Foreign workers: Boon or bane to Singapore?

FOREIGN labour issues experience a certain periodicity in the local news cycle, typically peaking nearing general elections before fading (albeit incompletely) into the background after. The script seems to have remained largely unchanged in 2020 with one exception - the rapid spread of Covid-19 among the foreign worker population added the dimension of lives to the conversation that had until then, mainly revolved around livelihoods.

The perennial questions of whether foreign labour yields net benefits for Singapore and related to that - what the optimal size and growth rate of the foreign labour force should be - divide opinions, while new questions about our responsibility towards migrant workers' lives have emerged amid the pandemic.

Benefits and costs