Singaporeans clearly don't understand how immigration works
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Title : Singaporeans clearly don't understand how immigration works
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You are now reading the article Singaporeans clearly don't understand how immigration works With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/06/singaporeans-clearly-dont-understand.html
Title : Singaporeans clearly don't understand how immigration works
link : Singaporeans clearly don't understand how immigration works
newstoday-ok.blogspot.com ~I have had another rush of traffic to my blog because of a discussion on the HWZ-EDMW forum about renouncing one's citizenship and then returning to Singapore to work as a foreigner. I don't even know why you're asking such a question in the first place as such a route is highly irregular to say the least and even though my career did take me back to Singapore in 2011 (hence the birth of this blog back then), allow me to state a few facts for you Singaporeans contemplating this route. Unless you have actually done a serious amount of research to look into just how incredibly hard it is to get hold of a passport from a desirable country in the West (such as Canada, Australia, NZ, USA, UK, Germany, France etc), well, you wouldn't be asking such questions in the first place.
Nice countries in the West only want very highly skilled migrants, not uneducated losers.
Need I state the obvious? If you want to move to a country like Australia for example, you need to score enough points on their immigration system in order to even secure a work permit. They only want highly skilled migrants who can contribute to their economy, not losers who can't even build a decent career in their home countries. So if you're a fully qualified doctor, sure, no problem, you can move to any country you like. But if you're a loser who can't find a job, then no country in the world would offer you any kind of residency. Indeed, in light of the election of president Trump and Brexit, immigration to the UK and US has become a lot harder for those who are not extremely highly skilled or fabulously wealthy. Sure there are loopholes in the system - many Filipino nurses have secured British citizenship by working many years in our NHS system and you can always do the "Mrs Trump" route: simply marry someone from the country of your choice but make sure that s/he is rich enough to support you, don't marry a penniless loser or you will get locked out of the immigration system (reference: the Irene Clennell case).
But wait, if you are a highly skilled professional, then...
Highly skilled professionals earn a lot of money - oh yeah, with a lot of money, you can have a very good life in Singapore. You can live in a very nice condo, go shopping in the nicest places in town, dine in the finest restaurants everyday and take plenty of holidays to exotic Asian locations. Long weekend in Boracay anyone? If you fall ill, just go to a private clinic at Gleneagles or Mt Elizabeth hospital. If you earn that much money, then you will simply treat your CPF payments as just another tax that you have to pay. Those very rich Singaporeans who have a very high standard of living in Singapore really have little to complain about - it would be those who are struggling to make ends meet, living with their parents in a crowded HDB flat even into their 40s who do have a bone to pick with the government. Ironically, the people who most want to leave are the ones least able to leave: the ones most able to leave are the ones with the least incentive or reason to want to leave. I suspect the people on HWZ-EDMW belong to the latter group.
And even if you do leave...
Say you do get yourself into a trade that will help you obtain a work permit to work in the West, you have to work several years there before you can even apply for permanent residency status or citizenship. For the UK, after working 5 years here, you can apply for permanent residency status and after 7 years, you can apply for citizenship. In Australia, you need to work there for 4 years to get PR then another one year to get citizenship (so that's 5 years in total for Australia). In the US, it takes a lot longer than that. But say you take the UK route, after having worked 7 years in the UK in a highly skilled profession, in that time, you would have a useful network of professional contacts - clients, potential employers, former and current employees, colleagues, other useful contacts who are vital to your career. By the same token, after having been away from Singapore for 7 years, you would have lost contact with most of the useful people in your professional circle. Social media makes it a bit easier these days of course, but it is hard to keep a relationship meaningful from several time zones away. Returning to Singapore after a prolonged absence of 7 years make it incredibly hard to re-enter the job market in an Asian society where relationships (aka 关系) are so important - you're practically starting from scratch all over again after such a long absence; not to mention you're giving up a meaningful, useful network of professional contacts built up in the last 7 years in the UK. Thus those who have left tend to stay in their new country of choice for that very practical reason: you don't want to sabotage your career by starting all over again in Singapore after a period of prolonged absence. And by the same token, if you are sincere about building a solid career in Singapore, why would you want to spend such a long time away from Singapore? It just makes no sense at all.
It is far harder to carve a career so many time zones away.
I came to the UK as a scholar back in 1997 - upon graduation, I wanted to stay on in the UK and get a job - oh boy, now compare what I went through to what my sisters went through. My sisters were able to harness the full network of our entire family including older cousins and their friends to use their connections to secure interviews and negotiate pay deals through back channels. I had none of that as a foreigner in the UK and my friends at university were no help - it was infinitely harder for me to get my first job than my sisters in Singapore who managed to get their first jobs through our extended family network. Heck, when my sister fell ill during her time at NUS, the entire family took such good care of her. When I became hospitalized with a serious eye infection in my first term at university, I was completely on my own. Need I state the obvious? If you think life in the West is easy, you're completely wrong - life in Singapore isn't perfect but at least you do have the precious support of your extended family if you ever needed help. Such is the Asian culture there, you can always rely on your family and your friends - well, I had to start from scratch in the UK and it was through sheer determination and a lot of luck that I have become as successful and rich as I have today. If you can't make it in Singapore where you grew up, surrounded by the support network of extended family, don't even think about starting afresh abroad. Learn to crawl before you think about running.
Why are Singaporeans even contemplating this then?
I don't think most Singaporeans even have the slightest clue how complex and difficult it is to emigrate to the West! It is a process that often takes many, many years. Even if you do marry a national from that country, you're still not guaranteed residency there. Some Singaporeans probably imagine it is as simple as filling up a couple of forms and then you get your passport on arrival; whereupon they can get on the next flight back to Singapore as a foreigner - no it does not work like that at all. Sure there are some countries who are selling citizenship to very rich investors, but you usually need to invest a lot of money in that country before they will hand you a passport. That is a route taken by rich Chinese and Russian millionaires keen to start a new life abroad, but unless you're a millionaire, you can forget it. US$250,000 gets you a St Kitts & Nevis passport, but spend a bit more and you can get a Maltese passport at 1.15 million euros (and hey, Malta is in the EU). But if you are that rich, then life in Singapore would be pretty sweet. So it is really not a question of whether or not you can return to live/work in Singapore as a foreigner, but rather why you would do that? Either you like Singapore (in which case, just take the good with the bad and get on with life there) or leave and don't return.
And if you don't like Singapore, the answer is obvious.
Sure there are plenty of reasons why you may not be happy in Singapore, I have written a long piece on that already - the answer then is pretty simple and obvious: just leave and seek greener pastures elsewhere. You may enjoy living in a different country, working in a totally different culture - a change of scene may be exactly what you need to feel happier. So many Singaporeans have done that, left and settled elsewhere - once they have happily put down their roots in another country, they promptly forget about ever returning to Singapore. After all, why would you give up a happy, successful life in your new country only to return to Singapore where you are never guaranteed that you will achieve the same level of success? And by the same token, if you are indeed happy and successful in Singapore, then why would you want to leave in the first place? It just doesn't make much sense at all to establish yourself successfully in another country over a period of like 5 to 7 years, only to give it all up to return to Singapore as a foreigner. It makes no sense - I did it for a short while in 2011 but only because the company I was working for then sent me there for a short stint. I certainly did not 'return' to Singapore, hell no. Companies do send employees abroad for a period from time to time - it really isn't that uncommon. I just happened to have been sent to work in Singapore for the company (a Luxembourg based company) for a while, that's all. That doesn't tantamount to 'returning' to Singapore. I spent a few months in Singapore and then promptly returned to London.
Making your mind up really isn't that hard.
Given the amount of time it takes to obtain PR status in another country, you have to spend quite a few years working there as an expatriate. After a few years there (4 years in Australia, 5 years in the UK), then you can apply to get PR status. But by then, surely you'll have a very good idea whether or not life in your new country is working out for you. You probably wouldn't spend 20 years being married to someone before realizing, oh shit this isn't working out, s/he isn't right for me and then you get a divorce - nor would you spend 10 years working in a company before realizing you're utterly miserable there and only then do you think about looking for a new job. You will have a very good idea whether you are happy or not, it's not the kind of complex question you need to spend years searching for the answer. Imagine you're at the stage of your life whereby you've worked abroad for a few years after having grown up in Singapore, if I were to ask you the questions, "where would you be happier? Do you want to return to Singapore or settle down for good in your new country? Are you happy with your life now or do you want to return to Singapore?" These aren't hard questions to answer - making your mind up based on these simple questions about your happiness is actually really quite simple. Either you are happy in Singapore and want to grow old there, or you say, no I would rather be happier abroad. It is one of the other - returning to Singapore as an expatriate is a really bizarre compromise.
There is little (if anything) to be gained by returning to Singapore.
Why would one want to return to Singapore after working a few years abroad anyway? Let me tell you about my friend Mr D (one of my readers here in fact) - he gave up a good job in America to return to Singapore because his mother has been diagnosed with cancer. He wanted to spend more time with her as she was undergoing treatment - that's a totally understandable and quite noble decision on his part. He suffered a lot from the decision and is worse off than he was in America - having left behind a valuable network of professional contacts in the US, he is now doing a job that he is overqualified for and earning a lot less than in the US (not to mention longer working hours). Furthermore, he no longer can afford a car in Singapore and lives in a much smaller flat than when he was in America. Financially and economically, he is worse off in every single way than in America and of course he was aware of the high price to pay to return to Singapore. I suppose as a filial son with a good relationship with his mother, he is willing to give up a much better, much more comfortable life in America just to be with her in this difficult time. But if you take his mother out of the equation, then it would make no sense at all for Mr D to want to return to Singapore when you have everything to lose and nothing to gain?
You're looking at this the wrong way round.
We all want a better life of course. We want to earn more money, we want job security, we want to be well liked, we want to be happy and successful, we want a good work-life balance, we not only want to be rich but have the time to spend that money doing fun things like going on nice holidays rather than working so had you have no time to even see your friends. Would getting another citizenship and then returning to work in Singapore somehow give you everything you want? No, clearly, it wouldn't. The fact is so many of the factors that determine how successful you are lie in your very own hands: you cannot depend on the government of your country to make you successful. No, you have to make yourself successful and take responsibility for your own destiny. You can find rich people in the poorest countries in Africa, you can also go to somewhere like Japan or Switzerland and still find poor people struggling to make ends meet. Simply changing your nationality isn't going to fundamentally change your fate: if you really want to do something to improve your lot in life, then let's talk about more pragmatic issues like your education, your training, how you can get a better job, how you can earn more money and get that promotion. Of course, those are bloody difficult issues - simplifying it to one's nationality is naive because you then expect things to magically get better once you arrive in another country. I have just written a long piece about how screwed the poor, working class in the UK are - the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence, how green your patch of grass is depends on how good a gardener you are.
Okay so that's it from me on this topic. My final advice is for you guys to seek proper, professional advice instead of wasting your time talking to people on those forums. I am just appalled at people who pass off half-truths and hearsay as 'advice' on these forums when they really have no freaking clue what the facts are and they just continue to mislead each other - I can only shake my head in despair when I look at the quality of the discussion on this topic. Good grief. Never mind the broken English, the fact is so much of the information about immigration rules are available online on government websites - instead of trying to seek answers online, why not turn turn to Google and look up the information you need from a reliable source? That forum page was nothing short of the blind leading the blind, people who don't know what they are talking about confusing each other. Is it too much to ask you young people to use Google to look up the facts? Many thanks for reading.
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| Do you have any idea how complex and difficult immigration is? |
Nice countries in the West only want very highly skilled migrants, not uneducated losers.
Need I state the obvious? If you want to move to a country like Australia for example, you need to score enough points on their immigration system in order to even secure a work permit. They only want highly skilled migrants who can contribute to their economy, not losers who can't even build a decent career in their home countries. So if you're a fully qualified doctor, sure, no problem, you can move to any country you like. But if you're a loser who can't find a job, then no country in the world would offer you any kind of residency. Indeed, in light of the election of president Trump and Brexit, immigration to the UK and US has become a lot harder for those who are not extremely highly skilled or fabulously wealthy. Sure there are loopholes in the system - many Filipino nurses have secured British citizenship by working many years in our NHS system and you can always do the "Mrs Trump" route: simply marry someone from the country of your choice but make sure that s/he is rich enough to support you, don't marry a penniless loser or you will get locked out of the immigration system (reference: the Irene Clennell case).
But wait, if you are a highly skilled professional, then...
Highly skilled professionals earn a lot of money - oh yeah, with a lot of money, you can have a very good life in Singapore. You can live in a very nice condo, go shopping in the nicest places in town, dine in the finest restaurants everyday and take plenty of holidays to exotic Asian locations. Long weekend in Boracay anyone? If you fall ill, just go to a private clinic at Gleneagles or Mt Elizabeth hospital. If you earn that much money, then you will simply treat your CPF payments as just another tax that you have to pay. Those very rich Singaporeans who have a very high standard of living in Singapore really have little to complain about - it would be those who are struggling to make ends meet, living with their parents in a crowded HDB flat even into their 40s who do have a bone to pick with the government. Ironically, the people who most want to leave are the ones least able to leave: the ones most able to leave are the ones with the least incentive or reason to want to leave. I suspect the people on HWZ-EDMW belong to the latter group.
 |
| Those who have the most reason to least are least able to. |
And even if you do leave...
Say you do get yourself into a trade that will help you obtain a work permit to work in the West, you have to work several years there before you can even apply for permanent residency status or citizenship. For the UK, after working 5 years here, you can apply for permanent residency status and after 7 years, you can apply for citizenship. In Australia, you need to work there for 4 years to get PR then another one year to get citizenship (so that's 5 years in total for Australia). In the US, it takes a lot longer than that. But say you take the UK route, after having worked 7 years in the UK in a highly skilled profession, in that time, you would have a useful network of professional contacts - clients, potential employers, former and current employees, colleagues, other useful contacts who are vital to your career. By the same token, after having been away from Singapore for 7 years, you would have lost contact with most of the useful people in your professional circle. Social media makes it a bit easier these days of course, but it is hard to keep a relationship meaningful from several time zones away. Returning to Singapore after a prolonged absence of 7 years make it incredibly hard to re-enter the job market in an Asian society where relationships (aka 关系) are so important - you're practically starting from scratch all over again after such a long absence; not to mention you're giving up a meaningful, useful network of professional contacts built up in the last 7 years in the UK. Thus those who have left tend to stay in their new country of choice for that very practical reason: you don't want to sabotage your career by starting all over again in Singapore after a period of prolonged absence. And by the same token, if you are sincere about building a solid career in Singapore, why would you want to spend such a long time away from Singapore? It just makes no sense at all.
It is far harder to carve a career so many time zones away.
I came to the UK as a scholar back in 1997 - upon graduation, I wanted to stay on in the UK and get a job - oh boy, now compare what I went through to what my sisters went through. My sisters were able to harness the full network of our entire family including older cousins and their friends to use their connections to secure interviews and negotiate pay deals through back channels. I had none of that as a foreigner in the UK and my friends at university were no help - it was infinitely harder for me to get my first job than my sisters in Singapore who managed to get their first jobs through our extended family network. Heck, when my sister fell ill during her time at NUS, the entire family took such good care of her. When I became hospitalized with a serious eye infection in my first term at university, I was completely on my own. Need I state the obvious? If you think life in the West is easy, you're completely wrong - life in Singapore isn't perfect but at least you do have the precious support of your extended family if you ever needed help. Such is the Asian culture there, you can always rely on your family and your friends - well, I had to start from scratch in the UK and it was through sheer determination and a lot of luck that I have become as successful and rich as I have today. If you can't make it in Singapore where you grew up, surrounded by the support network of extended family, don't even think about starting afresh abroad. Learn to crawl before you think about running.
I don't think most Singaporeans even have the slightest clue how complex and difficult it is to emigrate to the West! It is a process that often takes many, many years. Even if you do marry a national from that country, you're still not guaranteed residency there. Some Singaporeans probably imagine it is as simple as filling up a couple of forms and then you get your passport on arrival; whereupon they can get on the next flight back to Singapore as a foreigner - no it does not work like that at all. Sure there are some countries who are selling citizenship to very rich investors, but you usually need to invest a lot of money in that country before they will hand you a passport. That is a route taken by rich Chinese and Russian millionaires keen to start a new life abroad, but unless you're a millionaire, you can forget it. US$250,000 gets you a St Kitts & Nevis passport, but spend a bit more and you can get a Maltese passport at 1.15 million euros (and hey, Malta is in the EU). But if you are that rich, then life in Singapore would be pretty sweet. So it is really not a question of whether or not you can return to live/work in Singapore as a foreigner, but rather why you would do that? Either you like Singapore (in which case, just take the good with the bad and get on with life there) or leave and don't return.
And if you don't like Singapore, the answer is obvious.
Sure there are plenty of reasons why you may not be happy in Singapore, I have written a long piece on that already - the answer then is pretty simple and obvious: just leave and seek greener pastures elsewhere. You may enjoy living in a different country, working in a totally different culture - a change of scene may be exactly what you need to feel happier. So many Singaporeans have done that, left and settled elsewhere - once they have happily put down their roots in another country, they promptly forget about ever returning to Singapore. After all, why would you give up a happy, successful life in your new country only to return to Singapore where you are never guaranteed that you will achieve the same level of success? And by the same token, if you are indeed happy and successful in Singapore, then why would you want to leave in the first place? It just doesn't make much sense at all to establish yourself successfully in another country over a period of like 5 to 7 years, only to give it all up to return to Singapore as a foreigner. It makes no sense - I did it for a short while in 2011 but only because the company I was working for then sent me there for a short stint. I certainly did not 'return' to Singapore, hell no. Companies do send employees abroad for a period from time to time - it really isn't that uncommon. I just happened to have been sent to work in Singapore for the company (a Luxembourg based company) for a while, that's all. That doesn't tantamount to 'returning' to Singapore. I spent a few months in Singapore and then promptly returned to London.
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| What have you got to gain by staying in Singapore when you're not happy? |
Making your mind up really isn't that hard.
Given the amount of time it takes to obtain PR status in another country, you have to spend quite a few years working there as an expatriate. After a few years there (4 years in Australia, 5 years in the UK), then you can apply to get PR status. But by then, surely you'll have a very good idea whether or not life in your new country is working out for you. You probably wouldn't spend 20 years being married to someone before realizing, oh shit this isn't working out, s/he isn't right for me and then you get a divorce - nor would you spend 10 years working in a company before realizing you're utterly miserable there and only then do you think about looking for a new job. You will have a very good idea whether you are happy or not, it's not the kind of complex question you need to spend years searching for the answer. Imagine you're at the stage of your life whereby you've worked abroad for a few years after having grown up in Singapore, if I were to ask you the questions, "where would you be happier? Do you want to return to Singapore or settle down for good in your new country? Are you happy with your life now or do you want to return to Singapore?" These aren't hard questions to answer - making your mind up based on these simple questions about your happiness is actually really quite simple. Either you are happy in Singapore and want to grow old there, or you say, no I would rather be happier abroad. It is one of the other - returning to Singapore as an expatriate is a really bizarre compromise.
There is little (if anything) to be gained by returning to Singapore.
Why would one want to return to Singapore after working a few years abroad anyway? Let me tell you about my friend Mr D (one of my readers here in fact) - he gave up a good job in America to return to Singapore because his mother has been diagnosed with cancer. He wanted to spend more time with her as she was undergoing treatment - that's a totally understandable and quite noble decision on his part. He suffered a lot from the decision and is worse off than he was in America - having left behind a valuable network of professional contacts in the US, he is now doing a job that he is overqualified for and earning a lot less than in the US (not to mention longer working hours). Furthermore, he no longer can afford a car in Singapore and lives in a much smaller flat than when he was in America. Financially and economically, he is worse off in every single way than in America and of course he was aware of the high price to pay to return to Singapore. I suppose as a filial son with a good relationship with his mother, he is willing to give up a much better, much more comfortable life in America just to be with her in this difficult time. But if you take his mother out of the equation, then it would make no sense at all for Mr D to want to return to Singapore when you have everything to lose and nothing to gain?
 |
| Mr D had a terribly hard decision to make. |
You're looking at this the wrong way round.
We all want a better life of course. We want to earn more money, we want job security, we want to be well liked, we want to be happy and successful, we want a good work-life balance, we not only want to be rich but have the time to spend that money doing fun things like going on nice holidays rather than working so had you have no time to even see your friends. Would getting another citizenship and then returning to work in Singapore somehow give you everything you want? No, clearly, it wouldn't. The fact is so many of the factors that determine how successful you are lie in your very own hands: you cannot depend on the government of your country to make you successful. No, you have to make yourself successful and take responsibility for your own destiny. You can find rich people in the poorest countries in Africa, you can also go to somewhere like Japan or Switzerland and still find poor people struggling to make ends meet. Simply changing your nationality isn't going to fundamentally change your fate: if you really want to do something to improve your lot in life, then let's talk about more pragmatic issues like your education, your training, how you can get a better job, how you can earn more money and get that promotion. Of course, those are bloody difficult issues - simplifying it to one's nationality is naive because you then expect things to magically get better once you arrive in another country. I have just written a long piece about how screwed the poor, working class in the UK are - the grass isn't greener on the other side of the fence, how green your patch of grass is depends on how good a gardener you are.
Okay so that's it from me on this topic. My final advice is for you guys to seek proper, professional advice instead of wasting your time talking to people on those forums. I am just appalled at people who pass off half-truths and hearsay as 'advice' on these forums when they really have no freaking clue what the facts are and they just continue to mislead each other - I can only shake my head in despair when I look at the quality of the discussion on this topic. Good grief. Never mind the broken English, the fact is so much of the information about immigration rules are available online on government websites - instead of trying to seek answers online, why not turn turn to Google and look up the information you need from a reliable source? That forum page was nothing short of the blind leading the blind, people who don't know what they are talking about confusing each other. Is it too much to ask you young people to use Google to look up the facts? Many thanks for reading.
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You are now reading the article Singaporeans clearly don't understand how immigration works With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/06/singaporeans-clearly-dont-understand.html