Ministry of Social & Family Dev Prerequisites for new citizens
I wish to give my views about prerequisites for new citizens.

The biggest problem with granting citizenship to foreigners is that they compete with local born citizens (locals) for jobs and have an advantage over the locals who had to serve two years of national service and 10 years of reservist duty. 

The locals enter the workforce two years later than those who do not serve national service and have two years less in working experience. 

Employers also avoid employed locals because they have to be called up each year for reservist training.

The obvious solution is to require the new citizens to have the same obligation towards national service. However, this approach has the following problems:

a)  The new citizens are older and not suitable for military training
b)  The applicants will not be interested to become a new citizen if they have to serve national service.

This is a serious problem. It cannot be solved. It has not been solved for many years.

I suggest an "out of the box" approach. 

Instead of asking the new citizens to serve national service, which most will not do so, why not reduce the national service obligation for locals? It can be done as follows:

a) Full time military training should be reduced to one year. This is the approach adopted in Switzerland and in many other countries. In Singapore, most of our full time NS men "waste" their time during the second year.

b) The reservist duty should be reduced to 5 years. This will reduce the disadvantage faced by locals in getting jobs.

In our modern era of military defense, there is no need to have a large army of soldiers. Warfare now involves fighter planes and drones. We do not need to have a large force of soldiers.

To strengthen our military capability, we should have a larger force of full time professional soldiers, rather than depend on conscripted soldiers and reservists. We should make it attractive for people to become soldiers by paying them well.

Tan Kin Lian



 

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