A perceptive article like rest of your work since I started following them since 2017. I like the framing of the challenges in terms of a "trilemma", a lexicon borrowed from other disciplines such as international economics concerning having a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital movement, and an independent monetary policy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity). While I broadly agree with your application of the trilemma onto the UK situation, you have misinterpreted the Singaporean situation. The Singapore government under Lee Kuan Yew did not choose to preserve non-selective immigration and social stability by sacrificing civil liberties on the general populace. First, Singapore's immigration is and has long been highly selective, granting visas to only highly skilled or highly educated people and in a separate system, to low skilled labourers who fill jobs which Singaporeans do not want to take up, or are too well educated to contemplate taking those jobs. Secondly, during the decades when Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister, civil liberties on all sorts of issues were curtailed due to a paternalistic and illiberal ideology under the banner of "Asian values" (http://www.cafefle.org/texteskkkmg-icc_articles/13_Singapore_26p-Pol%20copie.pdf). Their curtailment was not due to the need to accommodate non-selective immigration, which was never the practice in Singapore since independence. The enforcement of racial quotas in housing, and in parliamentary representation was to maintain racial harmony from the beginning of Singapore as an independent nation, when its citizens were already multicultural and multi-ethnic (say, around 70% Chinese, 20% Malay, 10% Indians) due to preceding generations of migration into the Malay Peninsula.
Lee Kuan Yew since the 1990s has expressed views on racial differences among Singapore residents due to genetics and culture, which in the early 1990s would be deemed politically incorrect if a British or American politician said the same about their own populations, and be deemed outright racist and fascist if said in the present day. In the lengthy interviews he gave a couple of years before his death, as candid words of wisdom to pass onto the nation, especially the younger generations, he lamented cultural problems with the Muslim Malay populace, making them economically backward relatively (e.g. see https://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011%2F12%2F10%2F181861; https://youtu.be/ihiE4oGyYlQ?t=1898).
I think it is informative to examine Singapore's migration situation and trends, and the challenges it presents, and how the government tries to tackle them, and the attitude of the populace to mass migration. It's population has increased from 3.5mln in 1995 to 5.6mln in 2020, an increase of 60%. For context, compare with UK's increase of about 20% during the same period - an increase deemed excessive and unsustainable by the political Right.
We see now why the Soviets and their satellites persecuted dissenters--because the system unravels if you don’t.
A perceptive article like rest of your work since I started following them since 2017. I like the framing of the challenges in terms of a "trilemma", a lexicon borrowed from other disciplines such as international economics concerning having a fixed foreign exchange rate, free capital movement, and an independent monetary policy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_trinity). While I broadly agree with your application of the trilemma onto the UK situation, you have misinterpreted the Singaporean situation. The Singapore government under Lee Kuan Yew did not choose to preserve non-selective immigration and social stability by sacrificing civil liberties on the general populace. First, Singapore's immigration is and has long been highly selective, granting visas to only highly skilled or highly educated people and in a separate system, to low skilled labourers who fill jobs which Singaporeans do not want to take up, or are too well educated to contemplate taking those jobs. Secondly, during the decades when Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister, civil liberties on all sorts of issues were curtailed due to a paternalistic and illiberal ideology under the banner of "Asian values" (http://www.cafefle.org/texteskkkmg-icc_articles/13_Singapore_26p-Pol%20copie.pdf). Their curtailment was not due to the need to accommodate non-selective immigration, which was never the practice in Singapore since independence. The enforcement of racial quotas in housing, and in parliamentary representation was to maintain racial harmony from the beginning of Singapore as an independent nation, when its citizens were already multicultural and multi-ethnic (say, around 70% Chinese, 20% Malay, 10% Indians) due to preceding generations of migration into the Malay Peninsula.
The restrictions the country imposes on its low-skilled migrants laborforce, would be deemed inhumane and draconian in the Western world, such as forbidding the migrants to marry or have intimate relations with Singapore citizens and permanent residents, and living in segregated migrants dormitories (one could call them ghettos for migrants whose right to stay can be terminated at short notice): https://www.ricemedia.co/current-affairs-commentary-an-attempt-to-make-sense-of-the-migrant-worker-debate-thus-far/, https://spj.hkspublications.org/2020/03/06/illicit-intimacies/). One could say there is severe curtailment of civil liberties on those migrants.
Lee Kuan Yew since the 1990s has expressed views on racial differences among Singapore residents due to genetics and culture, which in the early 1990s would be deemed politically incorrect if a British or American politician said the same about their own populations, and be deemed outright racist and fascist if said in the present day. In the lengthy interviews he gave a couple of years before his death, as candid words of wisdom to pass onto the nation, especially the younger generations, he lamented cultural problems with the Muslim Malay populace, making them economically backward relatively (e.g. see https://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011%2F12%2F10%2F181861; https://youtu.be/ihiE4oGyYlQ?t=1898).
Singapore is an English-speaking cosmopolitan city state. The politicians and commentariat pay attention to developments in Western world including the USA. As debates about "white privilege" is rampant in America, some commentators in Singapore has ported the notion to "Chinese privilege" (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14631369.2020.1869519). The PAP unequivocally rejects it exists in Singapore: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/ndr-entirely-baseless-claim-chinese-privilege-exists-singapore-lee-hsien-loong-2143026.
I think it is informative to examine Singapore's migration situation and trends, and the challenges it presents, and how the government tries to tackle them, and the attitude of the populace to mass migration. It's population has increased from 3.5mln in 1995 to 5.6mln in 2020, an increase of 60%. For context, compare with UK's increase of about 20% during the same period - an increase deemed excessive and unsustainable by the political Right.