HAUNTED, as ever, by the CIA’s most notorious mis-assessment of Iran (which, they said, “is not revolutionary or even in a pre-revolutionary situation”, just months before the 1978 revolution), I headed down to what is supposed to be Singapore’s biggest protest since independence—just in case. No worries. There are probably as many as 5,000 people (out of a population of 5.3m) braving the monsoon rains at Speaker’s Corner, a muddy field reserved for just this kind of thing, to abuse and jeer at the government. But there’s no whiff of insurrection in the air; I reckon the prime minister will survive. Your investments are safe. The government’s policies on immigration were the object of the protesters’ wrath. Even short a revolution, this promises to remain the country’s most sensitive issue for some time to come. The fact that there was a public protest at all in this tightly-controlled country, organised (inevitably) on Facebook, is testimony to the emotions that this particular subject stirs. The rally at Speaker’s Corner was provoked by the publication of the government’s white paper on population, published on January 29th, which projects a possible rise in Singapore’s to a whopping 6.9m by 2030. This would make what is already by most measures the most densely populated country in the world…yet more densely populated. Moreover most of this population surge is to be achieved, apparently, by immigration rather than by procreation. Singaporeans, it seems, have given up on the bedroom; the “total fertility rate” here, at 1.2, is among the lowest in the world.

At the rally on February 16th speakers young and old, Chinese, Malay and Indian, the articulate and the less so, all queued up to denounce this policy. They say that immigration on such a large scale will destroy Singapore and its way of life. There were a lot of complaints as to how the sheer crush of people has already led to clogged roads, bursting buses, higher prices and fewer jobs for locals. (There was also some resentment at being told how badly they were performing in-between the sheets, for instance in the following Mentos ad, a work of monumentally poor taste.)

Yet to their credit all the speakers tried to remain high-minded rather than demagogic or nationalistic, as can easily happen in debates about immigration. Aware of the danger of appearing racist, the organisers issued frequent warning against xenophobia, and even against appearing too “political”. Instead we were treated to long treatises on wage rates and suboptimal economic outcomes, as well as to quotations from Alan Greenspan. This is, after all, a “hub”—or even a “node”—of the global capitalist system.

For its part, the government argues that Singapore has to bring in the immigrants to maintain the economic success of recent years, and with it the city-state’s high standards of living. The protesters express gratitude for the high standard of living, but they insist that it is time for the country’s enormous riches to be more evenly distributed among its people, especially among its native-born population. There was a feeling that immigrants get special breaks (such as dodging the two-year national-service requirement), thereby contributing less to Singapore than they should, while extracting benefits just like the Singapore-born and -raised.

Increasingly, people argue that Singapore’s economic model has come to rely too much on immigration for the benefit of immigrants and the well-heeled—leaving most native Singaporeans, who form an ever smaller percentage of the population, relatively poorer, possibly jobless, and certainly unhappy.

This rally won’t seriously disturb the government’s peace of mind. For a start, the white paper has already been passed by a large majority in parliament, where the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has held a large majority ever since self-government began in 1959. The party has been losing popularity in recent years, however, winning an historic low of 60% of the vote at the last election in 2011 (while still winning its usual healthy majority of seats). Immigration has been one issue to hurt it.

So party bigwigs know that they have to listen more closely to the electorate, as they have promised to do, and they also know that immigration is one of those issues that has a way of turning very toxic very quickly, as politicians from Britain and France to Malaysia and China can easily confirm. So on this one, even if the revolution never comes, it makes sense to expect some give-and-take, and perhaps flexibility even, from the PAP.