In Singapore\'s Immigration Debate, Sign of Asia\'s Slipping Middle Class

BEIJING â€" Immigration is a hot-button issue nearly everywhere in the world, though the contours of the debate vary from place to place. In the United States, sweeping changes to the law may offer legal residency for millions of people who have entered the country illegally, my colleague Ashley Parker reports.

Here in Asia, in the nation of Singapore, the debate looks somewhat different: The government plans to increase the population from just over five million to a possible high of nearly seven million by 2030, via regulated, legal immigration. It’s provoking opposition.

So much so that on Saturday, about 3,000 people turned out for what some commentators said was one of the biggest demonstrations in the nation’s history. (If the number seems small, it reflects the tight political control exerted over Singapore life by the People’s Action Party, which has run the country for aout half a century and discourages public protest.)

What are the contours of the debate in Singapore

Concern over booming immigration, often focused on new arrivals from increasingly rich China, has been simmering in the nation, with many feeling that the immigrants don’t play by the same rules, that their manners are poor and that they are pushing up prices. That feeling crystallized last year when a wealthy Chinese man driving a Ferrari at high speed killed three people (including himself) in a nighttime accident.

(Similar sentiments are found in Hong Kong, as my colleagues Bettina Wassener and Gerry Mullany wrote.)

Vividly illustrating the resentment, Singaporeans sometimes call the wealt! hy immigrants “rich Chinese locusts,” according to an article in the Economic Observer’s Worldcrunch.

Less controversially, the article quoted Peng Hui, a professor of sociology at National Singapore University, as saying: “Singaporeans do not discriminate against the Chinese. On the contrary, they very much identify with their Chinese ancestry.” (Of course, rich Chinese are not the only new immigrants, but they are a major group, many commentators have pointed out.) “What the local people do not appreciate is the fact that Chinese people talk loudly in public, eat on the subway and like to squeeze through in a crowd or grab things,” Mr. Peng was quoted as saying.

So the Singapore government’s Population White Paper that passed in Parliament earlier this month, just before Chinese New Year, was bound to stir things up.

The government is presenting the rise in immigration as a target that is needed if Singapore, where immigrants already make up about 40 percent of the population, and which has the highest concentration of millionaires in the world, is to continue to flourish, reports said. Singaporeans just aren’t having enough children, said the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong.

“In my view, in 2030, I think 6 million will not be enough to meet Singaporeans’ needs as our population ages because of this problem of the baby boomers and bulge of aging people,” Mr. Lee said in Parliament, adding that 6.9 million was not a target but a number to be used to help plan for infrastructure.

“Do we really need to increase our population by that much” wrote a person called Chang Wei Meng in a letter to The Straits Times, according to Reuters. “What happened to achieving the Swiss standard of living”

Gilbert Goh, a main organizer of the rally Saturday at Singapore’s Speaker’s Corner in a public park, said the protesters had a message: “They want to tell the government, please reconsider this policy. The turnout is a testimony that this policy is flawed and unpopular on the ground,” The Associated Press quoted Mr. Goh as saying.

Yet amid the familiar rhetoric about immigrants, heard around the world - they don’t fit in, they’re rude, they’re different - might something more important be going on here

In a blog post on , Nicole Seah, a politician who has run for Parliament and comments on social issues, wrote: “Along with many other Singaporeans, I oppose the White Paper.”

Why She is looking for “a society that lives in harmony, rather than tense and overcrowded conditions,” she writes.

“Not the Singapore Inc. that has been aggressively forced down our throats the past few years - a Singapore which is in danger of becoming a transient state where people from all over, come, make their fortunes, and leave.”

Not “a Singapore that has become a playground for the rich and the people who can afford it. A Singapore where the middle class is increasingly drowned out because they do not have the social clout or sufficient representatives in Parliament to voice their concerns.”

Ms. Seah’s statements raise an interesting question: Is this part of! a phenom! enon that the columnist Chrystia Freeland has written about so ably for this newspaper, the ascendancy of a wealthy, “plutocrat” class and the slipping status of the middle class

As Ms. Freeland wrote last week: “The most important fact about the United States in this century is that middle-class incomes are stagnating. The financial crisis has revealed an equally stark structural problem in much of Europe.” Is it hitting Asia, too, and does Singapore’s protest speak, at least in part, to this Hong Kong’s dissatisfaction too

Should Common Plastics Be Labeled Toxic

THE HAGUE â€" Hoping to reduce one of the most ubiquitous forms of waste, a global group of scientists is proposing that certain types of plastic be labeled hazardous.

The group, lead by two California scientists, wrote in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature:

We believe that if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power to restore affected habitats and prevent more dangerous debris from accumulating.

While 280 million tons of plastic were produced globally last year, less than half of that plastic has ended up in landfills or was recycled, according to the scientists’ data. Some of the unaccounted for 150 million tons of plastic is still in use, but much of it litters roadsides, cities, forests, deserts, beaches and oceans. (Just think of the great floating garbage patches at sea).

Unlike other forms of solid waste, such as uneaten food, scrap metal or last year’s clothes, plastics take an especially long time to break down. And when they finally do, they create hazardous, even toxic particles that can harm wildlife, ecosystems and humans.

For now, the group â€" led by Chelsea M. Rochman of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, and Mark Anthony Browne at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California â€" is calling for the reclassification of plastics that are particularly difficult to recycle and that are most toxic when degrading: PVC, polystyrene, polyurethane and polycarbonate.

The scientists say these types of plastics ! â€" used in construction, food containers, electronics and furniture â€" make up an estimated 30 percent of all plastics produced.

Join our sustainability conversation. Does it make sense to re-classify common plastics as hazardous, or are their better ways to reduce the amount of plastics we throw out

How Much Do You Trust Journalists

LONDON â€" Another poll came out this week showing that in the hierarchy of trust, journalists figure near the bottom of the heap.

Some of us take a perverse pride in being down there with the money-changers and the harlots (actually, the latter sometimes rate rather highly in these surveys.)

The comforting theory is that if everybody hates us, we must be doing something right.

The Ipsos MORI poll published on Friday found that among 1,018 British respondents, only one-in-five trusted journalists to tell the truth â€" on a par with bankers and below real estate agents.

Bizarrely, almost 70 percent trusted television news presenters â€" ahead of priests and other clergymen.

The only small consolation for the derided scribes was that they came out just ahead of politicians. Only 18 percent of respondens believed politicians could be relied on to tell the truth.

Now, the results may just reflect the current state of British journalism, and indeed of British politics.

In the latest development in a long-running phone-hacking scandal, Scotland Yard on Wednesday arrested six more journalists who previously worked for Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct News of the World.

The scandal already led to a months-long inquiry by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, who concluded with an excoriating critique of the press as a whole for displaying “significant and reckless disregard for accuracy.”

Media-watchers believe, however, that in an era of rapid technological change, the trust issue goes wider than the morally dubious practices of some of the Britis! h red-top press.

As my colleague David Carr wrote at the height of the phone-hacking scandal last year: “Journalism’s ills don’t live exclusively on Fleet Street or stop at British shores.”

“Economic pressures have increased the urgency to make news and drive traffic, even as budgets have been cut and experienced news professionals tossed overboard,” David wrote.

He said part of the reason the public had lost confidence was that the product sometimes did not merit it. “If journalism is losing its way, that’s a story that needs to be told over and over,” he wrote.

An American student journal this week quoted Ron F. Smith, author of Ethics in Journalism, as saying the reputation of journalists was continually being questioned.

“Nearly every public opinion poll shows that people have lost respect for journalists and lost faith in the news meda,” according to the introduction to his 2003 ethics manual.

Mariah Young, an aspiring journalist who writes for The Bullet, a student newspaper at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington, used the citation to ask whether journalists had lost a once cherished sense of ethics.

In an era of Twitter and the Internet, it was becoming harder for journalists to break news, papers to publish and people to trust the media, Ms. Young concluded.

There was similar soul-searching last month by John Lloyd, a veteran British commentator and Reuters columnist.

“The trend in a lot of the media is toward more scandal, more controversy and more opining,” he wrote, lamenting that news organizations wedded to objective reporting, investigation and rational analysi! s were no! w in a minority, “and a lot of them are finding it hard to make a living.”

He called for greater focus on long-term strategic issues such as global warming, dwindling resources and social change. “We should find some way of making this stuff part of a real global conversation â€" one that is vivid, comprehensible and more democratic,” he wrote.

In a comment to Mr. Lloyd, one anonymous news editor wrote, “Journalism has always attracted the self-righteous, opinionated and egotistical and with the new Facebook generation now in the workforce that bar is already at an all-time high.”

Has journalism really lost its way Or does the public always get the press it deserves And is the impact of citizen journalism a plus or a minus Tell us what you think.