Every country in this series so far has sold some version of the same trade. You get access, and you give up certainty. Thailand lets you stay for years on a chain of visas that never quite becomes permanence. Vietnam gives you presence without the paperwork to make it stick. Malaysia formalizes the temporariness so cleanly that it becomes its own kind of stability. The Philippines hands out durable permission but keeps dependability conditional. Indonesia is the purest version of the trade: extraordinary attachment to a place, with almost no institutional tenure underneath it.

Singapore does something none of the other five do. It does not ask you to trade certainty for access. It gives you the certainty, in full, and then makes access the scarce resource instead.