揭秘新加坡的 PR 和公民身份种族配额

For a very long-time people living in Singapore, locals and non-locals, have long suspected that Singapore has an ethnic quota system for its immigration policy. It wasn’t until last June 2023 that these suspicions were indeed confirmed to be true when K Shanmugam, the Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Law, shared during a panel discussion on “Revisiting Pluralism” [1] at the Institute of Policy Studies that “the government has publicly committed to keeping our racial percentages more or less constant” when asked about Singapore’s immigration policy. While Singapore has a well known and established ethnic quota system in public housing, which we will discuss in more depth later, there has never really been any clear public acknowledgement of an ethnic quota system for immigration until 2023. 

In this article we delve more deeply into the ethnic quotas for immigration policy, especially for Singapore permanent residency (PR) and Singapore citizenship (SC). We begin by examining what other areas have ethnic quotas in place and what gave rise to these quotas. We then examine official immigration and population data to see how the quota system has worked over time. We then discuss how these quotas, and any discernible changes, impacts the approvals of new PRs and SCs.

How Singapore’s ethnic policy keeps communities diverse

Introduced in 1988, the government implemented the Group Representation Constituencies (GRC) system which required at least one minority candidate (either Malay, Indian, or other minorities) to be represented in each GRC team. Under Singapore’s political system, citizens are elected to parliament either through single member constituencies (SMC) or GRCs which comprise of 3 to 6 members, who contest elections together. For GRC contested seats, the entire team wins or loses together so no single person within the team can get elected by themselves in those constituencies. The GRC system was created to keep all races living together peacefully, make sure minorities are included, and avoid neighbourhoods having only one type of people.

One year later, in 1989, citing the need to root out ethnic enclaves, the government introduced the Housing Development Board (HDB[2]) Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP} to further institutionalise the ethos of racial harmony in society. Under the EIP, purchases of new and resale HDB apartments would need to comply with upper limits on the proportion of apartments that could be owned by each ethnic group within a neighbourhood[3] and apartment block level. The last published quota in 2010[4], indicated that within neighbourhoods, Chinese had a limit of 84%, Malays 22%, Indians and other minorities 12%. Within each block Chinese limits were 87%, Malays 25%, Indians and other minorities 15%.

Why does Singapore care so much about racial harmony?

The legacy of riots and independence

In Singapore's early years, racial harmony became a critical focus for the government. The scar tissue from 2 distinct periods (1964-1965 and 1969) in Singapore’s history has sharpened its focus on this issue. As Asian nations recovered and rebuilt from the devastation of World War II, calls for self-governance grew stronger. These calls eventually led to the formation of peninsula Malaysia as an independent country in 1957 as the Federation of Malaya. Then in 1963, The Federation of Malaya united with Singapore, Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak to form Greater Malaysia. Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia to gain independence from British colonial rule, to seek higher economic benefits from having a larger common market, and to combat the threat of communism in Southeast Asia. However, in 1964 the racial riots from July to September, mainly between the ethnic Chinese and Malays, led to deaths of 36 people and injuries of 560 people with thousands arrested to prevent further escalation of violence and damage to property. It was during this tumultuous period the government established Goodwill Committees across constituencies to promote racial harmony and address community concerns. In August 9, 1965, due to deep irreconcilable differences in racial, political, economic and social issues the Malaysian Parliament voted unanimously for the expulsion of Singapore. On the same day, Lee Kuan Yew announced Singapore’s independence as a sovereign state, marking the end of a brief but tragic union with Malaysia. While race was not the only issue for the separation it was a dominant concern among Singapore’s leaders at that time. For example, Singaporean leaders said Malaysia wanted a “Malay Malaysia” and not a “Malaysian Malaysia”.

A new vision of racial unity

From the pain and anguish of those years, Singapore began to embrace the idea of equality and meritocracy for its society and even led to the Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam describing Singapore as a “little United Nations in the making” in his 1965 maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly. Minster Rajaratnam would then go on to establish Singapore’s National Pledge in 1966: "We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion, to build a democratic society based on justice and equality so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation.". To this day this pledge has been recited publicly in unison at school assemblies, in Singapore armed forces and at national day gatherings.

Unfortunately, from May to June in 1969 the spillover in fear and negative sentiment from racial clashes in Malaysia sparked localised fighting in a few locations in Singapore between groups of Malays and Chinese, eventually leading to 4 deaths and 80 injuries. These tragic events would deepen the governments resolve to have a racially harmonious society.

How rigid are the ethnic quotas?

Looking over the past 10 years of immigration data there would be very little doubt to the observer that an ethnic quota is in place with hardly any variation in the ethnic groups as a % of the total resident population from year to year and even over a 10 year time frame.

Singapore resident (PR and SC) population by ethnicity

资料来源：新加坡统计局：新加坡统计局

This stands in stark contrast to Malaysia which over the same time frame has between 2x to 26x more deviation for each ethnic group. For example, in Malaysia the standard deviation of the Malay resident population over the past 10 years is about 2.51%, whereas in Singapore the same metric for Malays is on 0.1%. In relative terms, this makes Malaysia 25.6 times more volatile compared to Singapore.

Comparison of 10Y standard deviation of % total resident population across countries

Source: Department of Statistics Malaysia, Singapore Department of Statistics, E&H Immigration Consultancy

What does this mean for prospective applicants looking to become PRs or SCs?

Firstly, while it may look like the quota system is quite rigid over the past 10 years, the data over a longer period paints a different picture. For example, in the 10 years between 2004 to 2014, there was a sizeable decline of -1.9% for Chinese and increases of 0.97% and 1.52% for Indians and Other minorities, respectively. In the 10 years before this, between 1994 to 2004, the changes were also quite large with a decrease of -1.32% for Chinese and increases of 0.91% and 0.54% for Indians and other minorities, respectively.

Changes in ethnic population as % of total population over the past 30 years

Source: Singapore Department of Statistics and E&H Immigration Consultancy

Based on the older data, we can see that the immigration policy was far less restrictive and with probably a more meritocratic based system across all prospective applicants for Singapore residency meaning Indians would compete with Chinese and Malays. However, since the tightening in immigration policy in 2010, we think there is less competition of applicants across ethnic groups and more competition within ethnic groups. This means smaller ethnic groups like Indians and other minorities are more disadvantaged as the pool of grants for their ethnic group in absolute terms will be smaller.

Winners and losers of the ethnic quota system

Keeping the quotas as they are today helps Chinese people the most because their numbers have dropped the most in the past 30 years with the proportion of Chinese dropping to 73.99% in 2024 from 77.49% in 1994. This also helps the Malays as their relative size also shrunk from 1994 to 2014 but since then has increased a little to 13.52% in 2024. Based on Minister K Shanmugam’s remarks in 2023 that part of the reason for having the quota was that “Senior leaders in the Malay community have expressed that they want to keep the Malay population at around 14-15% or at least continue to remain the second largest community in Singapore.”. This would favour more leeway upwards for the Malay population. We think growth in the Malay population will likely be remain moderate as Minister K Shanmugam has also said that its hard to attract talented Malaysian and Indonesian Malays into Singapore. While on the other hand there are multitude of Chinese and Indians looking to become Singapore residents. To put some numbers behind this, there are about 25.6 million ethnic Malays in Malaysia and Indonesia, whereas there are about 1.426 billion Chinese and 1.429 billion Indians globally[5]. The Indians and other minorities probably have the worst position because the pool of prospective applicants for Singapore residency are typically orders of magnitude more than the small quota allocated for them. To put this into perspective we have estimated the 2023 breakdown of PRs and SCs granted based on the 10 year averages of the ethnic population as % of the total. As shown in the table below, the number of Indians granted citizenship (SCs) is about 2,117 while the Chinese were estimated be granted is 17,426, which is about 8.2x more than the grants for Indians. We would caveat though that the quota for Indians is probably larger and would include the other minorities also, likely following the HDB Ethnic Integration Policy quota system. But even so, the absolute number of grants is relatively small.

Estimated PR and SC granted based on ethnic quotas

Source: Singapore Department of Statistics, ICA, and E&H Immigration Consultancy

[1] https://www.facebook.com/MothershipSG/videos/spore-govt-committed-to-maintaining-racial-percentages-but-cmio-shouldnt-be-over/1288118582129078/

[2] The HDB is the government agency tasked with providing government subsidised housing for Singaporeans.

[3] In the context of HDB housing, a neighbourhood refers to a collection of HDB residential blocks within a defined geographical area. The boundaries of a neighbourhood are set by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and Housing Development Board (HDB) for planning and community purposes.

[4] https://www.sg101.gov.sg/social-national-identity/examples/hdb/

[5] This is based on 2023 UN estimates for the population of China and India. We have not included ethnic Chinese and Indians living abroad elsewhere.