No blanket approach in implementation of policy
- Lianhe Zaobao (12 May 2012) : No blanket approach in implementation of policy
- Lianhe Zaobao (07 May 2012) : Care and thought needed in implementing immigration policies
No blanket approach in implementation of policy
- Lianhe Zaobao, 12 May 2012
We refer to the commentary "Care and thought needed in implementing immigration policies" (Lianhe Zaobao, 7 May 2012) by Mr Tan Kuo Hong.
2. The government pays close attention to our immigration policies. Every application for PR or Singapore citizenship is carefully evaluated on a set of comprehensive criteria, so that we take in immigrants who can contribute and integrate well into our society.
3. On the workforce front, the Manpower Ministry tightened the Employment Pass (EP) framework last year to ensure that EP holders are of suitably high calibre, add valuable expertise and complement an increasingly qualified local workforce. EP applicants are evaluated carefully on a range of factors including salary and educational qualifications. Fluency in Chinese, Japanese and English is not a skillset possessed only by non-Singaporeans.
4. We do not adopt a blanket approach, as Mr Tan asserts, and hence we contacted him to seek clarification on the case he mentioned. We discovered that Mr Tan did not have the case details and was generalising based on third-hand information on what happened to his friend’s daughter. We are awaiting further information from Mr Tan in order to investigate the specific case further.
Care and thought needed in implementing immigration policies
- Lianhe Zaobao, 07 May 2012
I have an old friend who is a Chinese citizen. Ten years ago, his daughter got a scholarship from the Japanese government to do her Masters in Japan, and she later became a Japanese citizen. As her work in Japan was closely linked to Singapore, she got to know many Singaporeans and came to like the country, so she applied to be an assistant to the general manager at a Japanese company here, a global top 500 company. She is fluent in Japanese, English and Chinese, which was just what the job required.
Alas, her work permit was recently rejected with a simple, one-line email: “We regret to inform you that your application is unsuccessful.” She felt powerless and mystified, and her Japanese employer was outraged. The employer appealed to the immigration authorities but 14 days went by with no response. My friend’s daughter – disappointed and puzzled – has since left for Canada.
This incident brings out two problems.
First, now that our previous approach of uncontrolled opening up to immigrants has led to the current situation, one feels the authorities seem to be at a loss as to what to do. To put it bluntly, the authorities’ blanket approach now, which disregards whether there are people in Singapore who can meet the specific job requirements (for example, do we have people who are fluent in Japanese, English and Chinese?), is no different from how a desperate patient would jump at any plausible remedy in sight.
Second, our government officials have long become rigidly bureaucratic. Ignoring a complaint does not seem to fit with the efficiency and work attitude we should have as a developed country – in Europe and the US, all letters have to be answered within a certain time.
We laud and support the Government’s policy of “Singaporeans First”. But the ones we should be getting rid of are the foreigners who fight for jobs by accepting wages below market rates, and whose job requirements can be easily met by the local population (such as jobs in banks, the finance industry, hotels, and food and beverage services). We should not be shutting out foreigners whose qualifications are hard to find here.
Singaporeans are reasonable and rational. There is nothing wrong with hiring foreigners for jobs where talent or labour is scarce (such as construction, as raised by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) – as long as policies are fair to us and do not make locals feel they are worse off than foreigners like before, especially in terms of scholarship and job opportunities.
If the authorities continue with their blanket approach, it is feared that instead of addressing the issue, more damage might be done to Singapore in the long run, as the negative outweighs the positive.
(The writer is a general manager of a company in Shanghai.)