Yet that’s where the hardest punch will come from.

The fast-growing population – and even larger infusion of foreigners – is beginning to change, little by little, the texture of life here.

And I’m not just talking of crowded trains or longer queues but something more. The foreign presence – and influence – is, in fact, being felt everywhere, from the office to tourist districts, from schools to industries.

And it is only the beginning. In 20 years, we’ll be a packed-tight seven million people.

Even now, we already have these additional global infusions:

+ Marriage. One in four Singapore men married foreign brides last year, a 10-year high.

+ Tourism. Nine million tourists arrived this year, twice Singapore’s population. This could snowball to 18 million by 2015, a large number for a small island.

+ Education. Some 70,000 (2012 target: 150,000) foreign students are studying in schools here. Ten per cent of polytechnic students and one-fifth of university students are foreigners.

+ Net migration. Between 2000 and 2006, there was an average intake of 50,000 (birth rate: 35,500) foreigners a year. Of the current 4.5 million population (a million foreign workers), about 43% are not born here.

Travel on the train, walk the neighbourhoods, or visit a shopping mall and you’re likely to see a cosmopolitan city that is staying awake longer, party harder, but whose work pressures have not let up.

You might catch an Italian or a French cook whipping up his specialties at a hawker centre. Or see expatriate teens serving food at a kopitiam (local coffee-shop) during vacation to earn some pocket money.

Sushi, fish and chips, pizzas, Korean bibimbobs are replacing some local favourites.

Visitors can also see students from Ghana to Kazakhstan, from Myanmar to Maldives, and a dozen other countries in between.

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has projected Singapore as a vibrant city of up to seven million people by 2030, with probably a huge global element.

By then, Singapore-born citizens will be a minority in their own country, helped by declining birth rates and Singaporeans working or settling abroad.

They may be outnumbered two to one by foreigners settling here, not all of them permanently committed to this place.

Singapore will likely remain a migrant society, but more so than before, seemingly destined to be a population in transition.

Like at various stages of its past, there will – in future - be waves of foreigners settling down and then leaving for a better life. Its own true blue citizens, too, will increasingly become an international creature.

MM Lee spoke of his concern of having too many Singaporeans living abroad with their families (estimated 150,000 to 200,000).

“If more Singaporeans work abroad and their children forget their roots, there will be no Singapore node to send them out ... They dissolve and disappear and there is no Singapore,” he said.

He worries about a new generation of Singaporean international workers who are open to different identities losing their roots to the home country.

“They become citizens of the world. What does that mean? Lost!” Lee said as he exhorted Singaporean citizens working in Doha, Qatar, to warn their children of this danger.

This had raised a debate among think-tankers and academicians to question if Singapore is a nation or just a “hotel”.

It raised public consciousness of the social dangers to nationhood of globalisation at its extreme to small, new city states.

In another speech, Lee said a Singapore culture is unlikely to emerge, not even in the next few hundred years, given how the world is moving. The Singaporean is not a homogeneous product, he said, and neither does Singapore have the confidence to create its own culture.

Many commentators, including myself, disagreed with his statement arguing that if the state set its heart to it (and given the right encouragement) , it could evolve its own culture over time.

But watching today’s changing demography, it is easy to understand Lee’s pessimism.

The transient nature of the population and the intake of more and more foreigners who do not share values that had taken 40 years for Singapore to formulate make Lee’s harsh prediction more believable.

However, the minister mentor did not give migration, but the digital age, as a factor.

Instead of a national culture evolving in Singapore, he said, the more likely outcome of the exposure to TV and the Internet would be an “amalgam” of different influences because of it.

“In the old days, meaning before this digital age, you had the time and the isolation to develop on your own and create something distinctive,” he said.

“The basis of our culture is what we inherited from our original countries, our original cultures. Now, the influences and interactions are constant and via all fronts, whether it is watching television, reading books or going online.”

And the global pressures – both good and bad – are likely to increase. Singaporean youths are becoming accessible to the world through the Internet.

More than half the teens age between 15 and 19 here are on the web, or operate a blog or podcast. In the 20-24 age group, some 46% are bloggers.

This means that individually, young Singaporeans are tuned into the world from their home and open to foreign influences. The impact to the future could be more drastic that what Lee thinks.

o Seah Chiang Nee is a veteran journalist and editor of the information website littlespeck.com

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