Dear TRS
Let me introduce myself. I am not a Singaporean. I am not from PRC. I am not PR holder. I am not Malay. I am not Filipino. I am not Indian. I am not European. I am not Indonesian. I am just a citizen of a certain country. Please allow me to hide under the cloak of internet anonymity because I realize that Singaporeans love to give labels to people who are “not like them” or not their kind. Labels like PRC, Malays, Filipino, Ang Mo, and Indonesians that almost always are followed by a negative adjective.
Anyway, whenever I open your website, there is 100 per cent chance that I will read an article about a Singaporean or Singaporeans being mistreated by a foreigner. It seems like foreigners are the cancer of this society and that they should be removed at once or else, the whole country is will lose its “identity.” I find this ironic since Singapore is not built and maintained by Singaporeans alone. Sure you have a government that makes policies and Singaporeans take the majority of the workforce. But FTs help drive your economy. They are the ones who build your skyscrapers. They are the ones who take care of your parents and kids because you are busy working the whole day. They are the ones who serve you food at your restaurant because you find this job lowly. They are the ones who collect your garbage and clean your community because you find this job undesirable. They are the ones who fix your road, trim the trees, cut the grass, and go inside manholes to fix the pipeline because you Singaporeans are living in a first world country and citizens of the first world countries don’t do that, right?
Sure, you can stay on your high horse. You have the right to do so (as with everyone else). But what I don’t understand is that you need these FTs to work in this country and yet you don’t want them to ride the same bus and the same train. You don’t want them to live near next to you. Hell, someone even suggested to house them somewhere outside the city and give them a separate bus! Are we in Auschwitz? Are we suggesting Apartheid? Are we living in USA in the 60s?
While most developed countries that learned from past mistakes have welcomed foreigners into their countries and have no qualms with them, we would want to be different and drive them away, or worse, treat them like second-class citizens. Oh, I just mentioned the right term: second-class citizen. Singaporeans have the best way of treating FTs as if they are lower kinds and yet, they fail to realize that their economy and their livelihood are heavily dependent on foreign workers. Sure you don’t want them all to go away, but aren’t we complaining about the same maids who we can’t live without? Aren’t we avoiding the same cleaner who diligently does its job so that we don't have to?
This country has been blessed with so much and yet… despite its blessings, its people still complain about the most trivial things.
Sincerely,
Citizen
TRS Contributor