If you were to speak to people in the immigration industry there is a common belief that the Singapore government will tighten immigration policy ahead of General Elections. Are these beliefs well founded? We will try to answer this question by taking a deep dive into approvals of Singapore permanent residency (PR) and Citizenship (SC) into and out of General Elections. Unfortunately, we only have access to a limited dataset covering the last 3 elections so one should bear this in mind when taking in the results.

Some bias towards tighter immigration policy ahead of elections

As we can see from the table below there is a tendency for approvals of Singapore residency (PR/SC) to decline up to 2 years before the year of the General Elections.

However, we would caveat that this downward bias would be a lot less resounding if it weren’t for the fact that a) the world was exiting a generational meltdown in financial markets and economic growth, aka “The Great Financial Crisis (GFC)” in early 2009, b) the declines in the lead up to the 2015 election were relatively modest, even arguably flat, and c) we think there was a lot of political pressure (measured through Google searches for “Singapore immigration”) to drastically tighten immigration and slow down residency approvals as job growth took a substantial hit lower due to the GFC. Since then, we think the government has taken a more measured approach to growing the population through net inward migration. However, there is a stronger case to be made that approvals decline in the year of the election as those years (2011, 2015, 2020) were not marred by any significant global or local financial/economic crisis.

Chart 1: Singapore residency approvals vs Google searches for “Singapore immigration”

Approvals normalise after elections and resume trend growth

In contrast, in the following two years after the election year there is a clear bias for approvals to rebound and normalise back to trend levels of around 1.5% annual growth[1]. With resident fertility rates at historic lows of 1.04 we think any declines in approvals will be swiftly reverted back to trend positive growth to help offset the critically low birth rates in the resident population (see chart below).  

Chart 2: Total fertility rate in Singapore’s resident population by ethnic group

What about the next General Election?

With Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong passing the leadership reins to Deputy PM Lawrence Wong on 15th May 2024 the expectation is for the next General Elections to be held sometime between November 2024 to November 2025 since the next General Election has to be called by November 2025. If we were to guess, we think the most probable time would be sometime in mid to late 2025 to give the new PM, Lawrence Wong, some time to adjust to his new position. Given our findings above, we think there is some risk that immigration will tighten over the next 12 months. It is therefore critical for prospective PR/SC applicants to ensure their applications are completed at a high and meticulous standard. For expert advice and help on residency applications please contact E&H Immigration Consultancy (www.eh-immigration.com).

[1] We use the last 10 years of data to calculate the average annual growth rate of 1.5%.