In the world we lived today, many countries in this world faced a common population problem - ageing population. This worries many leaders from the capitalistic nations as they feared that their economy will be affected. Hence one solution to solve such problem is via migration. However, in my opinion, migration is an effective solution to a limited extent. Other factors like giving the married couples monetary incentives and increment of the retirement age also contributed to help Singapore solve ageing population.
Migration is an effective way to solve the problem of ageing population as it can help inject dynamism into our workforce and also help increase our population in Singapore. Till today, around 800,000 foreigners, be it foreign talents or just foreign workers, had come to Singapore to work and they formed up to a quarter of our Singapore's workforce. The government viewed them as a cornerstone for them to implement their policy that aims to help increase our population. One policy made by the government is the White Paper that was led to the protest at Hong Lim Park on 16 February 2013. The White Paper aims to increase the population of Singapore to 6.9 million by 2050 and this could be done via migration of foreigners into our countries.
However, in my point of view, migration is not an effective solution as it would lead to some other side effect like the foreign migrants will face social discrimination as the locals would see themselves as more superior than the migrants and this would increase the tension between the locals and the migrants. Moreover, the locals would also see the migrants as one who is coming to "steal" their jobs and that this feeling of mistrust will cause tension between them to rise and once distrust sets in, it will need a long time and a lot of effort to let these hostilities go away.
There are other ways in which the government had used in order to promote growth rate.
One way is to give monetary incentives to the young married couples. For example the baby bonus that is being given to the family for each child they gave birth. Moreover, for the subsequent child given birth, the family will more to ensure that the family is able to groom the child up healthy and able to provide him or her with the basic needs. This helps to encourage the young couples to reconsider their intention to bear child as most parents fear the high cost of living and it is this reason that deters many to bear children. Thus with the baby bonus being given out, the young couples will be more willing to bear children as their initial fear have been removed. Hence it is a way to solve population problems.
The other way to deal with population problems is to increase the retirement age of the workers so that the countries can remain competitive in the economic sphere. This is very important as the economy of the country will determine the standard of living of the people in the country. With the help of these experienced workers, companies will be better capable to produced better results as the older generation will be there to guide the younger generations with their experience and this will be essential to help the country stay competitive in the world. Currently, the retirement age of Singapore's workers have increased to beyond 62 years old. Thus with a more dynamic workforce, the population problems will affect the country less significantly.
In conclusion, migration is an effective way to solve population problems only to a limited extent as it can only solve the problems in a short run.
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