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 swiss here. So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans. They are educated and highly skilled and for some swiss, that's a problem. They blame them for not finding a job or an appartement. Just read the comments on inside paradeplatz, you can translate with any llm, on a post about the referendum. A subset of the swiss Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem, the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".
I am German and live near the Swiss border. My wife is Swiss. I always tell Germans: if you want to get a feeling for the life of an immigrant in Germany, go to a non-touristic region in Switzerland. It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.
My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.
Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is very different from blaming immigration for not finding a job. Jobs appear almost automatically (if some basic economic conditions are met), apartments have to be built and permitted.
Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is also different from blaming immigrants. Blame has a moral connotation, and certainly no individual deserves blame because he lives in an apartment that you'd like to live in, whether he moved from another country, another place in the same country or another district of the same city, or whether he was born in that apartment. But that doesn't mean that immigration can't make it more difficult to find an apartment if not enough apartments are built.
Swiss as racists. Amazing. People know Americans harbor racist feelings because they are surrounded by people of many races. But it's trivial to demonstrate racism among any population as soon as you introduce an "other" of virtually any type.
It's not just the state - it's your neighbors pushing the same building restrictions as the rest of the developed world, where people say "I don't want another neighbor next to me", which results in too few apartments for even the existing people's children...
You should check Geneva then - they are building apartment buildings like crazy in past 5 years. Too much if you ask me - in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building. Only the biggest protected parks are untouched. City is visibly and permanently degrading into concrete field. Weirdly schizophrenic move - they try to keep pushing bike lanes everywhere, even where not safe to share the road, yet they also remove greenery and trees. I guess the money is too juicy. But not to just bash - they build on outskirts too.
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 seems like a good idea to start worrying about population long before it feels overcrowded and there's no room left on the trains. The issue isn't about how much open space there is to stuff people into, but about how many people an area can sustainably support. I'm not sure that 10 million is a good target to aim for, but you sure don't want to wait until your quality of life declines before you start making plans.
If people are already starting to have trouble finding work and housing that seems like the conversation is long overdue.
The economy is strong because of immigration, particularly white collar immigration from EU countries. Without them businesses cannot grow in the same rate. Immigration leads to net job creation, meaning also more jobs to fill for locals. It's not zero sum.
Public finances would be in a much more dire state without immigration and the locals will have to bear the public debt burden, maybe not immediately but eventually.
Granted, housing and infrastructure do have to be built to keep up with population growth indeed, but it's a better problem to have than a depressed economy with decaying infrastructure and housing stock.
Or you can rather prepare housing and infrastructure for the increase of population instead of blaming foreigners and risk all bilateral agreements with EU in which Switzerland's economy depend on.
This seems like xenophobia masked as sustainability. The article indicates the referendum specifically would block immigrants but not, say, require free birth control for citizens. Interesting how narrow the target is if sustainability is the real goal.
No, you don't have that much space. The entire Switzerland is half the size of Czechia and half of it is taken up by high mountains.
Your cities are already pretty dense. Maybe your threshold for "too many people" is very high, but in general Switzerland doesn't have much free real estate left in/around its urban centers and most people would probably prefer to keep the rural places rural. You could turn your cities into a highrise maze - does the majority of the population want to?
I can fully see where this initiative is coming from. If Czechia was pushing 20 million people, I would consider it on the edge of being overcrowded.
Yes. We can cap non-EU/EFTA immigration to zero but that's relatively small anyway. Getting out of Schengen-Dublin and more importantly the Freedom of Movement of workers would basically unravel all bilateral agreements.
In one of the religious texts, the supreme god Indra says "man acquires sin by living amongst humans, and ward it off by wandering in faraway places (void of humans)". Not far off to think that Indians have always had this trauma due to population.
There are plenty of such places and as the population in many countries gets older there will be more even with available housing etc; the only issue is relatively lower pay.
Really? I live in Lausanne and it’s getting a bit crowded. The buses and trains are completely packed to the point of over flowing, the city as well. Sure there’s a lot of land but that doesn’t mean we need to maximize its use at the expense of the environment and the nature it supports.
Australian/Brit here. A Sudanese man tried to decapitate someone in the middle of the street in Belfast this morning. I suspect if the UK had better immigration controls this wouldn't have happened.
Many people are awful. I’d be fine with Afghan refugees moving in. Even if we accept the premise that Afghan culture is “awful,” wouldn’t the fact that they’ve fled the country indicate they’re not exactly in sync with that culture?
I live in an extremely diverse area with many immigrants on my street and it’s fine.
Could just stop state financing farmers and raise import taxes on non bio products which will raise food praises hence less people will be able to survive is better option?
Well, first UK had to vote for their own anti immigration nonsense, then US tried out their MAGA winning and now it's time for Switzerland to follow in their footsteps and make their country great again with SVP at the helm.
It didn't work out that well for UK the first time. So now they are trying a second time. By voting for the guy that promised he would solve it the first time. This time he really means it.
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).
Nobody in Switzerland is worried about the population growing due to birthrate. This referendum is about stopping immigration (even though in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth).
> 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.
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.
This is such a fascinating referendum. The population is at 9.1m, and at 9.5m it appears they'll stall asylum and family reunification, and at 10m they'll execute a Swexit - Switzerland isn't in the EU but it allows freedom of movement to EU nationals. Boy it is interesting to see what's going on in the world right now. There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy. I thought that even Brexit was a one-off event, but perhaps it is the other way around and European unity is a temporary thing that fragments easily. An interesting age, in the Austen Chamberlain sense.
> There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy
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.
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.
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!
Global freedom of movement was an inalienable right until European colonial powers noticed some of their colonies' peoples wanted to move to Europe.
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.
Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)
>would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns."
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.
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.
> It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
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.
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.
This initiative is a trap. Essentially, it would allow for the termination of bilateral agreements with Europe. This is what the SVP has been trying to do for decades, and this initiative provides them with a convenient excuse. And it’s particularly ironic because the SVP has always opposed legislation promoting sustainability.
> This initiative is a trap. Essentially, it would allow for the termination of bilateral agreements with Europe
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.
I must wonder though who could profit from Switzerland leaving Schengen. Okay pass checks are only a little hassle, but visas can become bigger, and judicial cooperation on international crime just drops. And yes, no more cross-border workers either way.
> And yes, no more cross-border workers either way.
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.
Too many people confuse Schengen and EU freedom of movement. Ireland isn't in Schengen, but any EU citizen is allowed to enter the country, find work and reside...
The strong point of the Swiss political system is that the government is, by (EDIT) convention, made up by all significant parties. No major political force can say “if only we were in power...” because they already are. Also, no party can create disasters and then disappear and leave the consequences to the following election winners to deal with.
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”).
> 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
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).
Yeah, the marketing for this referendum has been awful. But as a mixed-heritage Swiss-American (continental Indian), I’m also sympathetic to the argument that some geographies and political systems have a natural maximum population they can sustain. (Unsurprisingly, the SVP’s marketing may be the thing that tips me against this.)
Any parliamentary system with a proportional vote (or semi-proportional as in Germany with its 5% bar) has more parties and viewpoints represented than a first-past-the-post system such as the UK or USA. That's well understood.
Being in Switzerland it looks to me like this is a really tough referendum.
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.
It's not simple with the "clock-face scheduling" system which is used which times the trains to all meet at the big nodes (Zürich, Bern, Basel) so connections work. To achieve this trains are supposed to fit into 30/60/120 minute beats which synchronise the entire system. See [1,2] for how this works.
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.
> If the population exceeds 10M then the current rail and road infrastructure will not handle it well.
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.
There are so many other leavers to pull than this weird and random initiative: stop urban sprawl, extend public transport, curb automobile traffic, extend public spaces, reduce private property rights (Stichwort "Seeanschluss") to name some.
I'm still kind of hoping we're going this way instead of something like this initiative.
ETCS level 2 can increase rail capacity by orders of magnitude without laying any new track. You can have multiple trains following each other separated by stopping distance instead of having to separate trains between trackside signals.
I don't think so, faster trains are overtaking slower trains. There is simply not enough space between the station to overtake without having an acceleration that would damage the trains or the tracks. For example in western switzerland the maximal train speed for the fastest trains are ~130 Km/h while the same train can go up to 200 in some swiss-german part, only due to more congestion on the western part.
Trains cannot be bigger, some of them are already too big for the smaller train station and in case of rerouting / unexpected stop this causes issue. You cannot make them higher too.
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 agree. Enacting the deliberate policy of enforcing stasis sounds very appealing if one is incapable of conceptualizing second and third order consequences.
So this is essentially a way to reduce immigration to the country? And if they get close to the cap they will "need to take measures, particularly in the areas of asylum and family reunification."
Would be curious to learn more about why this is being proposed.
The initiator party wants to get Switzerland out of Schengen and of the EU bilaterals - which will happen as a consequence if this passes. Like a Brexit, basically.
Edit: but the CHexit will work just fine, because of the Swiss exceptionalism.
Way worse than Brexit, as Switzerland is much smaller, landlocked and had no colonies or anything like that. This would be a suicide for the country. Just populism to mobilize the electorate.
It's being proposed in order to maintain quality of life. No one wants to be overcrowded. This is a sane solution: collectively agree on the maximum tolerable population. Then it's down to individual responsibility to obey the norms of one's society.
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 think I'm totally missing the explanation how my quality of life will increase when Swiss products cannot be sold in the EU anymore because of the price hikes and double bureaucracy - including no more cross-border work. Job loss doesn't say much "quality of life", nor does higher prices on imports.
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.
Except that it is not EU conform. And won't hold up anyway. Everyone knows this.
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.
It’s ludicrous to think that 10 million is the “maximum tolerable population” for Switzerland. This is a racist, isolationist move and an attempt to stir up hatred among the population.
> 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).
The people behind this are conservative politicians. They have done so a lot in the last 20 years or so and keep on trying, but the EU regularly stops their shenanigans.
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.
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.
With a birth rate or 1.29, they will need to accept immigrants or face the consequences of a declining population. My guess is that in the end, the next generation of old folk will want taking care of.
> With a birth rate or 1.29, they will need to accept immigrants or face the consequences of a declining population
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.
I always dreamt of migrating to some european country but seeing their suicidal policy of importing the worst from all over the world I've completely abandoned the idea.
If this passes maybe there is some hope after all.
Note: In case anyone wants to exclaim xenophobia or some other nonsense I'm also part of the "xenos". So no it's not xenophobic to want your country to be safe and prosperous.
I migrated with my parents at 3 years old to a neighboring EU country from another EU country. I agree with you strongly.
As a migrant myself, I've become very critical about immigration in recent years. I've come to realize just how naive we europeans had become. Also just how penalized the idea of 'I want my country to maintain its culture, and I want my countrymen to look like me, smell like me and behave like me' had become, like it was some sort of a terrible sin to let anyone know you think like this. Thankfully we are waking up to our horrible reality and starting to take measures to fix the problem. Hopefully it is not too late.
Although understandable from a single family or individual perspective, migrating from one EU country to another EU country to escape problems is futile, and you should really try to help fix the country your in, according to what the natives want.
This does not make sense. How can you differentiate between "good" migrants (apparently you yourself) and "bad" ones? Shouldn't you remove yourself because you're a migrant to increase the quality of life for the "natives"?
David Lammy was asked about immigration in regards to the Sikh man that stabbed Henry Nowak to death, whose brother and mother then helped cover up the crime to police.
Lammy said "he's wrong this man is British" as if there was no such thing as an ethnic Brit.
I wonder if that number can be adjusted based on the amount of arable land, or based on the ease of construction (quite the nebulous term here admittedly). The number of mountains presumably makes this hard to compare.
India is 31, Netherlands is more dense than India. Would not have expected that, but then I remember that India has a massive desert, and the Himalayas. So I guess it makes more sense now.
That is an utterly meaningless statistic. Canada, with four times the population, ranks #233, because most of the country is uninhabited / uninhabitable.
Population weighted density is a better metric for this use case. It's more stable than population density when adding large areas of sparsely populated land, because the denser, more highly populated areas are more heavily weighted. It shows, roughly, the density experienced locally by the average person in some region.
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).
I agree, but it's also a lot easier to promise a silver bullet to everything than to propose improvements to the actual, hard problems.
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.
Not to be underestimated is the fact that the healthcare argument (I got like 5 flyers of a boomer in a wheelchair with a sad looking face with some nurse standing behind) is coming on the backs of boomers voting themselves the 13th AVS, which already pissed a lot of people off and is either going to lead to a pretty significant VAT rise or more direct taxes.
absent productivity increases, population growth is just there to maintain the welfare state for retirees, it's a perpetuum mobile. apart from that, i dont even know what the benefits of a growing population would be. switzerland is trying a different tack through democratic means.
You don’t know the advantage of a growing population, but you have not far to go in Europe to see the effect of a decreasing population, and it doesn’t really look good.
isnt that just a temporary bottleneck? a self-confident generation might make the sacrifice. plus, the opposite of increasing isnt necessarily decreasing, stabilizing is another one.
I don't see anything wrong with maintaining the welfare state for the retirees. The retirees are exactly the ones who built Switzerland to be what it is now, including its welfare state. It's a great result but of you don't like it, you are free to build a better one in your own country, with retirees under the bridges if you prefer.
As a Moroccan who recently moved to the Zurich area of Switzerland with my Swiss wife and kids, we found ourselves settling here for medical reasons and rediscovering a new way of life.
When I see this debate, I mostly feel confused. I keep thinking about us as human beings and what drives us, what makes us fear others, or simply makes us uncomfortable. I think this is, and always will be, a human trait: fear of losing what we believe we deserve more than others, fear of change, and fear of competition (even when there isn't any).
And I agree—Switzerland is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with some of the kindest individuals I've ever met.
I read a hilarious comment from a Swish once, he was confused how we could take in so many migrants from all over the world. He was all for helping people, he could see the economic benefits, he understood that the native population was aging. What he didn't get was how we were going to preserve the familiar country we grew up in. The new people won't love your country the way you do. They will see it for what it is, a strange collection of cultural weirdness and they will struggle leaving their own cultural weirdness behind. Why would they? His final point, what if there is a war? If you were a migrant, would you die for your new country or just move on to greener pastures?
The question is not wrong, but the answer is.
Here in Switzerlands middle land, the streets and trains are very crowded, not just during peek hours.
On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.
I think they suffer from universal problem that the job doesn't pay for housing anywhere within reasonable commute to the job, assuming that it's even possible to rent any housing at all.
> On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.
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.
Interesting that you're downvoted for pointing this out. Lots of people in Switzerland are struggling to find jobs, but no, they're all unfit, and we must import more immigrants.
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.
Yes and no. Thats also a kind of problem in Switzerland. The social system is so good, you can have a pretty good life without working. One one side, thats a good thing, on the other side, for some people, even young people, they say thats enough for me, and never start to work.
> On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.
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.
> ... population has grown... ... number of people immigrating depends primarily on the labour market. When the economy is strong, companies... often recruit the ... workers they need from the EU.
> ...
> 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.
What would they do if the natural birthrate were to tip it over the threshold? (Perhaps unlikely at current birthrates, but given that laws last long times, perhaps worth considering?)
Yeah I'm aware -- just pointing out that this threshold could be reached by other means and the options for enforcing it if it happens via birthrate are all pretty grim.
I'm probably missing something. This would seem a bit problematic for some organizations that put Switzerland on the world stage, e.g.
- 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.
The Swiss have historically been so isolationist, they refused to join the fricking UN until 2002. Some of the headquarters you're referencing have been there since the 19th century, they'll be fine.
Isolationist is an interesting way to describe Switzerland: economically they're probably one of the most internationally integrated, and thus dependent, countries in the world.
Great that they can vote, but this is also stupid. Plus, it works both ways, so if Switzerland wants to add a cap to limit movement then it won't be able to enjoy free movement in the EU either. I totally understand why Norway and Switzerland do not want to join the EU; the EU has tons of problems, but this kind of cherry-picking is simply unfair to the other EU members. (Also, the EU has to stop expanding. It constantly picks up poor countries, and demands that the richer EU countries must now pay more than before. This is also totally unfair.)
It's not about free movement, but "free trade"/joint market.
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.
The EU expansion politics was a success. E.g. Poland was a great industry place for cheap labour, now it becomes a richer economy, they consume more expensive from Germany and France.
This is totally understandable from human’s perspective. On the other hand this is a result of global market and trade and most importantly growth based economics. So it is very hard to cure a problem by removing the symptoms.
> without population growth there will be no economic growth
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.)
I assume that's meant sarcastically, but it does sum up the capitalist mindset. It's taken along with the understanding that it's fine if all the new economic output ends up in the hands of the 1%.
As a voting member of the population all I can say is - good luck winning it… We have silly initiatives once in a while, that’s because you don’t need that much to start one.
Its honestly so annoying, every 3 years we have to vote against the same garbage proposal because the SVP is unwilling to accept the will of the electorate.
What counties have had population caps exactly, like the one proposed? I know China and Singapore tried to limit birth rates, otherwise some countries have various quotas/intake control for residencies, but those countries don't seem especially "failed", like Andorra or Singapore, not do they have "population caps".
What if these comments are massively astroturfed? As far as I can tell economic growth comes at the expense of everything. And if you can’t manage economic growth that benefits all instead of the few at the top, without endless population growth, then your political/economic system is cancerous. Tangentially, diversity is the strength of the exploitative psychopathic ruling class in the West. Why can’t a country or city or region live in balance with the rest of the planet? Most people want to have families or would clearly be happier if they had the option. Fix these problems, live in balance sustainably. This is clearly not the plan for the West. Weaponizing the higher ideals to increase economic exploitation has to be one of the most evil endeavors in the history of humanity.
People are missing the point. The problem of capping the population is that this would end all bilateral agreements with the EU, as these depend on the free movement of people, which would severely damage the economy of a country that, even rich, it's really small, landlocked, surrounded by EU countries and dependent on their economy.
That's not at all reflected in the immigration numbers: ot has one of the highest proportional rates of immigration in Europe, and the brain drain of top talent from neighbouring countries has actually been a point of moral finger-wagging.
Then set the population limit and take the best of the best only. Go for it. Being so popular nothing can go wrong just like your most reputable bank cannot bankrupt, right?
This is about Swiss - EU relations. Everyone understands that a yes vote means the Swiss equivalent of „exiting the EU“.
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.
> 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
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?)
Of course it is political agenda driven, but at least from surface it does not have _fear mongering_ vibe, comparing for example with Sweden which did not conclude citizenship applications and applied back dated refusal. Also politician openly attribting all immigrants as source of increasing crime and lowering education levels.
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.
Hm. Are there any difference in the consequences for the immigrants, if they are kicked out because of arbitrary population cap, instead of anti-migration laws?
Why would you assume the population cap is arbitrary? There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)
What is rational about this exactly? They share no borders with the countries most immigrants come from, they are moving the problem to Spain, Italy, Greece.
Hacker News admins: can we please ban illiterate morons like this who think they are contributing anything of value by responding directly to the post title alone, while obviously not having read the actual posted article?
Given the initiative doesn't mention ethnicity/race but rather a population cap of people in general, Europeans (who are also white, FYI) might find it odd to do as you suggest.
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.
It would be saner to set a cap that is in some way tied to ecological footprint, food production, energy generation capacity, and other factors that make a country sustainable and sovereign. Trouble is, I expect that would put nearly every country way over.
First step towards a purge civilization. Also, rather narrowminded (to be expected, tho) to not expect your population to naturally grow beyond 10m (at 9.1 now) just based on the normal progress of healthcare and wellbeing.
A population ceiling is not a serious decision for a modern country like Switzerland, esp given their 1.29 kids per family. They could cap by proffesion, region or even origin nation. But a hard cap reminds something between One child policy of China and Brexit, which both didn't go well. First problem will be the shortage of workers in specific fields or regions.
Swiss here and able to vote.
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 swiss here. So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans. They are educated and highly skilled and for some swiss, that's a problem. They blame them for not finding a job or an appartement. Just read the comments on inside paradeplatz, you can translate with any llm, on a post about the referendum. A subset of the swiss Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem, the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".
Also voted no of course.
I am German and live near the Swiss border. My wife is Swiss. I always tell Germans: if you want to get a feeling for the life of an immigrant in Germany, go to a non-touristic region in Switzerland. It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.
My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.
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seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"
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>Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem
Yeah, screw the middle class. What do they know anyway?
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"So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans.".
It can be about both though.
> the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".
Good to see (in a sad way) that some biases are constant across humans.
The text of the proposal disagrees with your claim. Or - are there lots of Europeans seeking asylum in Switzerland?
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Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is very different from blaming immigration for not finding a job. Jobs appear almost automatically (if some basic economic conditions are met), apartments have to be built and permitted.
Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is also different from blaming immigrants. Blame has a moral connotation, and certainly no individual deserves blame because he lives in an apartment that you'd like to live in, whether he moved from another country, another place in the same country or another district of the same city, or whether he was born in that apartment. But that doesn't mean that immigration can't make it more difficult to find an apartment if not enough apartments are built.
Swiss as racists. Amazing. People know Americans harbor racist feelings because they are surrounded by people of many races. But it's trivial to demonstrate racism among any population as soon as you introduce an "other" of virtually any type.
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It's not just the state - it's your neighbors pushing the same building restrictions as the rest of the developed world, where people say "I don't want another neighbor next to me", which results in too few apartments for even the existing people's children...
You should check Geneva then - they are building apartment buildings like crazy in past 5 years. Too much if you ask me - in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building. Only the biggest protected parks are untouched. City is visibly and permanently degrading into concrete field. Weirdly schizophrenic move - they try to keep pushing bike lanes everywhere, even where not safe to share the road, yet they also remove greenery and trees. I guess the money is too juicy. But not to just bash - they build on outskirts too.
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.
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It seems like a good idea to start worrying about population long before it feels overcrowded and there's no room left on the trains. The issue isn't about how much open space there is to stuff people into, but about how many people an area can sustainably support. I'm not sure that 10 million is a good target to aim for, but you sure don't want to wait until your quality of life declines before you start making plans.
If people are already starting to have trouble finding work and housing that seems like the conversation is long overdue.
The economy is strong because of immigration, particularly white collar immigration from EU countries. Without them businesses cannot grow in the same rate. Immigration leads to net job creation, meaning also more jobs to fill for locals. It's not zero sum. Public finances would be in a much more dire state without immigration and the locals will have to bear the public debt burden, maybe not immediately but eventually. Granted, housing and infrastructure do have to be built to keep up with population growth indeed, but it's a better problem to have than a depressed economy with decaying infrastructure and housing stock.
Or you can rather prepare housing and infrastructure for the increase of population instead of blaming foreigners and risk all bilateral agreements with EU in which Switzerland's economy depend on.
This seems like xenophobia masked as sustainability. The article indicates the referendum specifically would block immigrants but not, say, require free birth control for citizens. Interesting how narrow the target is if sustainability is the real goal.
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"We have so much space".
No, you don't have that much space. The entire Switzerland is half the size of Czechia and half of it is taken up by high mountains.
Your cities are already pretty dense. Maybe your threshold for "too many people" is very high, but in general Switzerland doesn't have much free real estate left in/around its urban centers and most people would probably prefer to keep the rural places rural. You could turn your cities into a highrise maze - does the majority of the population want to?
I can fully see where this initiative is coming from. If Czechia was pushing 20 million people, I would consider it on the edge of being overcrowded.
Considering the other EU ramifications, this is basically Swixit, is it not?
Yes. We can cap non-EU/EFTA immigration to zero but that's relatively small anyway. Getting out of Schengen-Dublin and more importantly the Freedom of Movement of workers would basically unravel all bilateral agreements.
Switzerland is not a member of the EU.
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As a Indian I envy you.
My whole life has been a struggle for living in places where there could be fewer humans.
In one of the religious texts, the supreme god Indra says "man acquires sin by living amongst humans, and ward it off by wandering in faraway places (void of humans)". Not far off to think that Indians have always had this trauma due to population.
There are plenty of such places and as the population in many countries gets older there will be more even with available housing etc; the only issue is relatively lower pay.
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Really? I live in Lausanne and it’s getting a bit crowded. The buses and trains are completely packed to the point of over flowing, the city as well. Sure there’s a lot of land but that doesn’t mean we need to maximize its use at the expense of the environment and the nature it supports.
Australian/Brit here. A Sudanese man tried to decapitate someone in the middle of the street in Belfast this morning. I suspect if the UK had better immigration controls this wouldn't have happened.
In Belfast? Was that a Protestant Somali man or a Catholic Somali man?
Sounds like a lovely place. Why wouldn't you want to pass a law to keep it that way?
Why would you want less people to live in a lovely place?
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Please elaborate on this "harmful ideology you are trying to conceal"?
I'd be *far* more concerned about living next to the Swiss equivalent of Tommy Robinson than a Muslim or African.
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> how diverse are we talking?
Switzerland is deceptively effective at assimilation. Migrants tend to learn the local language and customs.
Many people are awful. I’d be fine with Afghan refugees moving in. Even if we accept the premise that Afghan culture is “awful,” wouldn’t the fact that they’ve fled the country indicate they’re not exactly in sync with that culture?
I live in an extremely diverse area with many immigrants on my street and it’s fine.
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Yeah I think a culture that turns away asylum seekers is pretty awful tbh
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Could just stop state financing farmers and raise import taxes on non bio products which will raise food praises hence less people will be able to survive is better option?
Well, first UK had to vote for their own anti immigration nonsense, then US tried out their MAGA winning and now it's time for Switzerland to follow in their footsteps and make their country great again with SVP at the helm.
After all, this time it HAS to go better right?
It didn't work out that well for UK the first time. So now they are trying a second time. By voting for the guy that promised he would solve it the first time. This time he really means it.
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> benefits from diverse cultures
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).
Nobody in Switzerland is worried about the population growing due to birthrate. This referendum is about stopping immigration (even though in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth).
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> 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.
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.
> more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that)
This is how freedom of movement works, yes, and it's a key reason why our country is so rich.
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This is such a fascinating referendum. The population is at 9.1m, and at 9.5m it appears they'll stall asylum and family reunification, and at 10m they'll execute a Swexit - Switzerland isn't in the EU but it allows freedom of movement to EU nationals. Boy it is interesting to see what's going on in the world right now. There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy. I thought that even Brexit was a one-off event, but perhaps it is the other way around and European unity is a temporary thing that fragments easily. An interesting age, in the Austen Chamberlain sense.
Calling it a population cap for something that seems to be about stricter border controls is a wild marketing choice.
It's actually kind of genius.
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.
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That avoids accusations of bigotry which Europe has convinced itself doesn't exist within its domains.
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I believe people migrating to Switzerland are largely educated Europeans, so population density must be their biggest concern about migration
Need to hold them liable to one child per household policy if, for some reason, Swiss start having a little bit more sex and bit more children.
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To be fair that's not specific to SVP's populist initiatives, the parliament pushes bills with nonsensical names all the time.
It is a population cap, you can read this proposal its like 5 lines of text.
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> There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy
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.
Where are the full ones?
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.
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most of the immigrants are highly educated professionals, big tech, pharma and meds. it‘s not the „empty“.
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Makes me wonder about what's happening in those large, empty, countries and how cheap land would be there...
> mass migrations
> 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!
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Global freedom of movement was an inalienable right until European colonial powers noticed some of their colonies' peoples wanted to move to Europe.
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.
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Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)
The EU is effectively paralysed in foreign affairs and a common fighter jet project died just today due to economic infighting. They're right.
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>Hopefully they were wrong.
Over a thousand years of history has shown that they were right.
>would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns."
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.
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> execute a Swexit
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.
> It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
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.
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Sure, and I didn't shoot you, I just sent a bullet in your direction.
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It's not Schengen. It's Free Movement, the core principle of EEA. You're not in EEA, you don't get free access to EU market.
This would be catastrophic to Swiss economy.
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Schengen is not the free movement clause… sad to see people that don’t even know the difference (free movement existed before Schengen).
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its called Switzerleave
It veers too close to Logan’s Run when they cap things like that. I’m sure it’s just policy action at the various thresholds but it sure sounds odd.
I was a teenager when 9/11 happened.
Until that point, I thought wars were a stupid thing that humanity realized were stupid and stopped doing.
There hasn't been a year, or even week without a war. How could you have thought that wars didn't exist?
> interesting
The word I'd choose instead is "concerning" if not "scary".
The EU will retaliate this time around and impose ruinous costs on Switzerland if it chooses to go through with this.
Unlike the Brits, the Swiss have absolutely no leg to stand on here. If EU closes the borders, the Swiss will literally die of hunger.
"Don't leave us or we'll kill you" isn't the pro-EU argument you seem to think it is.
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Just wait til Canada joins the EU and we will have a rethinking of any such unions as not necessarily being related to geographic location.
damn, the word 'execute' reverberated interestingly
Change is the only constant.
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.
Embrace negative change?
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Change may be inevitable but not every change is and we shouldn't stop insisting that things change for the better.
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This initiative is a trap. Essentially, it would allow for the termination of bilateral agreements with Europe. This is what the SVP has been trying to do for decades, and this initiative provides them with a convenient excuse. And it’s particularly ironic because the SVP has always opposed legislation promoting sustainability.
> This initiative is a trap. Essentially, it would allow for the termination of bilateral agreements with Europe
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.
is the idea of economic destruction akin to what the UK has suffered abhorrent to you? In your excitement about the one you might consider the other.
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> And it’s particularly ironic because the SVP has always opposed legislation promoting sustainability.
I was just telling someone this today! Very business-friendly party, with the exception of immigration policy, ofc.
I must wonder though who could profit from Switzerland leaving Schengen. Okay pass checks are only a little hassle, but visas can become bigger, and judicial cooperation on international crime just drops. And yes, no more cross-border workers either way.
> And yes, no more cross-border workers either way.
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.
Too many people confuse Schengen and EU freedom of movement. Ireland isn't in Schengen, but any EU citizen is allowed to enter the country, find work and reside...
>I must wonder though who could profit from Switzerland leaving Schengen.
Same types of people who profited from Brexit.
Convenient how? Even if you take the spin at face value, it’s downright dystopian.
Meanwhile SVP head politicians employ quite a few foreign workers at all levels of employment hierarchy.
It's pathetic.
The strong point of the Swiss political system is that the government is, by (EDIT) convention, made up by all significant parties. No major political force can say “if only we were in power...” because they already are. Also, no party can create disasters and then disappear and leave the consequences to the following election winners to deal with.
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”).
> 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
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)
> It's a tradition, not a rule
Amended, thanks!
Yeah, the marketing for this referendum has been awful. But as a mixed-heritage Swiss-American (continental Indian), I’m also sympathetic to the argument that some geographies and political systems have a natural maximum population they can sustain. (Unsurprisingly, the SVP’s marketing may be the thing that tips me against this.)
Any parliamentary system with a proportional vote (or semi-proportional as in Germany with its 5% bar) has more parties and viewpoints represented than a first-past-the-post system such as the UK or USA. That's well understood.
Being in Switzerland it looks to me like this is a really tough referendum.
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.
Can you explain how adding frequency to the train network will not work to compensate higher ridership?
It's not simple with the "clock-face scheduling" system which is used which times the trains to all meet at the big nodes (Zürich, Bern, Basel) so connections work. To achieve this trains are supposed to fit into 30/60/120 minute beats which synchronise the entire system. See [1,2] for how this works.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMbV1rIPhCg
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You can't add more trains if the schedule is full to the brink. You would need to add train tracks, and that requires big projects
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In many areas the train network is already at capacity.
Frequency is basically 15 minutes almost all over the country already
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> If the population exceeds 10M then the current rail and road infrastructure will not handle it well.
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.
^-- This!
There are so many other leavers to pull than this weird and random initiative: stop urban sprawl, extend public transport, curb automobile traffic, extend public spaces, reduce private property rights (Stichwort "Seeanschluss") to name some.
I'm still kind of hoping we're going this way instead of something like this initiative.
Are they counting “frontalieri” towards that cap?
No? Funny how that works, isn’t?
ETCS level 2 can increase rail capacity by orders of magnitude without laying any new track. You can have multiple trains following each other separated by stopping distance instead of having to separate trains between trackside signals.
I don't think so, faster trains are overtaking slower trains. There is simply not enough space between the station to overtake without having an acceleration that would damage the trains or the tracks. For example in western switzerland the maximal train speed for the fastest trains are ~130 Km/h while the same train can go up to 200 in some swiss-german part, only due to more congestion on the western part. Trains cannot be bigger, some of them are already too big for the smaller train station and in case of rerouting / unexpected stop this causes issue. You cannot make them higher too.
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.
Not really, the reality is that in some places Switzerland doesn't use ETCS 2 because it limits our system because ours is better.
I think you mean ETCS Level 3.
But that's just one of many investments that could be made.
Capping a population is a short term solution creating huge issues for the following generations. Examples: lots of places this happened.
I agree. Enacting the deliberate policy of enforcing stasis sounds very appealing if one is incapable of conceptualizing second and third order consequences.
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So this is essentially a way to reduce immigration to the country? And if they get close to the cap they will "need to take measures, particularly in the areas of asylum and family reunification."
Would be curious to learn more about why this is being proposed.
The initiator party wants to get Switzerland out of Schengen and of the EU bilaterals - which will happen as a consequence if this passes. Like a Brexit, basically.
Edit: but the CHexit will work just fine, because of the Swiss exceptionalism.
Way worse than Brexit, as Switzerland is much smaller, landlocked and had no colonies or anything like that. This would be a suicide for the country. Just populism to mobilize the electorate.
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Here you go (if you understand French, German, Italian or Romansh, there is a video)
https://www.admin.ch/fr/initiative-durabilite
https://www.udc.ch/actualites/campagnes/pas-de-suisse-a-10-m...
It's being proposed in order to maintain quality of life. No one wants to be overcrowded. This is a sane solution: collectively agree on the maximum tolerable population. Then it's down to individual responsibility to obey the norms of one's society.
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.
> unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant
I vote in Switzerland. I’m very much interested in the thoughts and opinions of others on this vote.
I think I'm totally missing the explanation how my quality of life will increase when Swiss products cannot be sold in the EU anymore because of the price hikes and double bureaucracy - including no more cross-border work. Job loss doesn't say much "quality of life", nor does higher prices on imports.
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Well I _am_ Swiss.
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.
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There’s never anything sane with population caps by fiat. If that’s a form of insanity they wish to indulge though, then democracy allows them that.
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> unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant
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.
Except that it is not EU conform. And won't hold up anyway. Everyone knows this.
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 increased Switzerland’s population density by 50% they’d be in a crowded hellhole like (checks notes) Belgium
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It’s ludicrous to think that 10 million is the “maximum tolerable population” for Switzerland. This is a racist, isolationist move and an attempt to stir up hatred among the population.
This is a way to enable deportations and curb permit prolongations, to delay reaching the 10m cap (which will create really bad consequences).
As an immigrant in Switzerland, I am quite WORRIED.
> 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).
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The people behind this are conservative politicians. They have done so a lot in the last 20 years or so and keep on trying, but the EU regularly stops their shenanigans.
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.
Moved out last year after 10y in the Zurich area.
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.
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With a birth rate or 1.29, they will need to accept immigrants or face the consequences of a declining population. My guess is that in the end, the next generation of old folk will want taking care of.
> With a birth rate or 1.29, they will need to accept immigrants or face the consequences of a declining population
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.
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Robots will take off in our life time. I will be taken care of by robots circa the 2060s and 2070s.
will soemone please think of the boomers? :(
I always dreamt of migrating to some european country but seeing their suicidal policy of importing the worst from all over the world I've completely abandoned the idea.
If this passes maybe there is some hope after all.
Note: In case anyone wants to exclaim xenophobia or some other nonsense I'm also part of the "xenos". So no it's not xenophobic to want your country to be safe and prosperous.
I migrated with my parents at 3 years old to a neighboring EU country from another EU country. I agree with you strongly.
As a migrant myself, I've become very critical about immigration in recent years. I've come to realize just how naive we europeans had become. Also just how penalized the idea of 'I want my country to maintain its culture, and I want my countrymen to look like me, smell like me and behave like me' had become, like it was some sort of a terrible sin to let anyone know you think like this. Thankfully we are waking up to our horrible reality and starting to take measures to fix the problem. Hopefully it is not too late.
Although understandable from a single family or individual perspective, migrating from one EU country to another EU country to escape problems is futile, and you should really try to help fix the country your in, according to what the natives want.
This does not make sense. How can you differentiate between "good" migrants (apparently you yourself) and "bad" ones? Shouldn't you remove yourself because you're a migrant to increase the quality of life for the "natives"?
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David Lammy was asked about immigration in regards to the Sikh man that stabbed Henry Nowak to death, whose brother and mother then helped cover up the crime to police.
Lammy said "he's wrong this man is British" as if there was no such thing as an ethnic Brit.
Switzerland is ranked 67th in country population density. For reference, the United Kingdom is ranked 48th and the United States is ranked 183rd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I wonder if that number can be adjusted based on the amount of arable land, or based on the ease of construction (quite the nebulous term here admittedly). The number of mountains presumably makes this hard to compare.
India is 31, Netherlands is more dense than India. Would not have expected that, but then I remember that India has a massive desert, and the Himalayas. So I guess it makes more sense now.
America is soooo big and soooo sparsely populated
That is an utterly meaningless statistic. Canada, with four times the population, ranks #233, because most of the country is uninhabited / uninhabitable.
Population weighted density is a better metric for this use case. It's more stable than population density when adding large areas of sparsely populated land, because the denser, more highly populated areas are more heavily weighted. It shows, roughly, the density experienced locally by the average person in some region.
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...
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> That is an utterly meaningless statistic
It's very meaningful, when the main argument is population overcrowding.
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One interesting point for me is that, IMHO, the propaganda on the „no“ side wad _abysmal_.
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…
I agree, but it's also a lot easier to promise a silver bullet to everything than to propose improvements to the actual, hard problems.
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.
> don't know how to turn this into law
For one time, we can be grateful that the breakdown in direct democracy is gonna save us from an own goal.
I‘d rather they didn’t.
Undermining democracy itself is far more dangerous than whatever the impact of this referendum would be.
I'm sure blaming the "propaganda" will help you about as much as it helps Americans after voting for their anti immigration party nonsense.
Not to be underestimated is the fact that the healthcare argument (I got like 5 flyers of a boomer in a wheelchair with a sad looking face with some nurse standing behind) is coming on the backs of boomers voting themselves the 13th AVS, which already pissed a lot of people off and is either going to lead to a pretty significant VAT rise or more direct taxes.
absent productivity increases, population growth is just there to maintain the welfare state for retirees, it's a perpetuum mobile. apart from that, i dont even know what the benefits of a growing population would be. switzerland is trying a different tack through democratic means.
You don’t know the advantage of a growing population, but you have not far to go in Europe to see the effect of a decreasing population, and it doesn’t really look good.
isnt that just a temporary bottleneck? a self-confident generation might make the sacrifice. plus, the opposite of increasing isnt necessarily decreasing, stabilizing is another one.
I don't see anything wrong with maintaining the welfare state for the retirees. The retirees are exactly the ones who built Switzerland to be what it is now, including its welfare state. It's a great result but of you don't like it, you are free to build a better one in your own country, with retirees under the bridges if you prefer.
As a Moroccan who recently moved to the Zurich area of Switzerland with my Swiss wife and kids, we found ourselves settling here for medical reasons and rediscovering a new way of life. When I see this debate, I mostly feel confused. I keep thinking about us as human beings and what drives us, what makes us fear others, or simply makes us uncomfortable. I think this is, and always will be, a human trait: fear of losing what we believe we deserve more than others, fear of change, and fear of competition (even when there isn't any). And I agree—Switzerland is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with some of the kindest individuals I've ever met.
I read a hilarious comment from a Swish once, he was confused how we could take in so many migrants from all over the world. He was all for helping people, he could see the economic benefits, he understood that the native population was aging. What he didn't get was how we were going to preserve the familiar country we grew up in. The new people won't love your country the way you do. They will see it for what it is, a strange collection of cultural weirdness and they will struggle leaving their own cultural weirdness behind. Why would they? His final point, what if there is a war? If you were a migrant, would you die for your new country or just move on to greener pastures?
The question is not wrong, but the answer is. Here in Switzerlands middle land, the streets and trains are very crowded, not just during peek hours. On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.
I think they suffer from universal problem that the job doesn't pay for housing anywhere within reasonable commute to the job, assuming that it's even possible to rent any housing at all.
> On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.
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.
Interesting that you're downvoted for pointing this out. Lots of people in Switzerland are struggling to find jobs, but no, they're all unfit, and we must import more immigrants.
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.
When ever anyone says they can't find workers, at the end of the sentence there is always an implicit "for the compensation I'm offering".
Yes and no. Thats also a kind of problem in Switzerland. The social system is so good, you can have a pretty good life without working. One one side, thats a good thing, on the other side, for some people, even young people, they say thats enough for me, and never start to work.
> On the other hand, it's already now hard to find people for almost any kind of work.
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.
> ... population has grown... ... number of people immigrating depends primarily on the labour market. When the economy is strong, companies... often recruit the ... workers they need from the EU.
> ...
> 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.
What would they do if the natural birthrate were to tip it over the threshold? (Perhaps unlikely at current birthrates, but given that laws last long times, perhaps worth considering?)
The initiative does not mention what. Because the initiative's sponsor are anti-migration.
Yeah I'm aware -- just pointing out that this threshold could be reached by other means and the options for enforcing it if it happens via birthrate are all pretty grim.
I'm probably missing something. This would seem a bit problematic for some organizations that put Switzerland on the world stage, e.g.
- 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.
The Swiss have historically been so isolationist, they refused to join the fricking UN until 2002. Some of the headquarters you're referencing have been there since the 19th century, they'll be fine.
Isolationist is an interesting way to describe Switzerland: economically they're probably one of the most internationally integrated, and thus dependent, countries in the world.
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Great that they can vote, but this is also stupid. Plus, it works both ways, so if Switzerland wants to add a cap to limit movement then it won't be able to enjoy free movement in the EU either. I totally understand why Norway and Switzerland do not want to join the EU; the EU has tons of problems, but this kind of cherry-picking is simply unfair to the other EU members. (Also, the EU has to stop expanding. It constantly picks up poor countries, and demands that the richer EU countries must now pay more than before. This is also totally unfair.)
It's not about free movement, but "free trade"/joint market.
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.
> It's not about free movement, but "free trade"/joint market
This is entirely about free movement and immigration.
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"constantly"
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.
The EU expansion politics was a success. E.g. Poland was a great industry place for cheap labour, now it becomes a richer economy, they consume more expensive from Germany and France.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015345
No Population Growth in My Backyard -- NPGIMBY.
This is totally understandable from human’s perspective. On the other hand this is a result of global market and trade and most importantly growth based economics. So it is very hard to cure a problem by removing the symptoms.
But without population growth there will be no economic growth, the economy will stall it will be an unmitigated disaster.
Every country must grow as much as it possibly can and then keep growing much more than that.
> without population growth there will be no economic growth
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.)
I assume that's meant sarcastically, but it does sum up the capitalist mindset. It's taken along with the understanding that it's fine if all the new economic output ends up in the hands of the 1%.
Australia here, Switzerland knows something we don't, it is sad.
Leaving the EU or ending free movement with EU countries leads to a significant increase in immigration from the third world, as Brexit showed.
It really doesn’t have to. Britain being incompetent is sort of its own chapter in governance.
no true scotsman
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The Swiss ruling class don’t have as much disdain for their populace. It will only end up that way if the Swiss people will it.
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.
Vindictive how? That it refuses to let the Brits have their cake and eat it?
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What “ruling class”? Switzerland is a direct democracy.
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As a voting member of the population all I can say is - good luck winning it… We have silly initiatives once in a while, that’s because you don’t need that much to start one.
Don’t be so quick.
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.
Pretty much. Many people ignored Brexit because they basically thought it would never get through until it crawled through with a tiny margin.
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.
Its honestly so annoying, every 3 years we have to vote against the same garbage proposal because the SVP is unwilling to accept the will of the electorate.
Don't look at tiktok then. It seems pretty much won in there.
I propose we set it at 4Mio instead, deport all the German speakers and give their properties to the French-speaking ones.
Oui ! Et rostï gratuit pour tous !
Bon Schuur Ticino!
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Deal!
It’s still common in Geneva to see lawn jockeys on display.
This is 100% about being racist with extra steps.
While I agree we need to keep our immigration under control, this is not the solution.
This is a good move. I hope Switzerland doesn't become like the UK.
The Swiss can choose what they want for their country. If they don't want immigrants, so be it.
This is proper Democracy.
Population caps by fiat have always been terrible moves. Example: every country that's ever had them.
What counties have had population caps exactly, like the one proposed? I know China and Singapore tried to limit birth rates, otherwise some countries have various quotas/intake control for residencies, but those countries don't seem especially "failed", like Andorra or Singapore, not do they have "population caps".
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What if these comments are massively astroturfed? As far as I can tell economic growth comes at the expense of everything. And if you can’t manage economic growth that benefits all instead of the few at the top, without endless population growth, then your political/economic system is cancerous. Tangentially, diversity is the strength of the exploitative psychopathic ruling class in the West. Why can’t a country or city or region live in balance with the rest of the planet? Most people want to have families or would clearly be happier if they had the option. Fix these problems, live in balance sustainably. This is clearly not the plan for the West. Weaponizing the higher ideals to increase economic exploitation has to be one of the most evil endeavors in the history of humanity.
Logan's Run!
People are missing the point. The problem of capping the population is that this would end all bilateral agreements with the EU, as these depend on the free movement of people, which would severely damage the economy of a country that, even rich, it's really small, landlocked, surrounded by EU countries and dependent on their economy.
Switzerland is much less desirable and attractive than they think they are.
That's not at all reflected in the immigration numbers: ot has one of the highest proportional rates of immigration in Europe, and the brain drain of top talent from neighbouring countries has actually been a point of moral finger-wagging.
Want to try again?
Then set the population limit and take the best of the best only. Go for it. Being so popular nothing can go wrong just like your most reputable bank cannot bankrupt, right?
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is this just a disguised anti-immigration policy? How is switzerland supposed to get to 10 million people with its fertility rate?
This seems a much more rational approach than pure political agenda driven fear mongering campaigns against immigrants.
This is about Swiss - EU relations. Everyone understands that a yes vote means the Swiss equivalent of „exiting the EU“.
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.
> 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
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?)
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Of course it is political agenda driven, but at least from surface it does not have _fear mongering_ vibe, comparing for example with Sweden which did not conclude citizenship applications and applied back dated refusal. Also politician openly attribting all immigrants as source of increasing crime and lowering education levels.
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.
This is not a vote for Switzerland to exit the EU...for obvious reasons. It is a vote to exit the Schengen.
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Hm. Are there any difference in the consequences for the immigrants, if they are kicked out because of arbitrary population cap, instead of anti-migration laws?
Why would you assume the population cap is arbitrary? There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
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As far as I understand, action begins when the population hits 9.5M, so likely no-one gets kicked out, but fewer new visas will be approved, etc.
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What is rational about this exactly? They share no borders with the countries most immigrants come from, they are moving the problem to Spain, Italy, Greece.
Vast majority of immigrants to Switzerland come from Spain, Italy, Greece and other EU countries…
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I agree. Every country has a limit, unspoken or not, let the people decide. Anything less is undemocratic.
What's rational in the arbitrary number of 10 millions for no reason at allM
It is completely irrational. But the UDC knows it, pure manipulation of the masses.
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Absolute dogshit we are voting on this week. Hopefully both gets denied. We are working ourselves into the bleakest future.
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Hacker News admins: can we please ban illiterate morons like this who think they are contributing anything of value by responding directly to the post title alone, while obviously not having read the actual posted article?
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Given the initiative doesn't mention ethnicity/race but rather a population cap of people in general, Europeans (who are also white, FYI) might find it odd to do as you suggest.
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.
[0] https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/21/afrikaners
there are several they/them in this very thread saying that it's a violation of human rights. so yeah.
I think the Swiss are not known to be particularly open-minded in Europe. They have ton of money though and the landscape is great
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I'm sure they are very proud of themselves for sneaking racist anti-immigrant policy in under the guise of left wing environmental rhetoric.
This is amazing and I hope it passes.
Do they know what happened to China's population control program?
It would be saner to set a cap that is in some way tied to ecological footprint, food production, energy generation capacity, and other factors that make a country sustainable and sovereign. Trouble is, I expect that would put nearly every country way over.
It is in fact based on stuff like this but hyperboled into a placative number. The "9.142 million initiative" would sell just as good.
First step towards a purge civilization. Also, rather narrowminded (to be expected, tho) to not expect your population to naturally grow beyond 10m (at 9.1 now) just based on the normal progress of healthcare and wellbeing.
A population ceiling is not a serious decision for a modern country like Switzerland, esp given their 1.29 kids per family. They could cap by proffesion, region or even origin nation. But a hard cap reminds something between One child policy of China and Brexit, which both didn't go well. First problem will be the shortage of workers in specific fields or regions.