Singapore’s total population reached a new high of 6.11 million in June 2025, according to the government’s Population in Brief 2025 report.
But behind the headline figure lies a story less often told — that Singapore is not being organically replenished, but increasingly replaced.
Immigration has long been framed as a response to ageing and falling birth rates. But the scale, permanence, and nature of this demographic shift now raise questions not just about sustainability — but about identity.
Has Singapore become Singapore Inc — a place people use for economic gain, rather than a shared home?
Growing numbers, hollowing core
In 2024, Singapore granted 22,766 new citizenships — a record high. An additional 35,264 permanent residencies were issued, the highest since 2010. Yet, the resident population (citizens and PRs) grew by only 20,000 people, from 4.18 million to 4.20 million.
This suggests a significant turnover of residents, including citizens. Under Singapore’s official de jure population definition, individuals who have been away for more than 12 months are excluded from the count.
In practice, this means many Singaporeans — including those born and raised here — are either relocating overseas or spending prolonged periods away, even as new immigrants arrive to fill the gap.
The outcome may resemble a high‑churn society, where identity becomes more transactional, and the connection to nationhood may erode under mobility and impermanence.
This shift fosters the image of a Singapore that is no longer a tightly knit nation, but a platform economy — a hub for talent, capital, and logistics, but not a community of shared destiny.
“Singapore Inc”: A platform, not a home?
The concern is not just philosophical. When people see Singapore primarily as a place to earn and move on, commitment to local norms, integration, and long-term responsibility declines. This is not the fault of immigrants alone — it is a result of policy design.
The government’s approach increasingly mirrors that of a large corporation: attracting global talent, ensuring economic efficiency, managing demographics like human capital portfolios. But like many corporations, the human cost is hidden — and the social contract with citizens is quietly fraying.
This leads to a deeper critique: has the state adopted a corporate mindset at the expense of national belonging?
Many Singaporeans feel that their concerns about housing costs, ageing burdens, or cultural erosion are met with technocratic responses, not empathetic governance. The result is a growing perception that Singapore is being run for numbers, not for people.
This population-centric growth model also reinforces a rentier economic structure, where wealth increasingly accrues to asset owners rather than wage earners.
The Singapore Exchange (SGX) offers a clear reflection of this: its dominant listings are in real estate investment trusts (REITs), property developers, and financial institutions — entities like CapitaLand Investment, Mapletree, Keppel, Frasers, and the three local banks.
These sectors rely heavily on rising population and footfall to sustain rental income, property values, and asset yield. As long as the economic engine is fuelled by population inflows, this model continues — even if it exacerbates wealth inequality and reduces social mobility.
In such a system, those without property or financial assets fall further behind, as wages stagnate relative to asset appreciation. The danger is a society where capital, not contribution, defines one’s stake in the nation.
A demographic time bomb, manufactured
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) remains critically low at 0.97, less than half the replacement level of 2.1. In 2024, Singapore recorded 29,237 citizen births. While this represented a slight increase from the previous year, the broader five-year trend remains downward.
Delayed parenthood has become the norm. The median age of citizen mothers at first birth has risen to 31.6 years, while marriages declined by 5.7 per cent. A growing number of Singaporeans remain unmarried into their 30s, citing cost of living, housing insecurity, and career demands as key deterrents.
While surveys consistently show strong aspirations for family, these do not translate into outcomes. Economic pressures, housing unaffordability, and work-life imbalance remain enduring obstacles. Even with measures like the Large Families Scheme, the base of young, native-born Singaporeans continues to shrink.
Policymakers have positioned immigration as a key lever to counter these trends. However, it has not altered the trajectory. Many new citizens also appear to follow similar low fertility patterns. This suggests the demographic challenge is not being eliminated — it may only be deferred.
Recent statistics underscore this point. Despite sustained inflows of immigrants over the decades, fertility has not recovered.
Based on current figures, it is plausible that without the 22,766 citizenships granted in 2024, net growth of the citizen population could have been extremely modest — potentially flat or negative — a milestone which, in the view of many observers, suggests that immigration is not solving but only delaying demographic decline.
Worse still, the effects of earlier immigration policy are now surfacing.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Singapore admitted large numbers of middle-aged immigrants — many of whom entered as permanent residents or became new citizens in their 30s or 40s.
Two decades on, these age groups now form a substantial portion of the 50–69 citizen cohorts — a trend that is observable in the official age pyramid charts from 2005 to 2025.
While part of this is natural ageing, the scale and distribution align with the possibility that immigration and naturalisation have materially shaped those bands.
The outcome is not simply organic ageing due to longer life expectancy. It is policy-driven demographic inflation. In 2005, only 8.8% of citizens were aged 65 and above. This rose to 13.1% in 2015.
By 2025, that number has leapt to 20.7%, with more than 757,000 seniors — a near tripling of the senior population in just two decades.
The scale of this shift is stark.
Between 2020 and 2025, the number of citizens aged 65 and above rose by over 190,000, while the total citizen population grew by only around 140,000.
If we account for survivorship and cohort ageing from 2005, data shows that over 89,000 seniors could not have come from natural demographic transition alone. This rise may reflect additions through immigration and naturalisation — possibly including elderly dependants or PRs granted citizenship in later life.
These patterns strongly suggest that the ageing curve is not purely natural, but has been shaped in part by past population policy.
Furthermore, as immigration continues, many new arrivals in middle age bring in spouses, elderly parents, or dependants via family reunion or long-term visit schemes. This continues to stack the top of the pyramid, inflating the senior population disproportionately compared to birth-driven growth at the base.
By using immigration as a short-term economic tool, policymakers have built a long-term structural imbalance. This imbalance now falls heavily on the “sandwiched generation” — working adults who must shoulder financial, social, and emotional responsibilities for both their children and a rapidly growing senior population.
Crucially, some of these seniors may not have grown up in or contributed long-term to the local system, yet are now full participants in its health, housing, and retirement schemes. The result is a system under increasing pressure, one which future generations will have to fund and sustain.
If what is described is true, the policy trade-offs have accumulated into a demographic time bomb — and it is still growing.
The 6.9 million debate — and public scepticism
The issue of population planning is not new. The 2013 Population White Paper famously projected a possible population of 6.9 million by 2030. Despite public outrage, the government insisted this was a “planning parameter”, not a target.
More than a decade on, the population stands at 6.11 million, and continues to climb steadily. Mega-projects like Changi Terminal 5, new housing precincts, land reclamation, and expanded transit infrastructure suggest that long-term population expansion remains central to national planning.
To many Singaporeans, this undermines official assurances. If 6.9 million wasn’t a target, why do national plans seem to assume — or even exceed — it?
Over the years, rumours have even swirled about a 10 million population target — a claim the government has repeatedly denied, even going so far as to issue POFMA corrections to quash it.
But when infrastructure and housing expansions appear to anticipate continued growth well beyond 6.9 million, such denials can seem hollow. The gap between narrative and reality has created a deepening trust deficit — not just around immigration figures, but around how demographic change is being planned, managed, and communicated.
Crucially, if immigration continues to be the primary lever of population growth, the demographic time bomb discussed earlier will only intensify.
The importation of middle-aged workers and new citizens may temporarily inflate the labour force, but it also front-loads the next wave of ageing dependants.
Without a genuine recovery in fertility or family formation — either among locals or new citizens — Singapore risks locking itself into a self-reinforcing cycle of dependency and demographic imbalance.
Obscured data, withheld accountability
Further eroding public confidence is the government’s lack of transparency on key population data.
In October 2024, Member of Parliament Louis Chua asked the Minister for Home Affairs for detailed figures on how long foreigners typically stay in Singapore before receiving PR or citizenship. This included requests for the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile durations.
Minister K Shanmugam refused to disclose this information. He stated that such data could be used to “game the system”, and that foreign governments might misuse the figures — calling it a matter of national interest.
While the government publishes some demographic profiles of new citizens, critical information about residency duration, integration timelines, and selection thresholds remains undisclosed.
This decision reveals a troubling pattern. When population policies directly shape the future of the nation, withholding relevant data undermines public trust.
Citizens are expected to accept decisions that reshape their social landscape, yet are denied access to the full picture. The result is the sense that population management is a top-down exercise, where citizens are data points, not stakeholders.
Fragmentation over cohesion
Integration remains another growing fault line. While government messaging continues to emphasise the “Singapore spirit,” many feel that spirit is weakening.
Immigration has brought with it large, self-contained cultural enclaves. Linguistic and social segregation is increasingly visible — whether in workplaces, housing estates, or educational environments.
Instead of becoming Singaporean, some new citizens continue to identify more strongly with their country of origin, not only culturally, but politically and socially. This trend is reinforced by the government’s own recent statements.
At the Kent Ridge Ministerial Forum, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that Singapore’s national identity, though stronger than before, “may not be the most important identity” for many citizens. He acknowledged the need to balance shared nationhood with race, religion, language, and personal choices.
This may be a realistic reflection of societal diversity — but it also underscores a deeper truth: the shared centre of what it means to be Singaporean is fading. The country is no longer bound by a common story — but by multiple identities, overlapping yet often separate.
It is also worth noting that the headline figure of 3.66 million Singapore citizens may give a misleading impression of continuity. A substantial proportion of that number comprises naturalised citizens, many of whom arrived from the 1990s onward, when Singapore began to liberalise immigration in response to workforce demands.
This so-called “great replacement” era marked, in our view, the beginning of a permanent shift in Singapore’s demographic makeup — one that continues to shape the nation’s identity today.
While the data does not break down how many citizens are Singapore-born versus foreign-born, the rapid rise in citizenship grants over the past three decades strongly suggests that native-born Singaporeans could already be a shrinking minority within the official citizen count.
As immigration continues to grow, this quiet demographic reality has profound implications for national identity, political representation, and long-term social cohesion.
What are we becoming?
Singapore’s strength has always been its ability to integrate across difference — to foster unity without uniformity. But the current trajectory suggests a slow drift away from that founding principle.
With each passing year, Singapore looks more like a globally-managed zone than a grounded society. The state brings in labour and talent, rotates people through, and keeps the economy growing. But the sense of rootedness — of home, history, and heart — weakens.
And if Singapore becomes a place where people come to earn, and leave once it no longer serves them — what remains of the national project?
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