Comment by derleyici

This just makes no sense, because before all why 10 million? There is no scientific or proven reason for this number by the proposing party. The SVP position paper is 38 pages of cherry-picked stats but nowhere do they demonstrate why 10 million is the breaking point rather than 9.5 or 11. It is a round number chosen for a slogan.

The Federal Council's official message to Parliament dismantles the whole thing. Real GDP per capita grew 0.82 percent annually between 2002 and 2022, comparable to Norway, Austria, and Denmark. EU and EFTA nationals are net contributors to Swiss social insurance, paying significantly more into AVS, AI, and APG than they receive back.

The SVP frames asylum seekers as the most urgent part of the problem, but recognized refugees make up about 1 percent of total residents. Meanwhile 64 percent of net migration in 2024 came from EU and EFTA countries, overwhelmingly people filling jobs. This is not an asylum crisis, it is labor migration the Swiss economy actively demands.

The initiative would likely require denouncing the ECHR, the Geneva Refugee Convention, and other human rights treaties to hit an arbitrary number. The guillotine clause means killing free movement also kills Schengen and Dublin. And the Federal Council already negotiated a safeguard clause with the EU that allows limiting immigration in justified cases without blowing up the entire bilateral relationship. That is a scalpel.

This initiative is a sledgehammer aimed at a number someone picked because it fits on a poster.

Sorry, not sorry, but facts don't care about feelings.