Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”
Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
It’s first “I don’t want illegal immigrants”, when the immigration is legal they start doing things like take back control(UK) or sustainability (Swiss).
What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago or robots now.
I find it annoying that they screw other stuff just because they don’t want to face the truth about their character.
Probably the solutions mentioned (sex/robots) are not the only ones. Many complain loudly about what might be a minority of the workers, so just knowing more people would have improved their opinion. Others do not have anything better to do, and they pick up this type of "crusades" with low impact on them, but big impact on others.
But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.
>More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.
They don’t want the working class southern Europeans around, they don’t have problem with the rich southern Europeans.
I wont call this xenophobia. Its just rich people annoyed by the poor hanging around outside the working hours. They often even like their poor people that do their things, they are actually annoyed by the other rich peoples employees or the kids of those employees who are seen as not as well behaved as theirs.
> Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
> It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
And it can happen implicitly or explicitly. Witness Jackson Hole. None of the workers can afford to live there and the nearest towns are not close. So the residents arranged a coach service to bus the workers in. And at the end of the day, and out. Yes, to their homes, but best believe there is a very limited window of return coaches which leads to a feeling of almost a sundown town.
>What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago
Unprotected heterosexual sex and births were decoupled 55 years ago. Almost as tenuous is the link between births and well raised children who can and will provide the labor that is wanted.
They don't want their son to do it because immigrants prevent the salaries of those jobs to rise naturally. Mass immigration is capitalism's answer to the Baumol law.
The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the bourgeois left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.
Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.
Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?
Looks you forgot yours at home. Lowering expenses (so wages) in a competitive free market works exactly like doping in cyclism: you'll be forced to if you want to stay alive.
But even without considering that, the business-owning "bourgeois" class not caring about their nation has no reason to be left unchecked by those whose job is to run a country.
Why don’t you let people decide who works with who in a free market and if you are worried about low wages introduce higher minimum wages.
Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.
Weird to see free market and minimum wage in the same sentence. The people that I know who voted yes on this don't want the people at all, no matter if the wage. They don't want the population density and they don't want the dilution of their culture
I’m somewhat sympathetic with that critique on mass immigration in regards to dropping wages at the low end, but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
Everytime I get into the weeds with anti immigration people I feel like I run through the IQ meme with “it’s just racism” on the low and high ends and {insert whatever alternative argument they have} in the middle.
> I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
How wouldn't it be just as racist to attack companies for hiring immigrants?
You think it is better to have people complaining about companies hiring completely legal migrants than seeking to reform the system in the first place?
Governmental policy is the appropriate place to focus attention - not Twitter outrage campaigns about random companies following the laws that were democratically put in place
I didn’t say it was better. I said it was indicative that it was just racism.
When I see ICE raid a farm or factory and take a bunch of illegal immigrants to praise, but the company has no consequences other than losing their employees and the anti immigration crowd is silent about that, then I feel like it’s just racism.
Also I would expect a push for limiting legal immigration from the camp that would be legitimate in arguing for less immigration to keep domestic wages higher, not necessarily pushing against the hiring of people who got past the rule system.
> but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants
They did this already back when Reagan granted amnesty in exchange for stronger border protections [1], it just hardly ever got enforced because employers are good at lobbying. This is slowly starting to change [2].
Despite this, yes, it is xenophobia. As much as they hate to admit it, opposition to immigration usually stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of a country, not an economic zone. Though the economic case for immigration has also been debunked [3].
> The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary.
apologies, but those of us in the Left agree more with the second part of your sentence than the Left. Are you mixing Leftists and Liberals, perchance?
Yet leftists will always agree to import migrants to undercut locals, in harmony with the capitalist bourgeois class. Besides, I have heard this argument said to me irl a countless times by people with leftist ideas.
The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers. If the person paying that Sri Lankan were to go to jail for his violation of labor law, the situation would be different.
Not really, labor laws in most places are the bare minimum acceptable. In Latvia, they are now hiring Indian truck drivers to compress even more the salaries.
Given that Latvian truck drivers are already the cheapest of the EU, you can figure out that legal is not the problem.
Amusingly, the ComputerWeekly article (citing the Business Insider article) omits the direction in which diversity affects unionization risk [1], while the two wikipedia articles (again citing the same Business Insider article) [2,3] strongly imply that diversity increases unionization, so the opposite of what their source is saying!
[1] These “risk scores” are calculated from over two dozen metrics – including employee “loyalty”, turnover, racial diversity, “tipline” calls to human resources and proximity to a union office – and shows the likelihood of employees in that location forming or joining a union. - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
[3] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community and calls to the National Labor Relations Board were named as contributors to "unionization risk". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_and_trade_unions
No no, they would have totally done it if the immigrants didn’t suppress the wages and the pay was %15 higher. Now they need to do some office jobs for 5 times the pay since the unemployment rate is %3. There are no Swiss sitting around and not cleaning the sewers because the pay was too low, it will have to fetch workers from other industries.
Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do.
The solution there is the same solution as the US. If the US introduced a (for example) 4x median salary fine for every year an employer employed someone not legally eligible to work the problem would fix itself. If they did not keep records assume 5 years or whenever the person's visa expired, since that is the most common case of illegal immigration.
But the businesses WANT a class of people they can underpay who can't gain access easily to legal services when the employer screws them over.
If the people are employed legally and are being paid the minimum wage, then your complaint is with the government and you should elect people that will raise the minimum wage.
I agree with your argument but this particular case is for the legal workers, just like UK significant portion of the Swiss population don’t want legal workers from the rest of Europe. They attempted to limit the legal rights of the EU citizens that currently have.
The higher paying water systems jobs are in fact filled by the children of the elite in both Switzerland and the US; it is a very impressive green job that they tend to get pushed to leave for more conservatively stable jobs.
I grew up at the border. A friend, who wasn't the brightest of the bunch, found a job to flip burgers at McDonalds after highschool. He was paid a salary higher than the French median wage. Not all Swiss are "elite", far from it.
You’re not really accounting for where the money for those “naturally rising wages” come from. A restaurant in the US is making the same (or frankly less) than it used to 10 years ago accounting for inflation. They can’t really afford to pay people more because of the higher consumer index. So the only real option is shutting down. Or in the US for farming. They already run on razor thin margins with a lot of variability from weather, pests etc. They were essentially making it work because of illegal immigrant labor. Now that Florida increased its crackdown on illegal labor around 30% of orange orchards have disappeared in a few years and probably a lot more as time goes on.
If you want to go back to your ethnostate fantasy, people are going to have to go back to consuming what you can produce in your own country. So Switzerland is going back to a diet of essentially bread and cheese and frankly I don’t think they grow enough grain for the bread.
Slaves my ass. If they had it worse than where they were coming from they wouldn’t be there. It’s also not just less restaurants, it’s wiping out the main streets of most small towns like conglomerates did in the US and that the US has been able to painfully rebuild because of Mexican/immigrant labor in the kitchens and back offices. And that’s not mentioning the immigrants that essentially run the entire US economic engine. Indians alone are responsible for founding 21% of the US’ unicorns/billion dollar companies being 1.5% of the population.
I don't care if working here in a sweatshop is marginally better. I don't want Indian dalits being used to be treated like outcasts in their host society and earning 100€ a month to be the lowest bidder for work in mine.
Besides, what you say is plainly false. Hairdressers are for instance in majority locals, command rather high rates, and are in demand. Maybe we also don't need 6 malls per medium-sized town either.
Of course you don’t care. You don’t have to worry about how a nation functions. You want your wages to be high, taxes low and your social welfare to keep functioning with a 0.9 birth rate.
Also, I don’t believe very many Dalits actually end up leaving India. Indian affirmative action means they essentially get a lot of the best college spots and governments jobs and it’s too cushy to leave.
Actually, if wages are high and taxes are low, chances are that the birth rate will rise :-)
And yes, the principle of public policy should be to care for one's own people first. Maybe India should have not been so nationalistic and allowed the English rulers to stay, so that financiers in London could continue to make fortunes out of the empire? How petty and egoistical of the Indians, right?
Pedantry, because the crackdown on labor certainly didn’t help, but the Florida orange orchards shutting down is mostly due to the citrus greening disease that’s wiping out the farms similar to how the gros Michael banana was wiped out last century[1]
Locals are not going to clean sewers and you know it. Society in general made it very clear over the last decades that jobs like that are shit, only losers are doing them, and that you need a degree to be worth something. If you want to blame something for this, blame neoliberalism. It helped create a culture in which educational credentials, professional careers, and market prestige became dominant measures of success, making many forms of manual labor appear less desirable.
You just have contempt for your fellow citizens, people are happy to do hard jobs if they are getting rewarded for it. This is also why you often find locals in equivalent jobs that can't be done by migrants (such as historical monuments restauration), but are equally hard (and better paid).
And I'm ok with restaurants being much more expensive. Anyway in France it's mostly pensioners that go there anymore.
When people have no hope of not making it as a permanent resident or citizen, their incentives to perform well are not as high. Also immigration is a global market, you compete with other countries that might offer better conditions so you lose on the best workforce.
I don't know the overall ratio, but my experience working with many immigrant workers is that they had no real intention of staying and instead are just arbitraging cost of living between [rich country] and [poor country] for their family back home. Emphasis on home.
Sounds like you have a really limited interaction with immigrants. I’m lifelong immigrant (4 different countries) in every single one of those countries majority of immigrants want to stay. Permanent residency is a constant conversation topic. There are definitely immigrants thinking like your explanation, but definitely a minority. .
There are all sorts of reasons people emigrate. It varies based on the jobs they’re doing, where they’re from, and where they’re going. And whatever their intentions, things change. And, why must there be a universal answer for everyone?
There are 40k naturalisations each year (a similar number relative to population as in the US). Around 13% of the Swiss citizens have acquired the nationality via naturalisation (8% in the US).
How many people born in CH never become Swiss? Because for the US, that number is ~0%.
And before you say: "well the US have different rules", well, ok, but then don't compare us to the US on the other number either, compare us to other EU countries with similar types of rules but different implementations.
CH has stricter naturalization laws than many EU countries and CH has mandatory military service which discourages many males from naturalizing, even those born in the country.
About one third. That would bring the fraction of naturalised foreign-born citizens in line with the US (which is also a kind-of-hard place to get citizenship, that's true).
> CH has mandatory military service which discourages many males from naturalizing
That doesn't make it difficult, it makes it undesirable and suggests that many people could get it but choose not to.
Maybe a personal analysis: It's a trend that is growing all over Europe. It's the equivalent of overtourism and a problem for the ruling parties (except the SVP that proposed it). Expect it to continue quite soon in Switzerland and other European countries (France, Germany etc.). Of course it doesn't make sense to curb immigration at 10 Mio and many know it. It was also for many a vote against the ruling parties. Although Switzerland is an immigration country, Swiss don't think this way. It's more farmer/alpine style: Welcome guests but expect them to leave again. Many Swiss also don't interact with foreigners a lot, including myself (besides at work). Many of my friends don't want to give up their prosperity. They are fairly advanced in their career and it's more about enjoying life. So for many of them it's more a rational decision than really a belief we should have more immigration. As long as I can benefit, it's good. For younger people it may be different. My wife, who is not native Swiss, was in favor. And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low.
The current system permitting freedom of movement across the continent while devolving immigration policy entirely to members creates a fundamental tension the EU needs to resolve. Because otherwise, Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly, which is bound to generate backlash even if they run a perfect programme.
To me it seems like EU countries are independently embarking on the Canada-policy of importing a whole bunch of South East Asians and Latin Americans. From Hungary to Ireland, you see the same trend.
Part of it is by economic necessity. For example finding nursing staff is very challenging and you have to compete with the US and Australia and other rich countries.
But part of it doesn't make much sense. We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside of Europe when we have about 2,500 EU universities pumping out graduates each year.
> We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside
I was involved in a startup in the Netherlands. We tried to recruit Dutch people, all wanted safe 9-5 jobs where they would know what they would do in 1-2 years. A startup can not guarantee that.
We ended up with most engineers foreigners, many (but not all) that have studied there.
So I would say that it is also risk and opportunity related. Someone "from outside" will be willing to do more, will have to prove himself, will take more risk. A "local" will have family support, wealth, a network, might want and value stability.
I don't have an opinion about how things "should be", I am just sharing how I saw them (myself an immigrant, multiple times)
I guess the question for society is: do we want businesses who cannot pay domestic workers a fair wage to exist in our country? Or do we want them to exist elsewhere and we import those products?
To society a startup with a 99%% chance of failing to IPO is no different from a sweatshop which also wants skilled but cheap labor.
The solution is obviously the American one. Make everyone so afraid of their job prospects that working for a startup isn't materially different in terms of job security.
When a person relocates to a country where their labor is more productive, a large amount of new economic value is created. Much of that value is captured by the migrant through higher earnings, but a lot also accrues to the people in the community they join.
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
There is no fixed demand for jobs, nor fixed supply of housing. Immigrant consumption creates a lot of jobs and immigrant labor creates a lot of housing
The timescale that the "lump of labour fallacy" operates on, as in the aggregate effects on employement, doesn't necessarily work for most people (individually).
Therefore it isn't really a good metric at the scale required to alleviate the problems people are facing.
"Eventually it will work out." Isn't proffering a solution.
> For example finding nursing staff is very challenging
No. Finding staff that'll work for very low wages is very challenging. It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages.
> It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages
Sort of. You’re simply not going to have an agricultural sector with at Canadian and American wages without significantly higher food prices and protectionism. One day we may automate that. But that will still be more expensive for the foreseeable future.
Voters seem to be picking domestic production and low prices, with low wages being a side effect. (Business interests of course love those.)
> The current system permitting freedom of movement across the continent while devolving immigration policy entirely to members creates a fundamental tension the EU needs to resolve. Because otherwise, Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly, which is bound to generate backlash even if they run a perfect programme.
You do realize German nationals (followed by French) are the top contingent in term of immigration to Swizerland.
(Only EU citizens benefit from freedom of movement to settle in Switzerland)
I believe the point was more that Germany can accept lots of immigrants being a large country, and freedom of movement will allow them inside all countries, which can lead to backlash.
> Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly
That's what I was responding to.
Note the UK left the EU and accepted more immigrants than before. We didn't force them. Hungary and Poland never accepted Syrian immigrants either and they weren't forced to accept them iirc.
I think this somewhat federation causes problems similar (by design!) to those that the Federal System within the United States encourages. The "finger pointing" allows for status quo to carry on as usual, while the overlapping & glacial judicial systems legislate glacially from their antiquated benches...
----
Hopefully we can all take inspiration from the living memories of balkanization – smaller groups, hopefully with shared interests and common backgrounds, ought to be in charge of themselves; and themselves, only.
It's a give/take. Even Israel & Spain have fenced borders (the latter on African continent)[i.e. it's not just USA "being racist"].
Every jurisdiction needs to limit immigration more (which EU's dispersed jurisdictions make impossible, by statute) before any one country can tackle any of their other lacks/disputes. The current EU setup is the inverse of USA's, where the feds technically regulate most immigration issues (instead of EU's individual memberstates having most power), but not all.
Balkanisation refers to fences within one’s borders. It’s fragmentation that leads to less wealth, less security and eventually a loss of sovereignty to a powerful neighbor who notices.
I understand and encourage the "breaking up" aspect. Smaller, more home-rule societies.
Looking at it from the Slovene POV (which ultimately benefited from the dissolution of Yogoslavia, occurring within my/most lifetime), local industries/GDP benefitted greatly.
Slovenia joined EU rather fast (2003), so that might also have contributed to the prosperity. Joining EU is not exactly "breaking up", is more like "joining".
Currently, the rest of ex-Yugoslavia countries don't seem to do as well as Slovenia, and the main difference is date of joining the EU...
Slovenia has been doing way better than the rest of Yogoslavia for longer than it's been a country... it's one of the reasons they lead initial Days War. IIRC their GDP (regionally) was 6x the Yogoslavian average in 1990~
> Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly
Fair enough and great point.
It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany. (Though still much harder than in America, at least based on my American friends who naturalized there and this Swiss of Indian and Germanic origin who naturalized in America.) It’s fair for those countries to want to maintain those differences.
> It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany
Is it? Asking out of curiosity, from a cursory look both countries require self-sufficiency, language (in fact Switzerland looks a little easier on this), no criminal background, an integration test to be taken (and both seem easy) and time in the country.
Only major difference seems to me is Germany takes 5 years in paper (more like 6-7 in reality with bureaucracy) and Switzerland takes 10 years in paper.
In Switzerland they are voting on naturalisation... which means you are at the whim of people living in the same place. If you don't fit in you'll have a hard time, if they don't like you for whatever reason etc, wrong hair colour, you name it. In Germany it's an administrative act with clear demands.
We are both correct in a way.
Local authorities can still decide applications. It's no longer a secret ballot but naturalisation commissions, local councils, municipal parliaments, or assemblies.
Some decisions still make headlines though because the reasons are rather weird sometimes.
Some countries print them out very liberally though. Sweden did not require financial self-sufficiency or language ability until like 2 weeks ago. I raised this point back in like 2015 and was promptly called a racist. So these have been handed to people who have nothing to do with the country. Few other countries have done this too but less so. Now all their children etc. will have unfettered access to Switzerland.
Tbh I cannot see anything else but Swiss people at some point voting themselves out of this somehow.
Your comments do land on the xenophobic side though.
E.g."Indians with German passports": You need to pass a naturalization and language tests before applying for citizenship. Until recently you couldn't even apply without living in the country for 6+ years - now reduced to 4+. So how do you or potential Swiss know they are Indians? The first thing that comes to mind is that you're assuming it by the way they look.
> And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low
I would agree and also suggest that initiatives like this play a large role in doing so. While there's a lot of bullshit arguments coming from the "yes" camp they do make some reasonable points and it's important that we discuss them to show what the trade-offs are.
I cannot speak for all Swiss but knowing that it was a democratic decision to continue with some, high skilled, immigration makes it far easier to accept than if some government employee in Bern would've made that decision single handed.
We ve been hearing that the trend is growing for decades now but it's failed to achieve anything via popular support. If anything there is anti-immigrant fatigue and indifference. It did provide, however a convenient scarecrow that helped to hide under the rug the mountain of bad policies that are rendering european countries irrelevant economic backwaters.
Can you explain why you think xenophobia is low? My experience as a swed is that xenophobia and trying to avoid immigration often go hand in hand. You do not have a large Swiss right populist semi racist party like most other European countries have?
In my experience, Swiss don't like criminals, unemployed people and people showing openly their religion. They negatively associate certain nationalities with stereotypes (e.g. Albanians, Maroccans etc.). If you are a representative of these groups, yes, it will be a problem. Violence towards foreigners is, compared to other countries, does not exist. Also with other nationalities, it is very different. Some people don't like Germans (that's also historically of course). However, with Germans near the boder it is often not a problem because they are more similar (and know how Swiss behave). With people from Berlin, many Swiss have not much in common. My wife is visible not Swiss and she never encountered raciscm (quite the contrary, she gets more free products at local stores than me because people recognize her). She also likes to buy tomatoes only from Switzerland. It is all how you behave in my experience.
To the SVP, it is quite a different between the party and representative that are in the government. They are considered moderate due to the political system in Switzerland.
The SVP is not considered "moderate". They are a far-right party. The fact that they are wide spread and gather a lot of votes does not make them "moderate".
As an anecdote re Germans: A friend of mine did an Auslandssemester there and was surprised to see "No Germans" signs for some of the housing options.
Always makes me chuckle as an example how "relative" xenophobia is.
You can get housing, you have to trade money for time and commute with the (frequent and reliable) public transportation.
Meanwhile the parlement and the anti+immigration far-right vote all the time to increase landlord rights and margins. Most of them are landlords, of course...
I mean, Kt. ZH also had the Wohnungsinitiative today, because not even Swiss people can find housing in ZH anymore.
Let’s be realistic and admit that landlords already prioritize someone with history of renting in the country and it’s pretty fair to say that new immigrants will struggle to get housing. Even if you come on a FAANG salary, you will not be able to buy your way in that easily.
Interesting that those supporting the motion claimed it was because there was no space left for new arrivals and that it put too much pressure on infrastructure like trains and yet the largest support came from the countryside which proably has less overcrowding and the cities were greatly against it.
Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...
Probably a pretty big selection bias there. People who don't like crowding and want space are more likely to live in the country. People already living in a dense City are less sensitive to more of the same.
I have a friend who voted yes and he lives outside of Basel because he thinks the city is too crowded. If you've been there you might find that amusing. His most vocal complaint is about too many people on Swiss hiking trails and difficulty in Booking huts.
More recently, he was laid off by a multinational pharma company where most of the Swiss office is now German immigrants.
That's not to say culture isn't a factor, but it would be a mistake to apply American ideas of racism to it
Things were fine during Covid. Now that the tourists are back the trains and trams are packed. The marketing for this campaign specifically talked about trains being packed but it should have focused more on how Swiss natives have to move out of Zurich to find an affordable place to jive, but the SVP would never focus on Zurich because theyre unpopular here.
The SVP campaign in favor of the initiative was something else. Half the country is plastered with their posters, and social media is full of astroturfing. It didn't pay off this times, but the propaganda dominance of this party is concerning.
27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?
> 27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country.
Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.
The point OP is making is that Switzerland undisputably has a very large proportion of immigrant population and that adding more should be carefully considered for various legitimate reasons, but it looks like you chose to be willfully ignorant.
Just curious, how can a state cap the country's population (I assume not like the Chinese government)? This appears that they assume their birth rate will be so low that they will need to absorb immigrates?
I don't know about "need" but the 1% population growth of Switzerland is already coming mostly from immigration. (It's also the case in the US, and in the EU it's even worse: without immigration population is declining.)
This is interesting — it put immigration limits directly up for a popular vote.
For those voting to strictly limit citizenship, I wonder if they are supporting: a permanent underclass without full rights? or that basic needs to be more expensive? or that widespread automation will soon meet basic labor needs?
The vote was not about limiting citizenship. It was about limiting the number of residents - if anything the effect would have been to _reduce_ that permanent underclass with fewer rights.
Misleading to call this "cap population", no one can cap population. The vote was about capping immigrant benefits, mostly aiming germans (reaching 9.5m) and then Swiss EU isolation/"Swexit" (at 10m). Basically the right wing SVP's long term goals packaged in a format that was more palatable to the masses.
The Swiss have votations all the time. They also can vote by mail. Those who didn't vote had no opinion, or no strong opinion, on the matter.
Also, cities who should suffer the most of overcrowding by immigrants voted against, as well as cantons situated at the border, while the backcountry who never see any immigrant voted in favor.
Overcrowding by immigrants does not mean the location will vote in favor of restricting immigration. After all, those are the places with the highest number of immigrant voters, who will not support such restrictions.
Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass.
And it takes more than a decade to have a chance at trying to get naturalized in Switzerland - a process that takes more than a year and thousands of CHF.
And naturalized immigrants have been shown to be ready to "pull the ladder behind them", even in countries where it is easier to get it (see the many interviews of Turks voting AfD in Germany or Indians voting Conservative in the UK).
If you think people who waited more than a decade and paid a hefty sum to affirm their will to be citizens are second-class (or maybe even traitors!) compared to people who became citizen by making no effort and were just born that way...
I recently got the Swiss passport but I'm still very much an immigrant. I am also a dual citizen, and frankly, hold not much love for this country. It's a secondary thing to me, the way having a nice car is: yeah it's nice, yeah I wouldn't want to give it up, but no it's not my identity and it's not the end of the world, despite me possessing it.
I did not "wait" for it. I came here, worked a bunch, made more money than I would've in my home country, and got the passport mostly so that I can have a refuge in case of severe war, and to have better travel opportunities.
Blame me all you want, I'm giving you the honest view many (most?) of us have, that you won't hear in society for obvious reasons. Lifelong culture, values, family, and friends do not change because a person worked in a given country for N years and filled some paperwork to get a passport, and to think otherwise is NONSENSE.
> If you think people who waited more than a decade and paid a hefty sum to affirm their will to be citizens are second-class (or maybe even traitors!)
I don't think so. Do you?
(Edit: I don't object to using 'immigrant' in a different way. But when someone said that in the places with more immigration there will also be more immigrant voters it was pretty clear in what sense the word was being used. Dumbass.)
Citizens with immigration background have been in the country for 10+ years, because 10 is the minimum for getting citizenship, at which point their voting patterns are more likely to be influenced by other factors and not their immigrant background.
Plus, it’s a bit of a phenomenon that many citizens with immigrant background’s tend to vote for stricter immigration policies.
The issue is this means in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen - which is very doable over two election cycles.
A 55% win with 58% turnout despite how this vote was front and center of media discourse is very worrisome as this shows how disengaged the other 42% are.
> in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen
If the marketing were less xenophobic and the cap were derived from some scientific basis, I think I could be persuaded to vote for it. Particularly since it is not a vote for Chexit, but a democratic vote to confront the EU. (Britain triggered Article 50. Nothing in this referendum directs Berne to do that.)
In what way? It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations. Unilaterally breaching your obligations is not a grounds for discussion or compromise, it is simply an exit from them, benefits included.
Suppose you're not getting on with your roommate. You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord. You are opting for the latter. That is not "confronting" anything, it is a done deal. It is a choice you are allowed to make, to be clear, just as the Brits did, but let's not pretend it's something it isn't.
> It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations
It was a vote to renegotiate them under threat of disavowing them. That’s fine.
> You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord
It’s totally fair, during those talks, to make clear that if you can’t reach an agreement on the roommate not doing their dishes, you’re prepared to move out. (That doesn’t commit you to moving out if they refuse to budge.)
> That doesn’t commit you to moving out if they refuse to budge
The vote did commit you to amending your federal constitution with a population cap, period.
> If the 10-million threshold is exceeded, Switzerland would have to terminate these agreements, including the one with the EU on the free movement of persons after two years. This would also render the other agreements under Bilateral Agreements I null and void. Switzerland’s participation in the EU’s Schengen and Dublin agreements would also be called into question, thereby jeopardising close cooperation in the areas of security and asylum.
There is no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences.
But I suppose that's how these votes have to be marketed, isn't it? The Brits were under the delusion that they'd get to have their cake and eat it too, that they could keep any benefits of being in the EU even as they exited it. I wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves. Which, again, is valid if that's the intention, but I suspect a lot of voters like yourself rather believed they were only voting to end freedom of movement for brown foreigners, or voting to negotiate special privileges, when in actuality it was literally a vote to exit treaties.
> no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences
There is always room for negotiation. Bilaterals is a treaty, not a diktat. And again, 2 years provides time for another referendum.
> wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves
Everyone did. The question was how the Guillotine clauses would be executed. Which, truly, nobody knows.
The "diktat" is the thing you just voted on which says "we will not negotiate". There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X".
> 2 years provides time for another referendum.
Voting for a no-negotiations amendment to your constitution as a negotiation tactic with the idea that you will later pass another constitutional amendment in a small window of time to revoke it is some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp.
> There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X”
Which isn’t a thing for a sovereign. Past sovereigns can’t bind future ones. Laws can always be repealed.
> some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp
Neither was I. Hence my vote against. Doesn’t mean the core concept is flawed, or that we have to accept EU treaties as perpetual because my ancestors voted for it to be that way.
The party that proposed this vote has always opposed the treaties with the EU and yes this whole thing is just a thinly disguised way to repudiate the treaties as soon as practicable. They know what they are getting, it's not a cake-and-eat-it-too thing.
Remember how Brexit started? Cameron wanted to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership.
Of course, those negotiations didn't go anywhere, because the EU has a limited ability to make concessions. Any comprehensive deal must be approved unanimously by all member states and some subnational entities. And that just doesn't happen, unless the proposed deal is clearly better than the status quo.
> withdraw from the bilaterals 2 years after exceeding 10m if they couldn't be renegotiated
Sure. This is two years down the road. And it is not Article 50. It would cause a shitshow. But that shitshow could be averted and is less comprehensive than directing an EU exit.
I mean technically, it was also rejected by the Kantons-as-entities so if that 5% is unevenly spread, theoretically it could still be rejected by Kantonal majority…
More surprising it didn't pass the "majority of cantons" either (both are required for initiatives like this), I would have expected it to pass (there are a lot of smaller/rural/alpine cantons which tends to vote more conservative).
The Masseneinwanderungsinitiative passed in 2014... and fuck all happened (despite the no campaign heavily leaning on the argument that it would kill the bilaterals, e.g. https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full). When push comes to shove, there is a solid bloc in parliament and the executive for saving the EU bilaterals, even if it means ignoring constitutional initiatives.
So don't worry, only one or two terrorist attacks/Rotherham situations that the medias can't completely memory-hole and you'll be able to scream "It's like the bad guys from my Netflix series won, my duderinos!" on Reddit to your heart's content.
I don't get why they would want to do this, when runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world. We're at a point where (I think, controversially) we need to sanction (or more) nations that aren't increasing their population annually. This is an existential threat facing the human race.
30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues".
It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
Most people have a local view of their world through their immediate surroundings, not a panoptic or holistic perspective on the earth or their nation.
The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.
What???? Why would we have to do that? Runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world? We have billions of people on the planet. GPD not going up is NOT an existential threat.
The complexity of society has got to be somewhat proportional to its population. If we halve the population, we won't just half the GWP. It will be lower still due to less specialisation.
Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.
Recent, related New Yorker article that goes into the background leading up to the vote
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl...
Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
It’s first “I don’t want illegal immigrants”, when the immigration is legal they start doing things like take back control(UK) or sustainability (Swiss).
What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago or robots now.
I find it annoying that they screw other stuff just because they don’t want to face the truth about their character.
Probably the solutions mentioned (sex/robots) are not the only ones. Many complain loudly about what might be a minority of the workers, so just knowing more people would have improved their opinion. Others do not have anything better to do, and they pick up this type of "crusades" with low impact on them, but big impact on others.
But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.
>More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.
They don’t want the working class southern Europeans around, they don’t have problem with the rich southern Europeans.
I wont call this xenophobia. Its just rich people annoyed by the poor hanging around outside the working hours. They often even like their poor people that do their things, they are actually annoyed by the other rich peoples employees or the kids of those employees who are seen as not as well behaved as theirs.
They don’t want Germans around!
They don't mind Austrians tho.
Germans are kind of disliked in the rest of DACH.
That one Austrian guy some time ago brought a lot of wealth to the Swiss. Who could blame them.
Who told you that? Swiss don't even want Germans, which is actually the biggest minority apparently. FFS, Germans! The original racists.
PS. I am German.
> Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
> It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
And it can happen implicitly or explicitly. Witness Jackson Hole. None of the workers can afford to live there and the nearest towns are not close. So the residents arranged a coach service to bus the workers in. And at the end of the day, and out. Yes, to their homes, but best believe there is a very limited window of return coaches which leads to a feeling of almost a sundown town.
>What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago
Unprotected heterosexual sex and births were decoupled 55 years ago. Almost as tenuous is the link between births and well raised children who can and will provide the labor that is wanted.
They don't want their son to do it because immigrants prevent the salaries of those jobs to rise naturally. Mass immigration is capitalism's answer to the Baumol law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the bourgeois left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.
Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.
Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?
That's as stupid as it is old. Locals would do it for a proper salary. But the same locals do not want to pay the proper salary!
Turn the brain on from time to time!
The locals are mostly workers, not capitalists with companies and salaried workers, so it's not "locals" exactly.
Looks you forgot yours at home. Lowering expenses (so wages) in a competitive free market works exactly like doping in cyclism: you'll be forced to if you want to stay alive.
But even without considering that, the business-owning "bourgeois" class not caring about their nation has no reason to be left unchecked by those whose job is to run a country.
Why don’t you let people decide who works with who in a free market and if you are worried about low wages introduce higher minimum wages.
Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.
Just ridiculous.
Most salaried people don't choose their coworkers, their bosses do.
Weird to see free market and minimum wage in the same sentence. The people that I know who voted yes on this don't want the people at all, no matter if the wage. They don't want the population density and they don't want the dilution of their culture
What is weird about it, free market is not rule-free market.
Immigrants in Switzerland don't "live like slaves," and I'm perfectly happy I don't have to clean the sewers, thank you very much.
Mainly because immigrating to CH is actually not that easy. Compare that with France or Germany.
I’m somewhat sympathetic with that critique on mass immigration in regards to dropping wages at the low end, but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
Everytime I get into the weeds with anti immigration people I feel like I run through the IQ meme with “it’s just racism” on the low and high ends and {insert whatever alternative argument they have} in the middle.
> I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
How wouldn't it be just as racist to attack companies for hiring immigrants?
I think what GP means is 'attack those companies for not paying decent wages', not 'attack those companies for hiring immigrants'.
You think it is better to have people complaining about companies hiring completely legal migrants than seeking to reform the system in the first place?
Governmental policy is the appropriate place to focus attention - not Twitter outrage campaigns about random companies following the laws that were democratically put in place
I didn’t say it was better. I said it was indicative that it was just racism.
When I see ICE raid a farm or factory and take a bunch of illegal immigrants to praise, but the company has no consequences other than losing their employees and the anti immigration crowd is silent about that, then I feel like it’s just racism.
Also I would expect a push for limiting legal immigration from the camp that would be legitimate in arguing for less immigration to keep domestic wages higher, not necessarily pushing against the hiring of people who got past the rule system.
> but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants
They did this already back when Reagan granted amnesty in exchange for stronger border protections [1], it just hardly ever got enforced because employers are good at lobbying. This is slowly starting to change [2].
Despite this, yes, it is xenophobia. As much as they hate to admit it, opposition to immigration usually stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of a country, not an economic zone. Though the economic case for immigration has also been debunked [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/28/employ...
[3] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigr...
> The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary.
apologies, but those of us in the Left agree more with the second part of your sentence than the Left. Are you mixing Leftists and Liberals, perchance?
Yet leftists will always agree to import migrants to undercut locals, in harmony with the capitalist bourgeois class. Besides, I have heard this argument said to me irl a countless times by people with leftist ideas.
The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers. If the person paying that Sri Lankan were to go to jail for his violation of labor law, the situation would be different.
Not really, labor laws in most places are the bare minimum acceptable. In Latvia, they are now hiring Indian truck drivers to compress even more the salaries.
Given that Latvian truck drivers are already the cheapest of the EU, you can figure out that legal is not the problem.
> The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers.
Which is made easier by immigration. In addition to the simple law of supply & demand, it also impedes unionization:
Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...
Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the United States - https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-reduce-unionization-uni...
Racial Diversity and Union Organizing in the United States, 1999–2008 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253
Amusingly, the ComputerWeekly article (citing the Business Insider article) omits the direction in which diversity affects unionization risk [1], while the two wikipedia articles (again citing the same Business Insider article) [2,3] strongly imply that diversity increases unionization, so the opposite of what their source is saying!
[1] These “risk scores” are calculated from over two dozen metrics – including employee “loyalty”, turnover, racial diversity, “tipline” calls to human resources and proximity to a union office – and shows the likelihood of employees in that location forming or joining a union. - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
[2] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community, and calls to the NLRB were named as contributors to "unionization risk." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon#Opposition...
[3] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community and calls to the National Labor Relations Board were named as contributors to "unionization risk". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_and_trade_unions
I find it hard to believe the kids of the Swiss elite would be cleaning sewers if not for the low pay.
No no, they would have totally done it if the immigrants didn’t suppress the wages and the pay was %15 higher. Now they need to do some office jobs for 5 times the pay since the unemployment rate is %3. There are no Swiss sitting around and not cleaning the sewers because the pay was too low, it will have to fetch workers from other industries.
Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do.
The solution there is the same solution as the US. If the US introduced a (for example) 4x median salary fine for every year an employer employed someone not legally eligible to work the problem would fix itself. If they did not keep records assume 5 years or whenever the person's visa expired, since that is the most common case of illegal immigration.
But the businesses WANT a class of people they can underpay who can't gain access easily to legal services when the employer screws them over.
If the people are employed legally and are being paid the minimum wage, then your complaint is with the government and you should elect people that will raise the minimum wage.
This kind of argument is the same as "guns don't kill people". Yes they do.
Explain in detail
I agree with your argument but this particular case is for the legal workers, just like UK significant portion of the Swiss population don’t want legal workers from the rest of Europe. They attempted to limit the legal rights of the EU citizens that currently have.
>Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do.
Of course business owners suppress wages. By using immigrants as leverage to tilt the supply/demand of labor in their favor. Duh.
This is the best argument in the thread against allowing immigration. That sounds awful. Better to avoid by keeping them out
Why not vote to legalize slavery again instead if you want to take the worst possible take on the argument.
The higher paying water systems jobs are in fact filled by the children of the elite in both Switzerland and the US; it is a very impressive green job that they tend to get pushed to leave for more conservatively stable jobs.
I grew up at the border. A friend, who wasn't the brightest of the bunch, found a job to flip burgers at McDonalds after highschool. He was paid a salary higher than the French median wage. Not all Swiss are "elite", far from it.
Switzerland has onlite elite kids? What do all the Swiss with <80 IQ do for a living? They're probably not gonna get a job at ABB, Google, UBS or ETH.
You’re not really accounting for where the money for those “naturally rising wages” come from. A restaurant in the US is making the same (or frankly less) than it used to 10 years ago accounting for inflation. They can’t really afford to pay people more because of the higher consumer index. So the only real option is shutting down. Or in the US for farming. They already run on razor thin margins with a lot of variability from weather, pests etc. They were essentially making it work because of illegal immigrant labor. Now that Florida increased its crackdown on illegal labor around 30% of orange orchards have disappeared in a few years and probably a lot more as time goes on.
If you want to go back to your ethnostate fantasy, people are going to have to go back to consuming what you can produce in your own country. So Switzerland is going back to a diet of essentially bread and cheese and frankly I don’t think they grow enough grain for the bread.
It's ok to have less restaurants? I prefer to have less restaurants and staff that isn't treated like slaves?
Slaves my ass. If they had it worse than where they were coming from they wouldn’t be there. It’s also not just less restaurants, it’s wiping out the main streets of most small towns like conglomerates did in the US and that the US has been able to painfully rebuild because of Mexican/immigrant labor in the kitchens and back offices. And that’s not mentioning the immigrants that essentially run the entire US economic engine. Indians alone are responsible for founding 21% of the US’ unicorns/billion dollar companies being 1.5% of the population.
I don't care if working here in a sweatshop is marginally better. I don't want Indian dalits being used to be treated like outcasts in their host society and earning 100€ a month to be the lowest bidder for work in mine.
Besides, what you say is plainly false. Hairdressers are for instance in majority locals, command rather high rates, and are in demand. Maybe we also don't need 6 malls per medium-sized town either.
Of course you don’t care. You don’t have to worry about how a nation functions. You want your wages to be high, taxes low and your social welfare to keep functioning with a 0.9 birth rate.
Also, I don’t believe very many Dalits actually end up leaving India. Indian affirmative action means they essentially get a lot of the best college spots and governments jobs and it’s too cushy to leave.
Actually, if wages are high and taxes are low, chances are that the birth rate will rise :-)
And yes, the principle of public policy should be to care for one's own people first. Maybe India should have not been so nationalistic and allowed the English rulers to stay, so that financiers in London could continue to make fortunes out of the empire? How petty and egoistical of the Indians, right?
> Actually, if wages are high and taxes are low, chances are that the birth rate will rise
Absolutely incorrect. There is not one case of this happening, infact it’s the exact opposite. It’s a common fallacy.
The only correlation for birth rate is that it is inversely correlated with women’s education.
Pedantry, because the crackdown on labor certainly didn’t help, but the Florida orange orchards shutting down is mostly due to the citrus greening disease that’s wiping out the farms similar to how the gros Michael banana was wiped out last century[1]
[1] https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-03-23/florida-oranges-cit...
Locals are not going to clean sewers and you know it. Society in general made it very clear over the last decades that jobs like that are shit, only losers are doing them, and that you need a degree to be worth something. If you want to blame something for this, blame neoliberalism. It helped create a culture in which educational credentials, professional careers, and market prestige became dominant measures of success, making many forms of manual labor appear less desirable.
In France, locals clean sewers. I know several sewer workers, who enjoy very early retirement (54 years old, only 12 years of sewer work). https://www.brut.media/fr/videos/france/societe/les-metiers-...
You just have contempt for your fellow citizens, people are happy to do hard jobs if they are getting rewarded for it. This is also why you often find locals in equivalent jobs that can't be done by migrants (such as historical monuments restauration), but are equally hard (and better paid).
And I'm ok with restaurants being much more expensive. Anyway in France it's mostly pensioners that go there anymore.
As Terry Pratchett put it in Carpe Jugulum:
> And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
Then do like UAE? No permanent residency or naturalization
Amnesty International report that things are fairly bad in the UAE for foreign workers.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...
That is kinda the intention, not the accident thing
When people have no hope of not making it as a permanent resident or citizen, their incentives to perform well are not as high. Also immigration is a global market, you compete with other countries that might offer better conditions so you lose on the best workforce.
I don't know the overall ratio, but my experience working with many immigrant workers is that they had no real intention of staying and instead are just arbitraging cost of living between [rich country] and [poor country] for their family back home. Emphasis on home.
Sounds like you have a really limited interaction with immigrants. I’m lifelong immigrant (4 different countries) in every single one of those countries majority of immigrants want to stay. Permanent residency is a constant conversation topic. There are definitely immigrants thinking like your explanation, but definitely a minority. .
It seems to depend a lot on whether it's skilled or unskilled work.
There are all sorts of reasons people emigrate. It varies based on the jobs they’re doing, where they’re from, and where they’re going. And whatever their intentions, things change. And, why must there be a universal answer for everyone?
We do. Swiss naturalization is famously difficult.
But EU citizens can basically live forever in CH even though technically they don’t have permanent residency.
There are 40k naturalisations each year (a similar number relative to population as in the US). Around 13% of the Swiss citizens have acquired the nationality via naturalisation (8% in the US).
How many of those were born in CH?
How many people born in CH never become Swiss? Because for the US, that number is ~0%.
And before you say: "well the US have different rules", well, ok, but then don't compare us to the US on the other number either, compare us to other EU countries with similar types of rules but different implementations.
CH has stricter naturalization laws than many EU countries and CH has mandatory military service which discourages many males from naturalizing, even those born in the country.
> How many of those were born in CH?
About one third. That would bring the fraction of naturalised foreign-born citizens in line with the US (which is also a kind-of-hard place to get citizenship, that's true).
> CH has mandatory military service which discourages many males from naturalizing
That doesn't make it difficult, it makes it undesirable and suggests that many people could get it but choose not to.
Big difference between permanent residency and naturalisation.
Maybe a personal analysis: It's a trend that is growing all over Europe. It's the equivalent of overtourism and a problem for the ruling parties (except the SVP that proposed it). Expect it to continue quite soon in Switzerland and other European countries (France, Germany etc.). Of course it doesn't make sense to curb immigration at 10 Mio and many know it. It was also for many a vote against the ruling parties. Although Switzerland is an immigration country, Swiss don't think this way. It's more farmer/alpine style: Welcome guests but expect them to leave again. Many Swiss also don't interact with foreigners a lot, including myself (besides at work). Many of my friends don't want to give up their prosperity. They are fairly advanced in their career and it's more about enjoying life. So for many of them it's more a rational decision than really a belief we should have more immigration. As long as I can benefit, it's good. For younger people it may be different. My wife, who is not native Swiss, was in favor. And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low.
> It's a trend that is growing all over Europe
The current system permitting freedom of movement across the continent while devolving immigration policy entirely to members creates a fundamental tension the EU needs to resolve. Because otherwise, Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly, which is bound to generate backlash even if they run a perfect programme.
To me it seems like EU countries are independently embarking on the Canada-policy of importing a whole bunch of South East Asians and Latin Americans. From Hungary to Ireland, you see the same trend.
Part of it is by economic necessity. For example finding nursing staff is very challenging and you have to compete with the US and Australia and other rich countries.
But part of it doesn't make much sense. We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside of Europe when we have about 2,500 EU universities pumping out graduates each year.
> We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside
I was involved in a startup in the Netherlands. We tried to recruit Dutch people, all wanted safe 9-5 jobs where they would know what they would do in 1-2 years. A startup can not guarantee that.
We ended up with most engineers foreigners, many (but not all) that have studied there.
So I would say that it is also risk and opportunity related. Someone "from outside" will be willing to do more, will have to prove himself, will take more risk. A "local" will have family support, wealth, a network, might want and value stability.
I don't have an opinion about how things "should be", I am just sharing how I saw them (myself an immigrant, multiple times)
I guess the question for society is: do we want businesses who cannot pay domestic workers a fair wage to exist in our country? Or do we want them to exist elsewhere and we import those products?
To society a startup with a 99%% chance of failing to IPO is no different from a sweatshop which also wants skilled but cheap labor.
The solution is obviously the American one. Make everyone so afraid of their job prospects that working for a startup isn't materially different in terms of job security.
When a person relocates to a country where their labor is more productive, a large amount of new economic value is created. Much of that value is captured by the migrant through higher earnings, but a lot also accrues to the people in the community they join.
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
And if they displace someone trying to join the engineering workforce say right out of school? What about housing?
There is no fixed demand for jobs, nor fixed supply of housing. Immigrant consumption creates a lot of jobs and immigrant labor creates a lot of housing
Look up the "lump of labour fallacy". The jobs market is not a zero-sum thing.
The timescale that the "lump of labour fallacy" operates on, as in the aggregate effects on employement, doesn't necessarily work for most people (individually).
Therefore it isn't really a good metric at the scale required to alleviate the problems people are facing.
"Eventually it will work out." Isn't proffering a solution.
> For example finding nursing staff is very challenging
No. Finding staff that'll work for very low wages is very challenging. It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages.
> It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages
Sort of. You’re simply not going to have an agricultural sector with at Canadian and American wages without significantly higher food prices and protectionism. One day we may automate that. But that will still be more expensive for the foreseeable future.
Voters seem to be picking domestic production and low prices, with low wages being a side effect. (Business interests of course love those.)
Free borders policy is a special case of free market, so of course more competition is intended to drive the cattle prices down .
This is literally what anyone means when they can't or can't easily find anyone for anything which isn't evil or suicidal.
> The current system permitting freedom of movement across the continent while devolving immigration policy entirely to members creates a fundamental tension the EU needs to resolve. Because otherwise, Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly, which is bound to generate backlash even if they run a perfect programme.
You do realize German nationals (followed by French) are the top contingent in term of immigration to Swizerland.
(Only EU citizens benefit from freedom of movement to settle in Switzerland)
> You do realize German nationals (followed by French) are the top contingent in term of immigration to Swizerland
Yes. I’m also conceding to the SVP the observation that a good fraction of said nationals are recently naturalized.
If the SVP says it, it must be true :) What's their sources? I'm sure they could find a couple of anecdotes, doesn't make it significant.
Assume it's true for the sake of argument. Do you think that would be an issue then?
> What's their sources?
Don’t know, don’t care. Mine are conversations in Zürich.
Is this Berlin that decides anything and rolls it out contintent-wide with us in the room right now?
Spain is legalizing 500k immigrants: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/spain/spain-legalizing-half-mi...
Not quite Berlin, but same effect: nearly indiscriminate influx of poorly vetted immigrants that can soon travel all around Europe.
So yes, it's with us in the room, just not right now, but very soon.
I believe the point was more that Germany can accept lots of immigrants being a large country, and freedom of movement will allow them inside all countries, which can lead to backlash.
And that point is wrong. An immigrant with a legal residence in Germany but no permanent residence permit can't just pack up and go live elsewhere.
Yep, someone points it to GP down below. One needs to apply for immigration again in the next country if they want to travel for more than a vacation.
Berlin is basically forcing the EU's hand regarding the Gaza war, so, yes?
Only in the same sense that Hungary was dictating Russia and Ukraine policy.
How is that related to immigration?
> Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly
That's what I was responding to.
Note the UK left the EU and accepted more immigrants than before. We didn't force them. Hungary and Poland never accepted Syrian immigrants either and they weren't forced to accept them iirc.
Was wondering how long this thread could go before someone made it about the omnicause.
I think this somewhat federation causes problems similar (by design!) to those that the Federal System within the United States encourages. The "finger pointing" allows for status quo to carry on as usual, while the overlapping & glacial judicial systems legislate glacially from their antiquated benches...
----
Hopefully we can all take inspiration from the living memories of balkanization – smaller groups, hopefully with shared interests and common backgrounds, ought to be in charge of themselves; and themselves, only.
> we can all take inspiration from the living memories of balkanization
Massive internal trade barriers and security so fragmented you’re at the whim of your larger neighbors?
It's a give/take. Even Israel & Spain have fenced borders (the latter on African continent)[i.e. it's not just USA "being racist"].
Every jurisdiction needs to limit immigration more (which EU's dispersed jurisdictions make impossible, by statute) before any one country can tackle any of their other lacks/disputes. The current EU setup is the inverse of USA's, where the feds technically regulate most immigration issues (instead of EU's individual memberstates having most power), but not all.
> Even Israel & Spain have fenced borders
Balkanisation refers to fences within one’s borders. It’s fragmentation that leads to less wealth, less security and eventually a loss of sovereignty to a powerful neighbor who notices.
I understand and encourage the "breaking up" aspect. Smaller, more home-rule societies.
Looking at it from the Slovene POV (which ultimately benefited from the dissolution of Yogoslavia, occurring within my/most lifetime), local industries/GDP benefitted greatly.
Slovenia joined EU rather fast (2003), so that might also have contributed to the prosperity. Joining EU is not exactly "breaking up", is more like "joining".
Currently, the rest of ex-Yugoslavia countries don't seem to do as well as Slovenia, and the main difference is date of joining the EU...
Slovenia has been doing way better than the rest of Yogoslavia for longer than it's been a country... it's one of the reasons they lead initial Days War. IIRC their GDP (regionally) was 6x the Yogoslavian average in 1990~
Immigration is not devolved. The whole point of Schengen is the opposite of devolution of immigration.
You are confusing immigration with naturalization. Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly.
> Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly
Fair enough and great point.
It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany. (Though still much harder than in America, at least based on my American friends who naturalized there and this Swiss of Indian and Germanic origin who naturalized in America.) It’s fair for those countries to want to maintain those differences.
> It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany
Is it? Asking out of curiosity, from a cursory look both countries require self-sufficiency, language (in fact Switzerland looks a little easier on this), no criminal background, an integration test to be taken (and both seem easy) and time in the country.
Only major difference seems to me is Germany takes 5 years in paper (more like 6-7 in reality with bureaucracy) and Switzerland takes 10 years in paper.
In Switzerland they are voting on naturalisation... which means you are at the whim of people living in the same place. If you don't fit in you'll have a hard time, if they don't like you for whatever reason etc, wrong hair colour, you name it. In Germany it's an administrative act with clear demands.
Citizens voting on naturalization was abolished by federal court decision since 2008.
You can still be voted on by the city council though, but they are required to provide a reason and „wrong hair color“ will not pass legal challenge.
We are both correct in a way. Local authorities can still decide applications. It's no longer a secret ballot but naturalisation commissions, local councils, municipal parliaments, or assemblies.
Some decisions still make headlines though because the reasons are rather weird sometimes.
Switzerland want less than B1? I find B1 barely can have a normal conversation.
B1 speaking, A2 writing if my token predictor is correct. :) -- which is a little less than Germany (B1 both)
Some countries print them out very liberally though. Sweden did not require financial self-sufficiency or language ability until like 2 weeks ago. I raised this point back in like 2015 and was promptly called a racist. So these have been handed to people who have nothing to do with the country. Few other countries have done this too but less so. Now all their children etc. will have unfettered access to Switzerland.
Tbh I cannot see anything else but Swiss people at some point voting themselves out of this somehow.
Your comments do land on the xenophobic side though. E.g."Indians with German passports": You need to pass a naturalization and language tests before applying for citizenship. Until recently you couldn't even apply without living in the country for 6+ years - now reduced to 4+. So how do you or potential Swiss know they are Indians? The first thing that comes to mind is that you're assuming it by the way they look.
> And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low
I would agree and also suggest that initiatives like this play a large role in doing so. While there's a lot of bullshit arguments coming from the "yes" camp they do make some reasonable points and it's important that we discuss them to show what the trade-offs are.
I cannot speak for all Swiss but knowing that it was a democratic decision to continue with some, high skilled, immigration makes it far easier to accept than if some government employee in Bern would've made that decision single handed.
We ve been hearing that the trend is growing for decades now but it's failed to achieve anything via popular support. If anything there is anti-immigrant fatigue and indifference. It did provide, however a convenient scarecrow that helped to hide under the rug the mountain of bad policies that are rendering european countries irrelevant economic backwaters.
Can you explain why you think xenophobia is low? My experience as a swed is that xenophobia and trying to avoid immigration often go hand in hand. You do not have a large Swiss right populist semi racist party like most other European countries have?
In my experience, Swiss don't like criminals, unemployed people and people showing openly their religion. They negatively associate certain nationalities with stereotypes (e.g. Albanians, Maroccans etc.). If you are a representative of these groups, yes, it will be a problem. Violence towards foreigners is, compared to other countries, does not exist. Also with other nationalities, it is very different. Some people don't like Germans (that's also historically of course). However, with Germans near the boder it is often not a problem because they are more similar (and know how Swiss behave). With people from Berlin, many Swiss have not much in common. My wife is visible not Swiss and she never encountered raciscm (quite the contrary, she gets more free products at local stores than me because people recognize her). She also likes to buy tomatoes only from Switzerland. It is all how you behave in my experience. To the SVP, it is quite a different between the party and representative that are in the government. They are considered moderate due to the political system in Switzerland.
The SVP is not considered "moderate". They are a far-right party. The fact that they are wide spread and gather a lot of votes does not make them "moderate".
Source: am Swiss
As an anecdote re Germans: A friend of mine did an Auslandssemester there and was surprised to see "No Germans" signs for some of the housing options. Always makes me chuckle as an example how "relative" xenophobia is.
How are the job prospects and housing prices? Switzerland is beautiful and I would gladly move there for six or so equivalent figures..
If you are non-EU, you will not get a work permit.
If you are EU or do get a work permit, you will not get housing.
The vote was for a reason…
Both of these are wrong.
Non-EU means it's harder to get a permit, especially without working experience, but it's not impossible either.
Housing is difficult in cities like Zurich but calling it impossible is stretching it, especially if one is fine with a longer commute.
You can get housing, you have to trade money for time and commute with the (frequent and reliable) public transportation.
Meanwhile the parlement and the anti+immigration far-right vote all the time to increase landlord rights and margins. Most of them are landlords, of course...
I mean, Kt. ZH also had the Wohnungsinitiative today, because not even Swiss people can find housing in ZH anymore.
Let’s be realistic and admit that landlords already prioritize someone with history of renting in the country and it’s pretty fair to say that new immigrants will struggle to get housing. Even if you come on a FAANG salary, you will not be able to buy your way in that easily.
They pay incredibly well, but their work culture (vacation, protections for parents etc) is atrocious. They're on par with Japan/South Korea.
You get bonus points for commuting across the German border and utilizing our cheap prices. Don't forget to get the value-added tax refunded!
Meat trafficking over the border is one of my hobbies.
Interesting that those supporting the motion claimed it was because there was no space left for new arrivals and that it put too much pressure on infrastructure like trains and yet the largest support came from the countryside which proably has less overcrowding and the cities were greatly against it.
Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...
The less exposure to different people the more xenophobia there is... That's true everywhere.
Probably a pretty big selection bias there. People who don't like crowding and want space are more likely to live in the country. People already living in a dense City are less sensitive to more of the same.
I have a friend who voted yes and he lives outside of Basel because he thinks the city is too crowded. If you've been there you might find that amusing. His most vocal complaint is about too many people on Swiss hiking trails and difficulty in Booking huts.
More recently, he was laid off by a multinational pharma company where most of the Swiss office is now German immigrants.
That's not to say culture isn't a factor, but it would be a mistake to apply American ideas of racism to it
Yep. 0 to 1 is much more noticeable than 99 to 100.
In case people were wondering about the result of that thread which made the front page a few days ago…
This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059
Things were fine during Covid. Now that the tourists are back the trains and trams are packed. The marketing for this campaign specifically talked about trains being packed but it should have focused more on how Swiss natives have to move out of Zurich to find an affordable place to jive, but the SVP would never focus on Zurich because theyre unpopular here.
What do tourists in trains have to do with population caps? Tourists are not registered citizens, they exist regardless of population caps.
Isn't that a consequence of Zurich housing & zoning policy?
The SVP campaign in favor of the initiative was something else. Half the country is plastered with their posters, and social media is full of astroturfing. It didn't pay off this times, but the propaganda dominance of this party is concerning.
Never heard of a hard limit on population. What happens if you go over?
It was terrible for girls born in China when they had their one child limit.
Nothing. It was an initiative to limit immigration, by a xenophobic party.
They don't give a damn if you have 13 children, they don't want brown people in Switzerland.
27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?
> 27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country.
Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.
The point OP is making is that Switzerland undisputably has a very large proportion of immigrant population and that adding more should be carefully considered for various legitimate reasons, but it looks like you chose to be willfully ignorant.
That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to.
> That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to.
I was addressing the implication in the "fact", which is incorrect anyway. One in five of that 27% were born in Switzerland: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...
It's really remarkable that such a large fraction of Swiss residents born abroad were also born in Switzerland!
I had only heard about rebirth in a figurative spiritual sense.
What events occurred that made the original Swiss people into Swiss people?
Oh there could but we are talking about the svp here, they are hiding their brown pants in the closet right now .
> you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?
That's the part they currently don't say out loud. They are getting bolder and bolder though.
Just curious, how can a state cap the country's population (I assume not like the Chinese government)? This appears that they assume their birth rate will be so low that they will need to absorb immigrates?
I don't know about "need" but the 1% population growth of Switzerland is already coming mostly from immigration. (It's also the case in the US, and in the EU it's even worse: without immigration population is declining.)
This is interesting — it put immigration limits directly up for a popular vote.
For those voting to strictly limit citizenship, I wonder if they are supporting: a permanent underclass without full rights? or that basic needs to be more expensive? or that widespread automation will soon meet basic labor needs?
addendum: thank you kgwgk
The vote was not about limiting citizenship. It was about limiting the number of residents - if anything the effect would have been to _reduce_ that permanent underclass with fewer rights.
Misleading to call this "cap population", no one can cap population. The vote was about capping immigrant benefits, mostly aiming germans (reaching 9.5m) and then Swiss EU isolation/"Swexit" (at 10m). Basically the right wing SVP's long term goals packaged in a format that was more palatable to the masses.
Cities once again save rural voters from civic suicide.
> Swiss citizens have rejected by a 55% majority...
This is still very close for comfort, and SVP will re-propose it again and again and again as it and it's predecessors have done for decades.
Only 58% of the voters voted.
55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes?
But of course, the SVP have been launching the same initiative since the 70s, they are unlikely to stop now.
>55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes?
Very typical, and even higher than usual.
The Swiss have votations all the time. They also can vote by mail. Those who didn't vote had no opinion, or no strong opinion, on the matter.
Also, cities who should suffer the most of overcrowding by immigrants voted against, as well as cantons situated at the border, while the backcountry who never see any immigrant voted in favor.
Overcrowding by immigrants does not mean the location will vote in favor of restricting immigration. After all, those are the places with the highest number of immigrant voters, who will not support such restrictions.
Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass.
And it takes more than a decade to have a chance at trying to get naturalized in Switzerland - a process that takes more than a year and thousands of CHF.
And naturalized immigrants have been shown to be ready to "pull the ladder behind them", even in countries where it is easier to get it (see the many interviews of Turks voting AfD in Germany or Indians voting Conservative in the UK).
Edit: FabCH concurs.
> Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass. […] And naturalized immigrants
can!
When do they stop being immigrants?
If you think people who waited more than a decade and paid a hefty sum to affirm their will to be citizens are second-class (or maybe even traitors!) compared to people who became citizen by making no effort and were just born that way...
I recently got the Swiss passport but I'm still very much an immigrant. I am also a dual citizen, and frankly, hold not much love for this country. It's a secondary thing to me, the way having a nice car is: yeah it's nice, yeah I wouldn't want to give it up, but no it's not my identity and it's not the end of the world, despite me possessing it.
I did not "wait" for it. I came here, worked a bunch, made more money than I would've in my home country, and got the passport mostly so that I can have a refuge in case of severe war, and to have better travel opportunities.
Blame me all you want, I'm giving you the honest view many (most?) of us have, that you won't hear in society for obvious reasons. Lifelong culture, values, family, and friends do not change because a person worked in a given country for N years and filled some paperwork to get a passport, and to think otherwise is NONSENSE.
> When do they stop being immigrants?
Never?
> If you think people who waited more than a decade and paid a hefty sum to affirm their will to be citizens are second-class (or maybe even traitors!)
I don't think so. Do you?
(Edit: I don't object to using 'immigrant' in a different way. But when someone said that in the places with more immigration there will also be more immigrant voters it was pretty clear in what sense the word was being used. Dumbass.)
Immigrants can’t vote.
Citizens with immigration background have been in the country for 10+ years, because 10 is the minimum for getting citizenship, at which point their voting patterns are more likely to be influenced by other factors and not their immigrant background.
Plus, it’s a bit of a phenomenon that many citizens with immigrant background’s tend to vote for stricter immigration policies.
maybe next time it will be 11M
The issue is this means in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen - which is very doable over two election cycles.
A 55% win with 58% turnout despite how this vote was front and center of media discourse is very worrisome as this shows how disengaged the other 42% are.
> in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen
If the marketing were less xenophobic and the cap were derived from some scientific basis, I think I could be persuaded to vote for it. Particularly since it is not a vote for Chexit, but a democratic vote to confront the EU. (Britain triggered Article 50. Nothing in this referendum directs Berne to do that.)
> a democratic vote to confront the EU
In what way? It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations. Unilaterally breaching your obligations is not a grounds for discussion or compromise, it is simply an exit from them, benefits included.
Suppose you're not getting on with your roommate. You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord. You are opting for the latter. That is not "confronting" anything, it is a done deal. It is a choice you are allowed to make, to be clear, just as the Brits did, but let's not pretend it's something it isn't.
> It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations
It was a vote to renegotiate them under threat of disavowing them. That’s fine.
> You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord
It’s totally fair, during those talks, to make clear that if you can’t reach an agreement on the roommate not doing their dishes, you’re prepared to move out. (That doesn’t commit you to moving out if they refuse to budge.)
> That doesn’t commit you to moving out if they refuse to budge
The vote did commit you to amending your federal constitution with a population cap, period.
> If the 10-million threshold is exceeded, Switzerland would have to terminate these agreements, including the one with the EU on the free movement of persons after two years. This would also render the other agreements under Bilateral Agreements I null and void. Switzerland’s participation in the EU’s Schengen and Dublin agreements would also be called into question, thereby jeopardising close cooperation in the areas of security and asylum.
There is no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences.
But I suppose that's how these votes have to be marketed, isn't it? The Brits were under the delusion that they'd get to have their cake and eat it too, that they could keep any benefits of being in the EU even as they exited it. I wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves. Which, again, is valid if that's the intention, but I suspect a lot of voters like yourself rather believed they were only voting to end freedom of movement for brown foreigners, or voting to negotiate special privileges, when in actuality it was literally a vote to exit treaties.
> no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences
There is always room for negotiation. Bilaterals is a treaty, not a diktat. And again, 2 years provides time for another referendum.
> wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves
Everyone did. The question was how the Guillotine clauses would be executed. Which, truly, nobody knows.
> Bilaterals is a treaty, not a diktat.
The "diktat" is the thing you just voted on which says "we will not negotiate". There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X".
> 2 years provides time for another referendum.
Voting for a no-negotiations amendment to your constitution as a negotiation tactic with the idea that you will later pass another constitutional amendment in a small window of time to revoke it is some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp.
> There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X”
Which isn’t a thing for a sovereign. Past sovereigns can’t bind future ones. Laws can always be repealed.
> some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp
Neither was I. Hence my vote against. Doesn’t mean the core concept is flawed, or that we have to accept EU treaties as perpetual because my ancestors voted for it to be that way.
The party that proposed this vote has always opposed the treaties with the EU and yes this whole thing is just a thinly disguised way to repudiate the treaties as soon as practicable. They know what they are getting, it's not a cake-and-eat-it-too thing.
Remember how Brexit started? Cameron wanted to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership.
Of course, those negotiations didn't go anywhere, because the EU has a limited ability to make concessions. Any comprehensive deal must be approved unanimously by all member states and some subnational entities. And that just doesn't happen, unless the proposed deal is clearly better than the status quo.
> Nothing in this referendum directs Berne to do that
The initiative text literally directed the Bundesrat to withdraw from the bilaterals 2 years after exceeding 10m if they couldn't be renegotiated.
> withdraw from the bilaterals 2 years after exceeding 10m if they couldn't be renegotiated
Sure. This is two years down the road. And it is not Article 50. It would cause a shitshow. But that shitshow could be averted and is less comprehensive than directing an EU exit.
I mean technically, it was also rejected by the Kantons-as-entities so if that 5% is unevenly spread, theoretically it could still be rejected by Kantonal majority…
More surprising it didn't pass the "majority of cantons" either (both are required for initiatives like this), I would have expected it to pass (there are a lot of smaller/rural/alpine cantons which tends to vote more conservative).
The Masseneinwanderungsinitiative passed in 2014... and fuck all happened (despite the no campaign heavily leaning on the argument that it would kill the bilaterals, e.g. https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full). When push comes to shove, there is a solid bloc in parliament and the executive for saving the EU bilaterals, even if it means ignoring constitutional initiatives.
Swiss are too educated to fall for this.
They have among the lowest fertility rates on the planet and a huge over 50 population.
There's no way they can keep being wealthy and comfortable without younger immigrants.
So don't worry, only one or two terrorist attacks/Rotherham situations that the medias can't completely memory-hole and you'll be able to scream "It's like the bad guys from my Netflix series won, my duderinos!" on Reddit to your heart's content.
#NotSorryForFlaming
Duh-muh, that evil, evil right-wing proposals.
R.I.P. Switzerland
I don't get why they would want to do this, when runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world. We're at a point where (I think, controversially) we need to sanction (or more) nations that aren't increasing their population annually. This is an existential threat facing the human race.
30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues".
It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
Most people have a local view of their world through their immediate surroundings, not a panoptic or holistic perspective on the earth or their nation.
The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.
It's aimed at immigration. Babies are OK. Not all that incentivized but OK.
What???? Why would we have to do that? Runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world? We have billions of people on the planet. GPD not going up is NOT an existential threat.
The complexity of society has got to be somewhat proportional to its population. If we halve the population, we won't just half the GWP. It will be lower still due to less specialisation.
Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.
Why cultures that depend on immigrant labor complain about the immigrants but never do the work themselves?