For the past few days, the community in Singapore, especially the online community, erupted into a furore from the recent incident. People vocally expressed anti-immigrant sentiments, which in turn allowed for the extremely xenophobic few to fan the fire.

"The level of xenophobia in Singapore have reached new heights in Singapore." That's what a lot of people have been telling me when I speak to them about the recent incident that ended with 3 deaths. I would like to respectfully disagree with that. I believe that the xenophobia is not something that is simply developed over one particular serious incident that is not experience first hand. Rather, it is the product of collated events that we see for ourselves. Be it small articles in the news like the curry incident, the student that described Singaporeans as "dogs", or even the Chinese lady that was rude to you on the bus.

It was obvious that xenophobia had already been a hot issue in everybody's mind since even 2008, when plans were made for Serangoon Gardens Technical School to be converted to dormitories for foreign workers. Even in the recent elections, we could see how immigrant control was an issue that was brought up repeatedly, but avoided as a topic by both parties, for good reasons as well!

Allow me to emphasize the fact that it is not only important, but crucial for Singapore to keep a healthy flow of immigrants. Both parties understand and know that, and speaking about reducing these numbers, even for the opposition parties, is taking a big risk. If there were no intake of foreigners, our fertility rate would be way below of the replacement rate, and the influx of talent would also allow us to grow the pool of ideas, skills and innovation that we could extract from, for any relevant purposes.

However, coming back to the accident, it seemed rather unfair that his nationality was even brought into the picture in the first place. His irresponsible act is to be scorned upon irregardless of whether he was Singaporean a not, or if he was driving a a Toyota or a Ferrari. There is, however no reason to be berating the departed, and we can only hope that this would perhaps remind motorists to stay safe on the roads. (Edit: Another accident has occurred on the same intersections.)

Also, perhaps as a note to end on, videos of multiple road accidents have found themselves online, and have been spreading virally over the internet. I personally find that to be rather distasteful, knowing for a fact that I was watching the death of a human being and that it was available for anyone to see over the internet. Then again, its probably just me.