Only an affluent minority of people arriving in Singapore were tourists who had come for leisure. The majority were poor migrants who flocked to Singapore to find work. In 1933, the government introduced the Aliens Ordinance Act to control immigration in response to the Great Depression: upon landing, new immigrants had to pay a fee of $5 to obtain a landing permit; a month later, they had to exchange their landing permit for a Certificate of Admission. By the 1930s more women were migrating to Singapore and an increasing number of immigrants began to marry and settle in Singapore and Malaya.
