Go back to your original life and stop asking what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
Anyway, I just spoke to one of my colleagues who holds the position of Assistant Director in my office. He has been a Singaporean PR for over 20 years. He highlighted a problem that most countries were facing in the 1990s, and it kind of enlightened me. According to him, it was termed as the 'brain drain' problem. You can look up Wikipedia.
In early 1990s, not only in Singapore, but all parts of the world, skilled workers and managers were looking for jobs outside of their own country. (The grass is greener on the other side, and hearsay plays a large part of information transfer.) In face of this problem, Singapore attempted to attract foreign talent to make up for the loss in their own talents, hence they implemented policies which gives foreigners an 'unfair advantage' and an incentive to settle down in Singapore.
See, these policies did have its merits. However, removal of an active policy is not as easy as implementing it. This is evident in the 'welfare state' in Britain, where government intervention led to an over-reliance on the government. Hence, when the government realized that the system was being abused, it was already too late to restore things to their original state.
In Singapore, I guess the problem did not start with our current leaders. You may call it a 'lack of foresight', but I would like you to ponder on whether we would be as prosperous as we are today, if not for those policies. Maybe somewhere in between, we forgot to change with the times. But maybe, we are too engrossed in what happens within our country, that we undermined the effects of a 'global competition'. Foreign talent influx might, in fact, be one of the policies that we need right now, in order to survive and remain competitive in the future. We may just not be seeing it now.
Of course, all these are discussed purely in an economic POV.
Please feel free to share your opinion. (:
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