Comment by amtamt
6 days ago
This seems a much more rational approach than pure political agenda driven fear mongering campaigns against immigrants.
6 days ago
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?)
> Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today?
My guess is yes.
It's one of the best things that the EU brings.
Support for EU within EU is growing since the war in Ukraine and has gone to overdrive since Trump 2.0. No current political party except for fringe parties in any EU state advocates for exiting the EU or ending the four freedoms. It’s reasonable to say that yes, EU citizens do approve of freedom of movement in EU. They probably do want to limit freedom of non-EU citizens though…
… which is exactly why the EU would terminate agreements with Switzerland if we start first. And why it would make political sense. They made that quite clear with the UK.
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> Why does it need to be? Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today?
Freedom of movement for labor is absolutely critical to counterbalance the freedom of movement that capital has, otherwise it leads to mass exploitation of labor and rising levels of inequality, which leads to, well, the French approach to the bourgeois problem.
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.
"the swiss equivalent"
As OP explains, freedom of movement can't be stopped in isolation from the rest of the bilaterals.
(btw funnily Schengen is just about the border control, we're talking about freedom of movement which is a different thing, e.g. UK wasn't in Schengen but the freedom of movement applied to UK as well before brexit, tho I guess people use Schengen interchangeably)
Which immediately triggers the guillotine clause in all other bilateral treaties including movement of goods and services, Horizon, energy market etc.
„Exiting the EU“ is a perfectly adequate way to summarize it to a world audience that doesn’t care about the details.
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Even worse then - no more visa free travel, and no more international collaboration on crime. I must wonder, who would profit from these?
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
Ok, so how to calculate it for switzerland in a non arbitrary way?
(Btw. I believe switzerland is not trying to be self sufficient anyway, but donimport lots of stuff, like most other countries do)
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> 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.)
Ah yes, folks fighting the good Malthusian fight since 1798, and yet to see a win. LoL. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Criticism
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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.
I am pretty sure there are many people living in swiss with temporary visa's and those will then be de facto kicked out, if they do not get their permissions extended.
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This. As immigrant I don't feel threatened by this at all. I can't vote, and I wouldn't vote for SVP but as far as I can tell this makes kinda sense.
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…
Germany (16% of recent immigration), followed by France and Italy (12% and 11%).
https://cms.news.admin.ch/fileservice/sdweb-docs-prod-nsbcch...
(page 5)
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.
It's not completely irrational. It's a fixed placative number yes.
But reality is also we don't produce more food than we already do. More people means more import and it's actually lowering the quality of the available food, making shopping more complicated, etc. And that's just the food quality aspect, what about pensions? Health care? ...
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