Think about migrants in Singapore, and you’re probably thinking about the China Chinese or India Indians.
After all, every time we talk about migrant workers, it’s usually either someone from China or someone from India.
Turns out, the largest group of migrants are neither of those, but Malaysians at 44% of all migrants living and working in Singapore.
Report By UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs
The UN figures in the report are based on public data from Singapore’s Department of Statistics. This was also reported by The Straits Times.
Take note: migrants can include PRs, work pass holders and their dependents, students, or people like the founder of HaiDiLao.
Behold the stats you’ve been waiting for:
Malaysians at 1,044,994 are actually almost three times of the Chinese at 380,766 for the year 2013.
Malaysians being the largest migrant group had been consistent since 1990, from when it was 195,072 (it was 27% of migrants), and then 952,261 in 2019.
In comparison, Chinese migrants were around 380,145 (18%), and back in 1990 it was 150,447 (21%). Indonesians had doubled from 21,520 (3%) in 1990 to 138,338 (6.4%) last year.
But It Makes Sense
Not only that Malaysia is literally our neighbour, but Malaysians also require fewer restrictions to work in Singapore.
Most people probably can’t tell the difference between Malaysians and Singaporeans until we notice very specific things, like them saying Leng Lui instead of Chio Bu.
When we talk about migrant workers, Malaysians were probably like:
Bet you didn’t even register that Malaysians are considered migrants huh? It’s almost as if we also cover Malaysia stories sometimes like we’re the same.
Plus the Johor-Singapore link is a major concern for a reason; we do actually want Malaysians and Singaporeans to go over to each other’s countries.
Which means, this stat probably changes nothing. Malaysians and Singaporeans are basically like family anyway.
A family that’s pretty close to each other until we talk about food, apparently. Pro tip: to get social media famous just mention something something Malaysia Nasi Lemak.
