Economic cleansing by Gilbert Goh

Below is the first part of a long article by Gilbert Goh on the grave changes in our socio, economic and political landscape. I will post the other parts as a series.

I seldom felt so enraged when I received emails from our readers until I received one from Francisthe other day.

Francis wrote how he was ousted from his company – a global Fortune 500 conglomerate, by a foreigner Indian IT director from India. He is now happily resettled in Melbourne – one of the tens of thousands of Singaporeans forced by the recent economical circumstances to relocate elsewhere in search of greener pasture.

What irked me was how easily the Indian IT director could replace our own local executives, without any repercussion, with his own people from India. Something is wrong with our human resource policy here and so far the ministry of manpower has kept quiet about this hiring discrimination….

Economic cleansing being practised here?

Though we may not have entered into such grotesque activity yet, the signs are there and its pretty ominous.

Nevertheless, we may have enter into a dark period of economic cleansing – foreigners arriving on our shore invited with open arms by a regime to take over our jobs and hiding a sinister agenda for political gain.

The agenda though subtle is equally damaging as economic cleansing has driven many of our citizens into deep depression and some have even attempted suicide. Those who can emigrate will do so – leaving the country to well-to-do foreigners with good paying jobs to gain control.

One in three workers in Singapore is a foreigner now and at least 1.5 million foreigners, carrying all kinds of work permits, have settled down on our tiny island state – artificially inflating our population to a miserable 5.1 million and stretching infrastructure and employment opportunities to the maximum.

Amidst this economic sizzle which is supposed to benefit its own people, entire companies have been replaced by foreigners and one only needs to walk along busy financial centre at Marina to witness the ugly manifestation.

Singaporean executives ironically remain a rare representation in our best economic model thus far – the financial sector.

Deustche Bank, Barclays, Credit Sussie, Hong Kong Shanghai Bank – all banking giants out to clamour for a lucrative piece of the Asian economic miracle here could only mysteriously employ a majority of foreign executives on its payroll. We don’t have enough talents – so say the employers and agreed by our government.

Let the foreign talents come in – not by the tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands as our own local workers sit by the wayside and envy the smartly-dressed foreign executives filing past on their way to work in gleaming glass-towered buildings! Never before has any country in the world imposed work discrimination so obviously and maliciously played out - against its own people mind you.

For the first time in history, more foreign doctors (60%) last year registered with our Singapore Medical Council (SMC) than local ones – a reflection of economic cleansing that will continue unabated in the near future.

The government has also shamelessly used tax-payer money to lure foreigners via a comprehensivewebsite meant to simplify procedures for immigrants coming into our country.

Government-linked companies, multi national companies and even small and medium enterprises splashed out full page advertisement abroad in search of foreign workers to fortify their economic prowess as companies continue to shun local workers labelling them lazy, choosy and hard to please.

The government has always asked its own people to welcome foreigners into our midst as if not – jobs will evaporate, investors will run away and the economy will collapse.

However, it could not properly explain why capable well-educated citizens continue to stay jobless or enter into under employment by driving cabs and taking on low level jobs in order to survive.

If this happens in any country in the world, citizens will gather together and speak out against such employment discrimination but in a law-abiding country like Singapore - whereby even a lone demonstrator can be arrested, we are being denied such basic human rights and can only count emigration as a way out of our misery.