Over 97,000 Malaysians have become Singapore citizens since 2015

SINGAPORE: According to Malaysia’s Home Ministry, nearly 100,000 Malaysians have reportedly become citizens of Singapore in the past decade.

The ministry told Malaysia’s Parliament on Monday (Aug 11) that between 2015 and June 2025, there have been a total of 97,318 such individuals.

The Star said that the Home Ministry provided a breakdown of the number of Malaysians who renounced their citizenship by year in a written reply to Datuk Seri Takiyuddin Hassan.

There were 7,394 renunciations in 2015, 8,654 in 2016, 7,583 in 2017, and 7,665 in 2018, before rising substantially in 2019 to 13,362.

In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of renunciations dropped to 5,591, but rose in 2021 to 7,956, before falling again to 5,623 in 2022.

The numbers have been increasing in the past three years: in 2023, there were 11,500 renunciations, and they reached an all-time high last year of 16,930.

Last week, the New Straits Times reported that between January and June of this year, more than 6,000 Malaysians have given up their blue passports for Singapore’s red one.

Malay Mail also noted that over the past 50 years, around 1.86 million Malaysians have decided to relocate overseas, leading to the establishment of TalentCorp in 2011 to encourage skilled workers to return to the country.

The aim of TalentCorp, which falls under the purview of the country’s Prime Minister, is to create strategies that will attract Malaysians to return to its shores. Around 5.6% of the country’s population has decided to move to another country over the past five decades, a figure that is considerably higher than the global average of about 3.6%.

TalentCorp said that the top five countries preferred by Malaysians to relocate to are: Singapore, Australia, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

“Notably, 3.3% of the total Malaysian population has migrated to Singapore, amounting to 1.13 million individuals, which constitutes 60% of the Malaysian diaspora,” Malay Mail quoted TalentCorp group chief executive officer Thomas Mathew as saying last month.

Many consider this “brain drain” to be a significant problem. In July, Dr Zaliha Mustafa, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Federal Territories) Dr Zaliha Mustafa, proposed the setting up of a registry that would measure how severe the issue is. /TISG

Read also: ‘6,060 Malaysians have given up their citizenship for Singapore so far in 2025’ — Home Minister says, and that could be just the beginning…