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I am a cardiothoracic surgeon in Singapore. I have a BS/MS in biomedical engineering and MD from Columbia University and I was born in KL and I attended Raffles Institution. I am a Singapore citizen now with two daughters that now go to RGS. In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion in Singapore about our immigration policies and I would like to make a simple, but what seems like (to me) a no-brainer solution. Rishi Sunak recently introduced the High Potential Individual (HPI) visa for graduates of top universities worldwide to work or to seek employment in the UK without needing a job offer or sponsorship from an employer. To me, if somebody had told me about a policy like this and not where it was introduced, I would immediately assume that it was a Singapore policy. Everything about it sounds like something we would do. In Singapore, we have a tradition of bringing in what seems to have become sort of a meme in some circles, foreign talent. These are people who were granted visas through the PMET scheme, of which I was once a beneficiary. Barring the recent controversies about foreigners being granted EPs with dubious qualifications, the spirit of the scheme is good. Singapore does not have a critical mass of people but it has a highly capital-intensive economy that provides services not least for the 685 million people of Southeast Asia. In the next 50 years of development, apart from the growth of mature sectors such as healthcare, education and financial services, it would be a waste not to be at the forefront of biomedical and biotechnology research, as well as in all areas of technology. It ought to be a matter of national interest to take in the best and the brightest. Evidently, we do have the right big picture. In the past decades we have tried a variety of different policies to attract talented individuals, as well as high-net-worth individuals. Both of these policies have had unintended consequences of threatening our social cohesion, consequences that Lee Kuan Yew himself have identified. The basic fact is though there is merit to the import of people from vastly different countries, a policy that we should still maintain albeit with more care, we need to look to the most obvious group of naturalizable talent—foreign students who have attended our secondary schools. Getting talented people once they have fully formed seems to be a low-hanging-fruit solution. Yet, I think sometimes we overestimate our pull on people who have not been assimilated to our society at least once in their lives. This is a target group but altogether a more difficult group to woo. Indeed, why would a medical professional at or near the top of his/her field be attracted by the prospect of moving to Singapore when they are already successful where they are? I recently read an article about a Vietnam scholar at Hwa Chong who was admitted to top universities worldwide and it got me thinking about where this young man will choose to settle after he has graduated. In all likelihood, as a computer science graduate, he would probably not be calling Singapore home. I have been in his shoes, being a Malaysian-born young teenager growing up in Singapore. It was pretty clear to me within 1-2 years of my being in Singapore that I was never going to go back to Malaysia again. Yet, I would be lying if I hadn't thought of staying in the US for good after spending a decade in America. I came back to Singapore partly because I started dating a Singapore girl in New York City who was not able to find a job in America after she graduated, but more because I had always envisioned myself going back to the country that has essentially defined who I was as a person. Since I came to Singapore young, I consider myself nearly 100% Singaporean, culturally. I joined Singaporean student groups when I was overseas, hung out with overseas Singaporeans, identified as Singaporean etc. When I came back, I had to face a really tedious process of getting visas and years waiting to be qualified to be a PR and eventually a citizen. I was not welcomed home as I sort of irrationally expected to be. After reading the article I thought about what it was that would have made it obvious for people like me to come back to Singapore even if not immediately then eventually, and the only thing that made sense to me was if Singapore had a policy to fast-track certain types of people to a Singapore citizenship. This is what I propose— All international students who have attended our pre-tertiary schools for at least 4 years in their teens, who then goes on to graduate from a carefully curated group of top universities, will be offered the option to take up a long-term visa without the need for a job offer or sponsorship from an employer. Upon the completion of said visa, and upon meeting certain criteria, such as having founded a Singapore company and employed at least one Singapore citizen or been working for a Singapore company, they will be offered to take up Singapore citizenship. We could call it the Returning Students Naturalization Program (RSNP). A potential university list could be— United States of America - MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, UPenn, Georgia Tech, UIUC, University of Michigan, University of Washington, Duke, John Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University, NYU, UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UT Austin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USC, Georgetown, Tufts, Rice, Washington University in St Louis, Emory, Notre Dame, Boston University etc. United Kingdom — Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Imperial College London, UCL, Warwick, Edinburgh, Manchester etc. Universities of similar quality can be chosen from China, Canada, Germany, Japan, France, and Australia. *I would caution against using famous university ranking bodies as I find that their methodology produces ridiculous results, such as Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Tokyo being ranked lower than NUS. Students who graduate from NUS, NTU, SMU or SUTD should automatically be accepted to the RSNP. We have nothing to lose from introducing this policy because students who have spent at least 4 years of their early teens with us adopt our accent, our culture and our values. These are formative years and I suspect for the rest of their lives they will be mistaken for being Singaporean wherever they go. There is therefore no assimilation problems. It seems like an awful waste to me that our education system finds merit in admitting the best and brightest teenagers to our most elite secondary schools, particularly Hwa Chong and RI, socialize them to our people and our culture so much that they become indistinguishable from their Singapore peers, but they do not offer seamless pathways for them to naturalize. The RSNP should strive to make it so obvious to them that they will become full-fledged Singaporeans without having to do much other than to make the decision to move back. I would argue that even without the citizenship criteria, highly motivated students who have graduated from top universities find ways to become productive anyway, so we could essentially just offer these people citizenship when they return. Talent is in short supply. The uncreative way is to have the same immigration policies that everyone has and to wait for people to arrive. We also tend to look at the challenge of integrating immigrants backwards. The traditional solution is to get them in first and then hope that they integrate well into our society. Here we have a way to woo fully integrated people back to where they grew up. These people walk like us, talk like us, they just hold a different passport. In a world where other countries are in a rush to attract foreign talent, we need to leverage on what we already have.