Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong responds to a question
about citizenship from a member of the audience.
How much money is a Singapore citizenship
worth?
Budget packages, GST credits, CPF top-ups, subsidies for public
housing, education, health and so on.
This slew of financial benefits offered to a Singapore citizen,
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said, is the reason why a permanent
resident from Malaysia recently decided to apply for Singapore
citizenship after living here for many years.
Speaking at Nanyang Technological University Student Union’s
Ministerial Forum, he told the crowd made up mainly of
undergraduates, “I asked her why do you need this? You are
a PR, your family is here, there is no problem.”
“She said: ‘If
you take citizenship, you get (financial)
benefits!’”
While the former American president John F. Kennedy could once
proclaim to his citizens to ‘Ask not what your country can do for
you; Ask what you can do for your country’, such patriotic
declarations today might simply drive people to immigrate elsewhere
instead.
The onslaught of globalisation has shifted today’s dynamics of
citizenship towards the people. The ease of uprooting from one
country to another has made each of us consumers in a supermarket
world of countries.
The product: Citizenship.
During the forum’s Question-and-Answer session, one
international student asked PM Lee on the benefits of becoming a
Singapore citizen.
Another haggled with PM Lee to provide affordable housing to
attract foreign talent like him to stay in Singapore.
Citing his fiancée and himself as an example, the PhD student
from China said it was hard to make Singapore his home without a
house. He could not afford a condominium, nor was he allowed to buy
a new HDB flat as both his fiancée and him were permanent
residents.
Hence, in this global fight for talent, how can
Singapore tweak its citizenship scheme into an attractive card that
a top talent would want in his or her wallet?
Show them the
money.
The lure of
low income taxes and attractive subsidies has definitely made
Singapore the destination of choice for many. Thus, PM Lee pledged at the forum to
sharpen the difference in these benefits so that “citizens come
first”.
But how different would citizenship be from a credit card
subscription then? If the choice of where to make a home boils down
to the place that gives you the most monetary benefits – then what
happens when there is no credit left?
To brand our citizenship by highlighting only its financial
benefits surely attracts the wrong kind of people.
After all, a nation is nothing more than an “imagined
community”. To tie the imagination entirely on money would mean the
people, and the country, could be gone in one economic
recession.
People should want to be citizens of
Singapore because of what they can and will do to make it their
home.
It is why the appeal of a Singapore citizenship must go
deeper. People should want to be citizens of
Singapore because of what they can and will do to make it their
home.
The
pink card in your wallet and the red passport you use to travel is
not a key to more money. Rather, it symbolises where you’re from
and who you are.
As a popular credit card advertisement puts it:
There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else,
there’s a credit card.
http://enquirer.sg/2009/09/16/singapore-citizenship-a-national-credit-card/
The Enquirer is an online newspaper
based in Nanyang Technological
University. It aims to carve out a niche in comprehensive
in-depth reporting of issues within the university.
