In fact, just posted my voting letter today, before taking a 1h bike ride through the biggest city in Switzerland, having lots of space and freedom biking around in our beautiful city.
When taking the train to my parents house, I pass several farms and landly smaller cities. Alot of free space in between those, train mostly has spare seats, depending on rush hour timings. There usually are several big commercials on private farmer land stating “NO to 10 Million Population”, prompting people to vote YES on the SVP/UDC initiative.
The initiative’s lancers seem to play a lot on people’s fear of overcrowding, which even in the most population-dense city in Switzerland seems like a joke. There’s a lot of space and quality of living is still amazing here.
Yes, during rush hours, you might have to stand for 15-30min in public transport. Yes, finding an appartment is getting harder and more difficult.
But is this a problem of more people coming here or the failures of the state preparing for future population growth? We have so much space, benefits from diverse cultures and love for human beings.
My letter was specifically voting AGAINST this initiative.
Also voted no of course.
Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.
I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.
For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.
> For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.
Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.
Also we had a German team lead hiring Germans, well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.
Diversity back in the day meant Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering working together…
Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.
Maybe Americans are the least biased (though being an American I am not so sure) but that doesn’t mean we aren’t biased (even if sometimes for legitimate reasons like ease of communication).
Actually each foreigner to raise or get some state benefits should pass some exam?
It's not easier dealing with people from your own country but it is biased. From someone who has hired hundred+ remote developers in europe for 10 years to lead them and out of those hired a total of 2 people from my country. Wouldn't have been hard either.
At the same time I see some managers doing this, currently in another fully remote company have a manager colleague that has hired 3 brazillians back to back. Go figure. Just shows you that it's a biased person in other respects (we all are) and that they make zero efforts to keep it in check (this is a decision you make).
Say I am hiring as a native English speaker in a Chinese company (while of course still knowing enough Mandarin to survive) and I have 3 candidates, one of whom also speaks English fluently. I would definitely be biased towards the English speaker, because I would work better with them.
Now, it doesn't really matter what their ethnicity was, but there is a higher likelihood of them being of the same ethnicity. Especially if my first language is niche, the chances of hiring the same ethnicity would be higher.
I've been on the receiving end of this before, being hired in part because I spoke English due to my manager while the rest of the company was primarily Mandarin
Also hiring is often based on trust and networks. People refer others to their company and jobs. That trust tends to work out pretty well for companies. If people get laid off they tell their friends and their friends pass on opportunities to them or try to help them find new jobs. And people tend to make friends with others they share a culture and language with.
If you add a bunch of barriers to make companies have to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity or culture, that slows down hiring and can be an extra regulatory burden for what reason?
When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives.
Then those white men feel spurned. They imagine they weren't hired because they're white. It's an easier pill to swallow and then the next thing you know DEI is the great Satan of low IQ white men.
Are the “mediocre white men” the ones with a 27-29 MCAT/3.4-3.59 GPA, who have a 21% chance of admission to medical school whereas a hispanic student in that same range has a 61% chance? Are those the “mediocre white men” you’re talking about?
> The companies get … more diverse perspectives
That makes no sense. The premise of non-discrimination laws is that someone’s ethnic background doesn’t affect their “perspectives” in ways that are material to employment.
Also when did we change the subject to college admissions?
Yeah, screw the middle class. What do they know anyway?
In Switzerland live over 41% migrants and children of migrants (just 8.4%). So the native Swiss are not just “surrounded” but greatly diminished.
Born on the wrong side of the Rhine? F right off.
No better at all. Worse, arguably.
Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”
Maybe we should just keep expanding it. Declare everyone white. Black people are just white people with more melanin.
Then we can be racist about aliens from outer space.
Its also why they get left behind by everyone who has.
Its an ever growing complex and unpredictable world. Sameness is not a strength in complexity theory.
If people are already starting to have trouble finding work and housing that seems like the conversation is long overdue.
Switzerland as a country usually strikes good balance between various extremes, much better than US or EU countries do. I have no doubt they will work it out, not ideally, but better than most. Immigration they tackled much better than rest of Europe for example.
And for the vote - its 1:1 Brexit. Vote for capping, damage your long term prosperity, and those unpopular jobs still will need to be staffed, or country will work worse, be dirtier etc. And if one can earn cleaning streets or putting stuff in shop shelves as much as cca doctor in France (with higher costs of life, but it doesn't have to be extreme), the amount of people willing to try coming and working is basically endless.
The idea one can freeze time and keep the country as some idealized image from their childhood (without the nasty stuff that happened ie in 70s to orphaned kids en masse, aka Verdingkinder), one would have to become second North Korea. Everything changes these days, massively and quickly. Dictators won't be sending their kids to study here under false names anymore, would they.
It's also one of the worst developed nation economies and has a massive old, shrinking population problem and is well associated with people having no kids, having no prospects for a better life, and having huge amounts of its population live alone shuttered from the outside world.
A good economy has many benefits and skilled immigration can significantly improve developed nation economies.
Japan heavily utilizes foreign workers via a Gulf style guestworker program, and even that has led to the far-right Sanseito becoming Japan's highest rated opposition party and the far-right wing of the LDP winning internal party politics.
I struggle to see this. Central Geneva is full of beautiful, well-maintained green spaces and children's play areas with plenty of larger parks scattered around.
Good thing no one asked you. Why should you have a say in how someone else uses their land if all they are doing is building more housing units?
My whole life has been a struggle for living in places where there could be fewer humans.
Name one. God help me if you cite curry.
After all, this time it HAS to go better right?
Is not accepting infinity immigration "taking away the EU"? And the population density is even more part of the conditions it has grown in. But much much harder to fix if it increases too much - shouldn't they take a precautionary approach?
Regardless, that's not the question I asked. I asked why the poster was pretending they don't know population number affects the quality of a place.
Have you read the page? Yes it is.
> Regardless, that's not the question I asked. I asked why the poster was pretending they don't know population number affects the quality of a place.
In that case: why are you pretending to not understand rhetorical questions after asking one yourself?
You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).
Is that true? Switzerland's foreign-born population was under 5% around WWII. Wasn't Switzerland already a rich country by then?
In 1940, Switzerland’s GDP/capita was 2.9x [EDIT: the world average]; it peaked at 4.4x in 2000 and is now 3.8x [1]. (It increases linearly, long term, from the mid 20s until 2000.)
Relative to Western Europe, Switzerland was 1.6x in 1950, about the same as today.
[1] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...
Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants. Arguably the wealth of today is the product of managing to avoid the worst of WWII and profiting from Switzerland's "neutrality" but that's an entire conversation by itself.
They secretly helped allies - check Campione d'Italia story for example. Thats very far from neutral behavior. And so on. But most people don't want to know facts, they want simple black & white stories.
It continues till today - they are officially neutral but look at their moves ie against russia during Ukraine war. Completely aligned with west (well apart from US which has top brass collaborating with their sworn mortal enemy). Look how their army looks like - 100% compatibility with NATO, 0% with russia or anybody else. They picked their side, they just don't boast around it, actions speak more than 1000 words.
Such a claim would need terms to be defined, even before justification. Switzerland's mercenary attitude to immigration is well known, yes. I would argue that endogenous factors (history and culture) are far more important in explaining Switzerland's success. Neither natural resources nor immigration are determinative of a country's wealth. See: Japan, which historically has had neither.
This is how freedom of movement works, yes, and it's a key reason why our country is so rich.
That's a very dumb theory. People cannot just be exchanged: you cannot take say, 60 million people out of Bangladesh, put them in Japan, and expect Japan to stay the same. Just as you cannot take 60 million Japanese, put them in Bangladesh, and expect Bangladesh to stay the name.
That's a fact. But I could give a shitload of historical examples too... Here's one: when white and black people arrived in the americas, there was still cannibalism taking place in both northern and southern america. The americas had neither white nor black people. Today there's no cannibalism anymore and there are not many kids sacrifices happening in the US to please Inca/Maya gods anymore either.
A slightly more reasonable theory is that if you import people through immigration at a reasonable rate, you can assimilate those people. For example for a long time in Europe female genital mutilation wasn't a thing anymore. Now sadly due to mass migration, ask any ob-gyn doctor in western Europe what he sees and what kind of act he has to do: like re-stitching hymens to pretend the women-to-be-married are virgins (because, yes, there are patriarchal cultures where men are going to inspect a woman's hymen to make sure she's a virgin).
People just live in a fantasy land in their heads: there are 300 million women alive, today, who've been genitally mutilated (that's a very sizeable percentage of all the women out there). What's actually ongoing is weirder and shittier than most people realize.
I say good for Switzerland to curb immigration a bit.
People may be not dissimilar but cultures certainly are.
It implicitly reframes a debate about immigration, to a debate about ecology/sustainability.
Like I'm not defending it or saying it's honest. But as a marketing jiujitsu move, it's actually impressively creative.
This specific policy may not be well intentioned, it may even be a means to avoid taking in those refugees when the time comes, but this is the kind of thing that nations should be thinking about right now.
Why are so many of your comments about race or religion?
Someone from India, China etc whose family immigrated in the 1800s to work in gold mines/railroads etc and probably has deeper roots in the country than the person criticising them = immigrant, bad, shouldn't be here. Somehow simultaneously taking all the jobs and living off the state and not contributing.
Someone from Europe/America/Canada with white skin who either came here as a child or was born here to immigrant parents = not a problem at all, they "don't count" for some reason.
You do realize who a great deal of the "southern Italians" in certain parts of New York and New Orleans actually are, right? Or is your point solely about religion?
So yes, it absolutely is about immigration, regardless of the wording.
European unity works well in a world of mostly-stable populations. Having mass migrations from large, relatively empty countries, to pretty full ones, is going to make the full ones increasingly expensive to make housing for, to power, and to water.
If anything agriculture is going to require more land in order to be sustainable.
Also, good portion of it isn't even meant for human consumption. Think flowers or cattle feed.
This is not about feeding the population or about sustainability. It's simply about profit.
In the USA it's basically corporations that run everything and drive the farmers into poverty where said corporations can then buy their land and rely on undocumented workers to keep the abuse going.
From the outside EU farmers seem to have better labor relations, but don't know.
Which is so weird! France has large amounts of good farmland, some of the most modern (and unified, unlike Germany) government in Europe for a long time etc... no obvious reason to have just half the population density of Germany.
France used to be “the China of Europe” (which is why we kept being at war with the whole continent at once). Had France followed their neighbors' demographic, it would be home to more than 200 million people today.
The demographic collapse of France in the 19th century, while Germany kept growing, alone explains the French defeat in 1870 (and then the two world wars).
More data on that piece of history, and a hypothesis to explain it, here: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust/
France was historically always focused on Paris, because that was where the Emperor was. If you were not a farmer, there was little reason to live anywhere but Paris or other large cities.
In contrast, Germany historically consisted of thousands of small fiefdoms that each held some sort of local importance and each held authority of some sort. The Kaiser was pretty far away and only mattered in practice when the Kaiserreich was involved in some sort of conflict.
https://nccr-onthemove.ch/indicators/how-qualified-are-migra...
More importantly, education isn't everything. Half the economy runs on work that doesn't need higher education and that locals largely won't do: cleaning, care, hospitality, construction. The Spanish and Portuguese speaking workers doing those jobs are propping up a standard of living for everyone.
* https://www.mission-geneve.dfae.admin.ch/en/manual-labour-mi...
* (scroll to the cost breakdown) https://batmaid.ch/en/about-us
After food, shelter and necessities is there something left over? Lately consuner spending is increasingly debt indicating that its not break even.
Geneva has the highest minimum wage in the world precisely to try and avoid the "working poor".
Also the "consuner spending is increasingly debt" is very US centric view. The situation in Europe is less extreme and totally absent in many countries.
This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.
There can be situations where the market for a particular type of labor does not exist. Populations aren't infinite, and if there are enough good paying, desirable jobs for full employment, then there may be no one available to do a job economically.
For example let's imagine a hypothetical town where only residents of the town are allowed to work in the town, though they can provide services to those outside of the town. Let's say 100 people live in this town, and they are all doctors. There is a hospital in this town that needs 100 doctors to run. There are other jobs to be done in this town - someone needs to pick up trash, someone needs to mow lawns, someone needs to sell food, etc. Now if you pay someone a doctor's salary to pick up trash, they could potentially leave the hospital to do that job instead; but then the hospital is understaffed. Something isn't going to get done; indeed in this scenario where there are a lot more jobs to be done than people to do them, a lot of stuff isn't going to get done, no matter how good the pay is, and the jobs that are done will be insanely expensive.
In this case you would simply allow people from outside the town to work in the town, or get more people to move into town. If you scale up this scenario to cities, provinces, and ultimately nations, it's clear that at some point you must choose between structural unemployment (ie number of workers greater than number of jobs to be done), bullshit jobs (people who would be structurally unemployed are hired to do unnecessary tasks), a managed economy (employment opportunities restricted to ensure necessary work gets done at any population level), or immigration/emigration of labor (labor supply varies to meet demand) regardless of wages. In practice you'll likely get a combination of the above.
The market for anything isn't infinite. When S/D shifts the market price changes to reflect that. The price reflects the relative supply and demand. You seem to be operating under the delusion that prices must be fixed at where you desire them and that no market existing there is a failure. In fact the availability of goods and services in a market is a function of your willingness to pay a market price for them. If you don't objectively value such goods and services they won't exist for you. It's not the responsibility of everyone else to subsidize your lifestyle because you're not willing to pay market prices.
Working age population is decreasing in Europe. It's only really major cities that suffer under development, and even among them it's just some, not the majority.
And despite all the bitching, even extra-EU immigrants are a huge resource for most European countries. In Italy e.g. extra-EU immigrants contribute to 14% of taxes and receive less than 2% of benefits, as many of them come here as young adults and leave before qualifying for pension anyway so the bulk of social services (school and healthcare) is essentially largely subsidized by immigrants.
In Germany extra-EU immigrants are on average net contributors to welfare state too.
Yes, many among them stay poor, don't integrate and tend to fall for minor, petty and some for violent crime.
What you hear little about are the insane dangers of organized crime like Italians and Albanians on the other hand, because they move hundreds of billions and are a drag to the economy in most of Europe.
Interesting. By what cost does this measure loss of freedom due to increased surveillance, decreased freedom of movement especially for women. Also increased cost and decreasing quality of police, law, education, or even street cleaning…
All the data I find shows them contributing less than natives, and even MORE less if corrected for age. https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/232517
Large scale global movement is indicative of failure to uplift the globe from violence, poverty, and climate change. It makes a lot more sense to me for the global powers who don't want mass migration to do something to fix its causes instead of retreating inward and succumbing to nativism.
What an absurd assertion. Where did you learn that? Read up about Roman border control and immigration policy, and what they required of immigrants into Roman territory.
> pretty full ones
C'mon, why parrot this nonsense? There are no "mass migrations" and neither the European countries nor the US are "full". Yes the Europeans screwed up real integration across the board, but nobody is really working on fixing that. Easier to just claim to be full and the immigrants are causing higher crime rates so no more people in but oh demographics, please everybody make more babies!
Nothing lasts forever. Good times will come and go and so would bad times.
I think as humans we are used to small time frames which are proportional to our own lifetime.
But the world: say climate, population, geology etc. moves at a much different cycle, if at all you can call it a cycle since none of the iterations are exactly the same.
So the lesson is this: change is coming. Change will always be coming. Embrace it.
If you like something, you have to struggle to preserve it as much as you can, for as long as you can, but you can never make it permanent.
Over a thousand years of history has shown that they were right.
True words of wisdom.
> Hopefully they were wrong :-)
They weren't. EU membership and cooperation is built on favoritism and necessity. You get into the EU if you have something of value the other members need from you (capital, geopolitical, industrial, human or natural resources) done via treaties instead of via war and conquest.
So it ended up as a toxic relationship where members exploit each other to get as much as they can while contributing as little as they can.
@Ukraine, you'll experience this when you get your turn, just ask Romania.
Same with joining NATO TBF. We had to buy some overpriced shoddy used F-16 from the US with a lot of miles on the clock, for the same price of brand new Swedish Gripens just so the US would accepts us in NATO.
So if history does indeed repeat itself, Ukraine will also have to sell off vital industry and resources to major EU corporations to get in. Like all those new shiny drone startups they have. Safe to assume Rheinmetall or Dassault will want those under German/French flag before Ukraine is allowed in the EU. Same with oil, gas and rare earths.
Basically EU and NATO are two tier institutions. First there's the whales, the big players who are founders and make the rules, or get invited to join, and then there's the scrappy low level players, who need to beg and offer monetary dowry to be allowed to join. In theory everyone is equal, except some dogs are more equal than others.
Because everything in the world is transactional pay-to-win. There's no charity and no handouts. If you're being invited somewhere or given something, it's because something from you is expected in exchange.
@throwaway85825 Yes, except that was non negotiable form the US side. "You buy our overpriced junk or take a hike, I don't care if your poor country can't afford it." Leaked cables between our leaders at the time.
Also food for thought to MAGA who keeps thinking that US acted like a charity for NATO.
Romanian telecom: post communist crash Romanian telecommunications were a disaster. For example two different phone numbers shared the same line (a.k.a. Cuplajul). In late 90s some western telecom companies started investing in Romanian cellular networks- they built all the tower and network infrastructure. I do not understand what you mean when you say the west stole telecoms from Romanian - the west actually built it.
Energy, oil and gas- the heydays of Romanian oil producing days were during the WWII when Romania supplied a lot of the oil used by the Germans. After that Russians took whatever was left over because of war reparations. Since I can remember Romania did not produce oil - it was dependent on Russian imports during communism for example. So there was no oil and gas for the West to steal either.
Re: NATO - in the 90s and early 2000sn Romania wanted to join NATO because that particular generation remembered the Russian all too well. The priceRomania paid was enforcing the embargo on the Serbs during the Kosovo and Bosnian wars.
Re: F16 - romanians are flying some hand me downs from Holland which were purchased at the dizzying price of 1 euro.
I am sorry, but you sound like a Romanian nationalist, one who unfortunately is convincing enough do that the current generation does not know how much better their lives are because of EU and NATO. But who knows, maybe they will get a chance to find out…
[edit - some typos]
It wouldn’t be full Chexit. Just renegotiating and then rejecting the Schengen chapter. It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
The new initiative is basically the same, but with no leeway to ignore it.
(that said I suspect if it passes, there will be something tied to the bilateral referendum in 2027/28 to try to supersede it)
This is my thinking, too. If it really comes down to Chexit-or-nothing, we’ll have another referendum.
If SVP gets control of government they’ll probably try to Chexit irrespective of any referendum power. That’s orthogonal to this question.
This would be catastrophic to Swiss economy.
These kinds of morally-superior, we'll show them, type of attitudes and suggestions are precisely why so many folks have come to be anti-EU. Nevermind the actual other real day-to-day issues with the organization.
I'm sure you're also staunchly against Scotland and any referendum to join the EU, and against Catalonia becoming independent as well? Why should Taiwan be an exception and not part of China? Seems many of the EU are of the opinion that "We support sovereignty when it conveniently aligns with my chosen organization".
The default and perhaps what is best for democracy is to have many smaller nation states, city states, and the other various confederations and the like. The super-organization of nations into these unwieldy states is in many respects anti-democratic and perhaps only temporary as these large nations and alliances were built precisely to fight other, large nation states.
Why? I think the first is a good idea and the second fine if that’s what they want.
It has treaties, but not membership. That doesn't make it "leaving" if they annul the treaties.
> It wouldn’t be full Chexit. Just renegotiating and then rejecting the Schengen chapter. It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
My terminology was matching what was used here.
This is a strange framing that itself usually comes from a standpoint of moral superiority. When you sign agreements with a governing body, like the EU on freedom of movement, and you break that agreement then there's consequences. And I don't mean that in an underhanded agressive way, but just literally you've broken the terms you had negotiated.
The superiority complex really often seems to come from countries like Switzerland or the UK in the Brexit situation. Countries that already have often privileged deals and then decide to forfeit them, which they are allowed to do, it's not an attack on their sovereignty, the EU is not mainland China and Switzerland or the UK were not Taiwan, they're free to do what they want, they just can't have their cake and eat it too.
I don't think so. Even in the case where the Swiss or UK are breaking agreements or demanding changes to those agreements, it isn't something that's uncommon as countries and nations and companies and all sorts of entities break or renegotiate agreements or contracts all the time. In the case of Switzerland let's say they no longer feel the EU's freedom of movement policy works with the existing agreement because the EU has failed to protect its borders. You're painting a breaking of the agreement in the sense that nothing has changed in the agreement, but that may not be true and so breaking the agreement by the Swiss would have actually been because of a break in the agreement by the EU.
These interactions taking place and then now all of a sudden the Swiss are to be the recipient of some draconian action "we'll show them" is not really that strange given it's relatively straightforward to see how these two entities can reasonable come to a disagreement which may or may not resolve itself.
what the Swiss are trying to do here is very uncommon, in fact it's so uncommon literally nobody has ever done it before. No country in history has imposed a numerical population cap on its population, and in addition, freedom of movement isn't a detail. It's the very core of the Treaty of Rome and the Schengen agreement that Switzerland is part of. That Europeans can now move freely between countries is the bedrock achievement of virtually all its labored for.
And the EU is not going to do braconian measures, the EU does not bully its smaller neighbors. Britain wasn't intimated, threatened and nobody tried to interfere with it when they wanted to leave. THey decided to do so and did. Swizterland can cap its population and deny freedom of movement, nobody's going to bully them, but they're obviously not going to have the relationship they had with the EU.
To even rhetorically compare the EU to the US (which has threatened to annex an ally's territory) or China (which throws minorities into camps and threatens a democracy with force) is pretty damn absurd. Ask Taiwan if they want to trade places with Switzerland on the world map if they could.
I think you are putting this referendum on a pedestal it doesn't need to go on. All countries control population to some extent, whether that's in how they support parental leave or how they support mothers, or through immigration control, quotas, points systems, &c. Switzerland is just adding in another wrinkle. Plus all legislation was at one point new.
Until that point, I thought wars were a stupid thing that humanity realized were stupid and stopped doing.
The word I'd choose instead is "concerning" if not "scary".
Or their preëmptive re-negotiation.
I’m not sure describing it as a trap is fair. Nobody voting on is confused about what the thresholds require. I’m not thrilled at how close they both are. But the fundamental idea of a maximum sustainable population for an Alpine republic isn’t abhorrent to me.
Yes. But I don’t think Brexit is comparable to what is being proposed here.
In Brexit, the UK invoked Article 50. In this case, the EU would have to execute its Guillotine clause. That dramatically changes the framework for and thus possibility of renegotiations.
Hoping different outcome by negotiation over this is like hoping for negotiating your way out of your gym membership payment when still attending. Not going to happen unless you become a charity case or insignificant, being significant is not a strength its a weakness when you are looking for charity or special treatment. Switzerland can imagine being too important to loose just as UK thought and they will be let go as UK.
I guess leaving EU can be useful to those who want to do things to Switzerland just like they did things to UK.
I was just telling someone this today! Very business-friendly party, with the exception of immigration policy, ofc.
Well, that will be a problem especially for Swiss industry. Tons of workers from neighboring Italy, France, Germany and Austria work in Switzerland, commuting each day. They do this because workers are paid better in Switzerland than in neighboring countries. If those workers aren't available anymore, Swiss production of all kinds of stuff will take a huge hit.
For the same reason of wage differences, not a lot of Swiss people cross the border for work, and all neighbors are larger (except of course Liechtenstein, but that's a very special case anyways). So for those neighboring countries, it isn't that much of a problem.
Same types of people who profited from Brexit.
It's pathetic.
Would be curious to learn more about why this is being proposed.
https://www.admin.ch/fr/initiative-durabilite
https://www.udc.ch/actualites/campagnes/pas-de-suisse-a-10-m...
There's always been a pull-and-push between getting skilled workers and protecting the internal labor market. Right-wing political parties never made a secret of the fact that they hated immigrants, because they stole jobs and redirected/exported money that would have otherwise been received by Swiss. IIRC this was historically mostly felt in Ticino (the southern region), where Swiss companies sourced very cheap Italian labor by undercutting Swiss salaries by a lot, shrinking the job market for Swiss people (a Swiss can barely get by in Switzerland with an equivalent Italian salary).
Switzerland is geographically in the middle of Europe, but it's not part of the EU. This allowed the country to thrive outside some of the more restrictive EU regulations and keep its own currency, but because it has a smaller job market that can barely replenish the high-skilled workers pool and is often in defect (not just finance bros, but also doctors, for instance), it always had to import workforce from neighboring countries to some extent. Over the last 40 years Switzerland basically opened up to more-or-less follow many EU rules and put in place agreements to have a play in the same market and be allowed to easily keep importing people it needs.
This initiative as I understand it would be equivalent to a Brexit (because sooner or later the cap would be hit, considering more housing keeps being built), which would undo 40 years of openings and IMO greatly weaken the integration with EU, and as a result the country as a whole.
As an immigrant in Switzerland, I am quite WORRIED.
If it helps : Assuming that the initiative pass and nothing is done to reduce the immigration rate, the 10M threshold would be reached by 2040 according to the Federal Statistics Office. The current regime should apply to you till 2042 which should give you 16 years to make your way to citizenship (Among many other path that would let you stay).
Edit: but the CHexit will work just fine, because of the Swiss exceptionalism.
The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.
Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.
While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.
Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and
1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)
2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)
3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)
6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)
7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech
all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.
At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.
THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.
Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.
Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.
[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...
[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...
[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...
[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/484/export-complexit...
You can fear the results of runaway immigration in the short term, like cultural clashes, organized crime and brown people in your neighborhood. But you can't deny the results on the long term when you allow talent to go to your country and end up with more nobel laureates of New Zealand origin than New Zealand.
https://www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe...
But either way, European nations are nearly all screwed - their expenditure on pensions and healthcare will quadruple in the coming decades as the demographics change heavily towards elderly peple.
Everything else is negotiated under separate treaties. This would revert Switzerland to pre-Schengen, which is sad, but it wouldn't be suicidal.
Not really, the bilateral are a package and the EU doesn't want CH to pick and chose.
If freedom of movement stops, a whole lot of thing also stop. It happened the last time SVP got something similar voted on (introduction of quota for foreign immigration), on a smaller scale (erasmus and horizon which are the higher ed and academic research collaboration, CH was a heavy recipient of the latter).
It really depends who is in power where when and if the 10mm limit is crossed. If there is a conservative in Paris or Berlin, chances are Switzerland can simply abrogate Schengen.
Of course if you have EU dismantlers in power anyway in FR/DE, they'll just be happy to sabotage.
I think we do bilaterally with our trading partners/border friends.
Freedom of movement across the EU has created a massive backlash. Politicians can keep ignoring that. Or they can modify Schengen, perhaps by admitting that FOM makes immigration decisions a collective one. (Germany letting in a massive wave of immigration means a massive wave of immigrants for everyone.)
And do the same with every other renegade, including reciprocal mirror tariffs and stuff. Want to play games? Let's play them together.
March 26, 1995 (The Implementation): The Schengen Area officially became effective on this date. Internal border controls were finally lifted among seven member states.
I say! That's news to most.
And somehow despite this, the European economies had the biggest share of global GDP back then.
And now they're more integrated than ever, have more immigration than ever, have created the EU as their "big daddy" leader and enforcer, and yet they can't stop losing share of GDP to the rest of the world. Stange. Maybe they should hit the brakes for a second and reflect that their current course of action isn't the cure but the disease.
Like ASML, Concorde and Airbus were created via European cooperation when EU was a nascent baby and present day Schengen freedom of movement did not exist. Now we EU bureaucracy, open borders unlimited freedom of movement but haven't created the next Airbus or ASML. Food for thought that the EU is tackling the wrong issues on its economic stagnation. Maybe the solution is not more EU, but less EU.
You haven't given a single reason why that would be beneficial.
It's a small, landlocked country, surrounded on all sides by Schengen nations, that until recently delegated air defense to the EU outside of their air force's office hours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...
Most of the time I'm waved through.
This is a proposal to change that state to something far stricter in this regard.
For the most part the swiss already decided to try to cherry pick as much as possible. They know that if they want to limit movement, then the EU will also limit movement from swiss to other EU countries. And the swiss always disliked that, so they could not go through with it. You can also see that with the UK - they are out of the EU but suddenly want free movement and free trade. Some people can't decide what they want.
Edit: unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant. Swiss voters have a right to decide how they want to live. They're not beholden to EU laws; they can make their own sovereign decisions, and everyone must respect that.
I vote in Switzerland. I’m very much interested in the thoughts and opinions of others on this vote.
Why? It’s repressive if done to cap a natively-growing population, since that means government controlling reproduction (à la one-child policy). But government has controlled immigration for generations.
I’m asking as someone who is genuinely on the fence on this vote.
There's a point where caping even natively growing population is actually the right move.
There's plenty of overpopulated shitholes (Mumbai, Dhaka, Cairo, Bangladesh, etc) where it would have been an absolute blessing if government was controlling reproduction or put a population cap in place.
If you think capping population is wrong, go visit Dhaka, I highly recommend it.
If you're still on the fence after visiting Dhaka, you're beyond saving.
You missed the part where we _voluntarily_ chose to enter into a contract with the EU that does in fact beholden us to EU laws.
We can go back on that contract, but breaking your word is something that people remember for a reason.
And that clause famously includes the breaking of all other contracts.
Lol. Dude, sure the Swiss can vote however they want. But we all see you and can pass judgement on this thinly veiled anti-immigrant nonsense all day long. Respect it I will never.
But a Switzerland that just collapses surely but surely? That’s gonna send a message.
Some politicians want to market themselves here.
> Then it's down to individual responsibility to observe the norms of one's society.
That's ok, but Switzerland decided to also partake in many EU regulations, including free movement. They can't cherry-pick individual parts. If they don't want special relations to the EU then that's also fine but the benefits will be gone as well. The UK found this out quite quickly too.
If you account for that, the effective density of Switzerland on the usable area is 600–700 people/km².
Doesn’t the population cap somewhat elegantly deal with this? If birth rates are insufficient, a certain amount of migration is tolerated. The lower births rates go, the more immigration is allowed.
If this referendum blocks EU movement, it will choke the pipeline that's filling positions that takes in a high amount of immigrants like healthcare, agriculture, etc. Once it dies out, people may not be as willing to move if they're the one paving the path.
Historically, the US has been quite successful in this area. Migrants from Philippines dominate nursing, Mexico for agriculture and Chinese/Indians for Sotware/Medical.
The migration path has to be vastly superior to their current living for this to work, if they want the same immigration. Or else, it will be mostly people who are truly in a terrible situation who'd be willing to take a chance.
A large part of this is due to bilateral agreements and free flow migration. This referendum directly affects that.
This referendum is an attempt by the members of SVP/UDC, the right-most party, to show that on immigration topics they have more popular support than what their relative power in the government is. Their proposed solution is very crude, on the other hand the opposition parties' position is basically “do nothing, everything is going fine”. I would have hoped the government to offer some kind of compromise proposal (which they are allowed to do and appears as third option in many referendums), but it seems the Swiss citizens will be faced with a “all or nothing” choice.
As a novel immigrant, as much as I appreciate the political system of my new host country, I was quite disappointed by the referendum campaign from both sides. Most of the propaganda concerning this vote has emotional and apocalytic tones (“the immigrants will steal our welfare and overpopulation will transform Switzerland into Kowloon” vs “we will become a pariah state, our pensioners will die unassisted due to the lack of nurses, EU will tariff us to death”).
Not really about immigration but EU relationship. Almost every SVP initiative tries to create a contradiction in the constitution with foreign agreements to force an "exit".
> The strong point of the Swiss political system is that the government is, by law, made up by all significant parties.
It's a tradition, not a rule (the composition of the council is simply the result of an election by the parliament).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_formula_(Swiss_politics)
Amended, thanks!
Both sides have very good arguments and from the side it looks like either way the Switzerland has to give up some asoects of its high quality of life.
If the initiative succeeds, Switzerland will get a large hit from the cancelation of a lot of bilateral agreements with the EU.
If the population exceeds 10M then the current rail and road infrastructure will not handle it well.
I have already been on a train which refused to move due overload. And it would only depart if enough people have disembarked. The autobahn are already having hours long traffic jams at peak hours and with extra million people it will multiply.
And it's almost impossible to significantly improve the throughput of rail and autobahn without extreme projects.
It looks like a lose / lose situation is a sense and a people are going to decide which hit to take.
Also many of the most important parts of the system are at capacity. Bigger trains can help but a lot of these gains have already been realised in the crowded areas. The current hope is digitalising signaling to allow density to be increased but that's not simple/cheap even if it's cheaper than working on the lines themselves.
Improvements on various train station (new underground stations in Geneva and Luzern, extra platforms, etc.).
https://company.sbb.ch/en/railway-development/future-rail/na...
(for example, there's also lots of tram, etc. projects)
Japan, Taiwan and China all added dedicated infrastructure which took a long time and cost a fortune (vs the shared tracks currently used for intercity/regional/European freight). Tokyo accepts famously absurd levels of overcrowding during peak hours. Deutsche Bahn in Germany is widely thought of a joke due to chronic underinvestment meaning on-time trains are surprising.
That said, these technical concerns have nothing to do with the 10 million proposal. It's worth asking why a camp that spent decades opposing sustainability legislation has suddenly discovered the word now that it can be pointed at immigration.
yes the schedule is full but its not just no space for more trains, more no space for unpredictable trains
Most of these are double decker trains and long platforms so they move a lot of people at once.
Here's is the timetable for a suburban station on a commuter lines: https://train-cloud.navitime.biz/en/odakyu/railroads/timetab...
On a weekday at peak hours, there are up to 20+ trains an hour, with commuter trains continuing directly into Metro systems, and directly onto different commuter lines on the other end.
Shanghai Hongqiao to Hangzhou East is about 10 high speed trains per hour, all trains using the same line.
Tokyo to Shin-Osaka is also about 10 high speed trains per hour.
Taipei to Taichung is 8-9 trains per hour, high speed + conventional. Shanghai to Suzhou is similar.
Rome to Florence is 6-7 trains per hour.
Hong Kong West Kowloon to Shenzhen North is 6 high speed trains per hour.
Beijing South to Tianjin is 5-6 high speed trains per hour.
In any case, I think commuters are fine with every 15 min, as long as there's enough seats. (for long distance like trains, my feeling is that frequency below 15min doesn't have a lot of impact, unlike shorter distance public transport like tram/bus/subway)
You could get ride of the smaller train , only allowing big city to survive or decrease the commodity traffic or increase the rail network or increase the train station (more tracks allowing to overtake there, and have bigger trains) There is no easy solution otherwise it would have been done.
I think you mean ETCS Level 3.
But that's just one of many investments that could be made.
No? Funny how that works, isn’t?
Actually it will do just fine. Maybe if the very party who is proposing this wouldn't have spent 20 years preventing infrastructure improvements it would handle it even better. Maybe if this very same party wouldn't continue to fight sensible transportation choices at every turn. Maybe if this party wouldn't spend endless time and energy trying to put as much money as possible in unpopular and irrational highway expansion projects.
There are lots of easy upgrades we can do to our transportation infrastructure. For example, Zimmerbergtunnel 2. This was known to be needed since the early 90s, and was planned. But was not done and is now in planning. We did it in 2 stages, making it much, much more expensive. But in the same period we spend as much as we did on Zimmerbergtunnel 2 on highway expansions that have lesser returns.
> And it's almost impossible to significantly improve the throughput of rail and autobahn without extreme projects.
Well we should get moving on some extreme projects then, or maybe not have the party that proposing this constantly stand in the way of sensible polices.
Anybody who seriously thinks about this will realize having new high speed line across the country would be great. But they would never let that happen.
NEAT was an extreme project, and it will provide benefits for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_weighted_density
The problem is it's difficult to compare across polities because nobody will agree on the right granularity of parcel size to use (and indeed, it is not really obvious what the right granularity is, and choice of parcel size can drastically change the number).
It's similar to the metrics of "average class size" vs. "student-weighted class size". https://allenschwenk.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/0...
It's very meaningful, when the main argument is population overcrowding.
Lots of people in Switzerland are struggling to find jobs, especially in the tech sector after mass layoffs and outsourcing.
If you're looking to hire a full-stack software engineer in Switzerland, send me a message! But I bet you won't, because there isn't actually an abundance of jobs in Switzerland.
Why is it hard? Can't find a pick from the ~3% unemployment rate? That's approx 100-200k people, are you sure you can't find a person in that selection?
Maybe you're asking a bit much for standards that you are weakly attempting at a defense or justification.
This argument without any other qualifications reads to me as whinging that you're not getting everything you want. So lower your standards, offer more pay, or just move to a different country.
Then of course those immigrants are laid off and contribute to the unemployment number, and rather than hiring them back, people will say we should import even more immigrants, and so on.
The counter arguments are awful and they are presented awfully and not even in such high quantity as you would expect.
I think it has a good chance of passing just because of that.
And then political shitf***y will begin with „we don’t know how to turn this into law!“, which is not good for the basis of democracy…
Yes infrastructure are strained, but it's not like nothing is being done. It's just that it take decades, and will be too little, too late.
Same thing with housing. Every one is saying we need to make the procedures more efficient, but when it comes time to actually makes changes, there's no consensus to drop anything.
They could have done better, but it would have been very easy to make nothing but empty promises. I prefer they didn't.
Although I thought weird that SVP brought the "we will need to increase retirement age" themselves. It's actually pretty likely, but sounds like a massive own goal so close to the vote given how unpopular it is.
- The UN
- CERN
- The Red Cross
- The WHO
- The World Economic Forum
- ETH Zurich
There are probably a lot of others I'm missing.
I'd imagine international banks also benefit from recruiting foreign nationals to do business with their home countries, and not just because there's a shortage of domestic labor. The whole point of these organizations is to be the headquarters of a much larger international project.
I guess maybe there will be a lot of weird exceptions if this were to go though. Otherwise, good luck sourcing your diplomats from entirely Swiss people.
You know full well that the polls are 52% no. It will be a razor thin rejection and the SVP will try again until they find one that passes.
Do not get complacent, once that happens this stuff can quietly grow very fast and suddenly happen in what feels like a total blind side.
Every country must grow as much as it possibly can and then keep growing much more than that.
This is not true. Productivity is the mediator between a constant population and economic growth. (The world economy has grown much faster than its population over the last 100 years. And the U.S. still out produces the more-populous India.)
This is 100% about being racist with extra steps.
I just skipped to the punchline.
Also, very Swiss of you to answer a joke about banning people from a country by asking to ban people from HN. Xenophobic much? Better focus your efforts on finding a job that the foreigners stole from you
And clearly you still haven't bothered to read the initiative, which doesn't kick out anyone, but demands the government revises immigration laws if the population hits 9.5 million before 2050.
But you _have_ found time to dig through my comments to find dirt on me to ridicule me. Clearly you're a hateful and despicable person.
> Better focus your efforts on finding a job that the foreigners stole from you
I never said a foreigner stole anything from me; I merely objected to the idea that Switzerland needs _more_ foreigners to work jobs, while hundreds of thousands of residents are looking for work. I'm clearly a terrible human being for wanting to... checks notes work a job for a living.
> ...
> The... sustainability initiative...[:] If the permanent resident population exceeds 9.5 million ... the Federal Council and Parliament will need to take measures, particularly in the areas of asylum and family reunification.
So, this measure says that if companies need more workers, Switzerland will refuse to grant asylum, and will prevent Swiss residents from having their spouse, child or parent come live with them.
Regardless of whether population capping is legitimate or not, that sounds quite nasty. If the measure had said "in case of population growing, there will be a moratorium on recruiting employees from abroad", then you would have a discussion.
The UK invoked Article 50. It didn’t have to, but it chose to because Britain. There is no world in which Switzerland is the party that tears up all of its EU agreements.
If someone says that’s a bad dog and I say no, that’s a cat, that’s not an example of No True Scotsman, it’s a category error.
A lot of the UK’s problems were a result of the EU being vindictive as well. The EU won’t act vindictively because they aren’t in the EU.
Having rich countries support its poor neighbors is an ingenious solution to improving your quality of life. You impose your rules, regulations and monetary policy, they get capital for internal improvements. If there's no huge waste or theft (which sadly exists), you end up with wide, strong and stable continent-level middle class. Which is great goal, as we can see when observing Switzerland -- wide, strong and stable country-level middle class.
Last time Switzerland attempted something like this (~10y ago), it got burnt, hard (lost a lot of EU related projects and academic financing). Cutting the economical/market ties with the EU, considering its position and dependencies, is a suicide.
This is entirely about free movement and immigration.
What the EU needs to get rid of is of the veto power. Otherwise I welcome our neighbors to the east as long as they are willing to play by the rules.
Want to try again?
All Swiss-EU contracts contain a „Guillotine clause“ where if one contract is broken, all are immediately gone. The initiative explicitly requires breaking the freedom of movement contract, which immediately severs all other links to the EU.
This _is_ pure political agenda driven campaign using immigrants.
Why does it need to be? Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today? Will the EU really hold hard on this line with Switzerland? (And does it make political sense to?)
Freedom of movement for labor is absolutely critical to counterbalance the freedom of movement that capital has, otherwise it leads to mass exploitation of labor and rising levels of inequality, which leads to, well, the French approach to the bourgeois problem.
… which is exactly why the EU would terminate agreements with Switzerland if we start first. And why it would make political sense. They made that quite clear with the UK.
I believe you. But hard numbers?
> No current political party except for fringe parties in any EU state advocates for exiting the EU or ending the four freedoms
Eh, there seems to be massive demand for modifying either freedom of movement or the context around it.
> They made that quite clear with the UK
The UK invoked Article 50. That wouldn’t happen here.
What IS a topic, is preventing non-EU migration, and that has broad support and slowly all parties are moving in that direction.
And we are NOT EU. But for now, they basically go „yes yes, but we think of you as EU because we are so tightly connected“.
So what do you expect to happen if we push the point and make them treat us as non-EU?
Again, based on what polling?
> what do you expect to happen if we push the point and make them treat us as non-EU?
I frankly don't expect the EU to be unreasonably spiteful. (And for the record, I don’t think the EU was spiteful with the UK.)
Do you have evidence/polling to suggest otherwise?
My guess is yes.
It's one of the best things that the EU brings.
10m is larger than current resident counts, so people moving in can decide now if they want to move with uncertainty. It is not what everyone would like, but it is more understandable that recent Swedish changes, for example.
As OP explains, freedom of movement can't be stopped in isolation from the rest of the bilaterals.
(btw funnily Schengen is just about the border control, we're talking about freedom of movement which is a different thing, e.g. UK wasn't in Schengen but the freedom of movement applied to UK as well before brexit, tho I guess people use Schengen interchangeably)
„Exiting the EU“ is a perfectly adequate way to summarize it to a world audience that doesn’t care about the details.
Incidentally, when brexit was being voted, the only person I knew who thought it was a good thing was Swiss. They are just fiercely independent.
Ah yes, folks fighting the good Malthusian fight since 1798, and yet to see a win. LoL. [1]
(Btw. I believe switzerland is not trying to be self sufficient anyway, but donimport lots of stuff, like most other countries do)
https://cms.news.admin.ch/fileservice/sdweb-docs-prod-nsbcch...
(page 5)
But reality is also we don't produce more food than we already do. More people means more import and it's actually lowering the quality of the available food, making shopping more complicated, etc. And that's just the food quality aspect, what about pensions? Health care? ...
What about health care if there's no more 'room' for the immigrants who make up a substantial fraction of health workers in Switzerland?
The US, meanwhile, has halted ALL refugees, except for white South Africans [0]. I leave it to you to decide if that discernment seems fair or not.
