Singapore’s National Population and Talent Division (NPTD) was unable to provide me with the data. This is its official response: “The number of Singapore citizens, as at Dec 2011, is 3.27 million. We do not provide a breakdown in terms of local-born or naturalised citizens, as we regard them all as Singaporeans.”
Based on this, I do not know if the government does not have the data or if it has the data but does not want to release it to the public. In any case, I have performed a very rough calculation based on other publicly available data to arrive at a rough guesstimate that 45.8% of Singapore’s total population (residents and non-residents) was born in Singapore.
Here are my very rough workings and assumptions:
In theory, the way to calculate the two should be
Singapore-born citizen population, 2011 = Number of Singapore-born citizens in 1965 + All newborns from 1965-2011 – Newborns who did not take citizenship – All deaths of Singapore-born citizens from 1965-2011 – All Singapore-born citizens who emigrated 1965-2011.
Foreign-born citizen population, 2011 = Number of foreign-born citizens in 1965 + All new naturalised citizens from 1965-2011 – All deaths of foreign-born citizens from 1965-2011.
However, the above data sets are not available publicly.
So, given what I could find, I have decided to calculate
Foreign-born citizen population, 2011 = (Number of citizens in 1970/ 2) + (All new naturalised citizens from 1970-2011: 3*naturalised from 2001-2010) – (All deaths of foreign-born citizens from 1970-2011: Half of the first number)
Assumptions
In 1970, foreign-born citizens comprised half the total citizen population
All deaths of foreign-born citizens from 1970-2011: Half of the above number
New naturalised citizens from 1970-2011–3 times the number of naturalised citizens from 2001-2010. If the absolute number of new citizens was consistent over the years, I should multiply this by 4.2 for the 42-year span–but I have applied a discount, given the assumption that absolute naturalisations would have been higher in 2001-2010 than the other years.
The number of foreigners (i.e. non-Singapore citizens) born in Singapore and now living in Singapore is negligible. This assumption is used in my final calculation, the % of Singapore’s total population that is born in Singapore, i.e. I assume there are no non-citizens born here and still living here.
Calculation
So, from government data, we know that:
Total population, 2011:5.26m
Total citizen population, 2011: 3.27m
Number of citizens in 1970: 1.8748m
New naturalised citizens, 2001-2010: 131,142
So, to repeat my guesstimate equation–
Foreign-born citizen population, 2011 = (Number of citizens in 1970/ 2) + (All new naturalised citizens from 1970-2011: 3*naturalised from 2001-2010) – (All deaths of foreign-born citizens from 1970-2011: Half of the first number)
OR
Foreign-born citizen population, 2011 = (1.8748/ 2) + (0.131,142*3) – (0.4687) = 0.862126m
Local-born citizen population, 2011 = 3.27m-0.862126m = 2.407874m
So, the percentage of Singapore citizens born in Singapore, 2011 = 2.407874/3.27 = 73.6%
And, the percentage of Singapore’s total population that was born in Singapore, 2011 = 2.407874/5.26 = 45.8%
So, that’s about it. Obviously this is a very rough estimate. If any of you can spot any errors in my calculations, or have better methods of calculating this, please let me know.
And, to reiterate, the only point of doing all this is for the discussion on identity. It seems to me that for the basic argument in my essay–that it is difficult to construct a strong national identity when only less than half the population is born in a place–I have a fairly big margin of error: 45.8% is well below 50%.
Look forward to your thoughts.