On Thursday (16 Jan), it was reported that Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing told the media that of the nearly 60,000 new jobs created for the locals between 2015 and 2018, about 50,000 went to Singaporeans and more than 9,000 went to permanent residents (PRs).
This works out to about 5 Singaporeans to one PR, which is close to the local workforce ratio of 6 Singaporeans to one PR, he said.
The topic of the breakdown of jobs among Singaporeans, PRs and foreigners has been in the spotlight since WP chief Pritam Singh raised a question on the matter in Parliament about two weeks ago.
And with regard to foreign PMETs working in Singapore, according to MOM’s foreign workforce numbers, the number of foreign PMETs on EP and S-Pass increased from 349,000 to 381,300 in the same 4 years.
That is, there was a net increase of 32,300 of foreign PMETs from 2015 to 2018.
Total of 87K Singapore citizenship granted to foreigners
Meanwhile, according to official statistics released 4 months ago (25 Sep 2019), the number of Singapore citizenship granted was the highest in at least 11 years, based on the annual Population in Brief report.
Singapore’s population grew by 1.2 per cent to reach 5.7 million in June 2019.
Singapore grants between 15,000 and 25,000 new citizenship a year “to individuals who are committed to making Singapore their home”, said the report, which is published by the Prime Minister’s Office Strategy Group.
“Immigration helps to moderate the impact of ageing and low birth rates in our citizen population, and keeps it from shrinking over the longer term,” it said.
From the data provided, a total of 125,564 PRs and 87,453 Singapore citizenship were granted by the Singapore government to foreigners from 2015 to 2018.
Of the 50,000 new jobs mentioned by Chan to have gone to Singaporeans, he did not mention how many went to the native Singaporeans vs the newly minted citizens.
