort of cynicism tends to pervade the rest of current policy thinking. It used to be the case that PRs and foreign workers could not buy HDB flats and were also subject to many other restrictions (e.g., PRs could not leave Singapore island for the first three years or some similar rubbish). Eventually they realized that potential PRs just took this into account and didn't go to Singapore at all. And in the meanwhile Singapore was busy shedding its upper-middle class to Australia. Clearly Singapore is not as inherently attractive as it thought it was, so either Singaporeans need to be hampered more in their attempts to leave, or foreigners who deign to come at all must be offered more carrots and less sticks.
The SDP currently likes to taunt the PAP for being unable to hold on to Singaporeans, so the govt is reluctant to publish detailed emigration statistics. But emigration is roughly twice the world average, even though Singapore has the highest net migration rate in SEA. Clearly Singapore's millions of citizens don't necessarily think of Singapore as a home.
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I mean, the only difference is that
1. You can't be a taxi driver
2. You can't buy more than one HDB flat
3. You lose out on a few hundred dollars of "Progress Packages"
4. You can't rent those hawker stalls
5. You can't vote (hahaha)
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