At last night’s national day rally, the PM Lee Hsien Loong had quite a number of things to announce. While the main attention has been given to 377A, PM Lee also made quite a statement about giving more focus on attracting foreign talent.
Talking about how Germany and UK are also trying to court more foreign talent, he says that “Singapore cannot afford to be creamed off or left behind”.
Singapore needs to attract the right foreign talent.
For the past few years, Singapore has already been actively trying to attract “talent” from abroad. With initiatives like CECA, Singaporeans have already been complaining about losing their jobs to foreigners.
Moreover, because of some “talents” that we have been attracting, Singaporeans have been getting bullied even outside the workplace. That is because these “talents” and “sovereigns” choose to bring their own culture and bad habits here, instead of trying to assimilate and adapt. Some of them even got to become Singapore citizens (see Erramalli Ramesh and Pi Jiapeng).
Singapore also needs to develop and keep our own talents.
We need to think about why talented Singaporeans are leaving for opportunities abroad. We also need to consider the Singaporeans that we are not helping to develop here.
In the past, our government used the excuse of not having talents in the tech industry here to bring in expats. It has been many years since then, and batches of tech graduates have already left school. Where are they and what are they doing? Why are they not prioritized?
Singapore really needs to rethink its foreign talent policy, and not blindly follow bigger nations. We are not Germany, we are not UK. We need to realize that.
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