Comment by arjie
6 days ago
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.
I think that immigration actually is an ecology/sustainability issue. There are economic and cultural effects to immigration as well, and that's what people tend to focus on, but they aren't the only issues to consider. I think every country that has their shit together should be giving serious thought to immigration and sustainability, especially knowing that a massive number of climate refugees are coming in the near future. Preparing for that now would go a long way to keeping quality of life up while still helping out.
This specific policy may not be well intentioned, it may even be a means to avoid taking in those refugees when the time comes, but this is the kind of thing that nations should be thinking about right now.
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That avoids accusations of bigotry which Europe has convinced itself doesn't exist within its domains.
Border control is not equivalent to racism. The people pushing for it loudly just tend to be doing it for blatantly racist reasons. Unsurprisingly, those people tend to abuse any ounce of power given to them. When they're granted extraordinary government powers, they make up official sounding reason to achieve their racist agenda. Hence the general consensus that any talk of border control is racism. The non-racist-driven border control agenda just controls the border, and shut the fuck up about it. They don't boast about arrests, they don't make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs, they don't send in the military to schools to grab kids out of class, they don't shoot people in the face when they look at them wrong.
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Europeans, with some exceptions (the UK, Germany, maybe Sweden), generally care way, way less about accusations of bigotry than Americans do, and the Swiss are one of the most DGAF nations in this regard.
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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.
You don't have to jump right to one child per household (which is a bad idea anyway) but maintaining sustainable population levels should extend beyond just border control. It should include things like building out infrastructure in underdeveloped areas and encouraging (or perhaps even requiring) people to move in the new spaces, enabling and encouraging remote work to free up unnecessary office space and concentration of workers to city centers, and the promotion of sex ed, family planning, and birth control so that the children being born are going to parents who want and are ready for them.
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.
If Swiss population growth were entirely attributable to the children of existing Swiss residents, then this initiative would be pointless because it wouldn't change anything, and we would not be having this conversation.
So yes, it absolutely is about immigration, regardless of the wording.
It's a migration cap. There's no provision on sterilizing Swiss women should the threshold be reached through birthrate…
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No, it's an immigration restriction. There's no way it applies if the Swiss start having 5 kids each.
Apparently you are unable to understand that if people who have been crying about immigration for 20 years that now push this things does not mean they have changed their mind. They just try to hide what's obvious to confuse uniformed voters (like old people who just see big number and remember the 1970s).
> 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.
> In Germany extra-EU immigrants are on average net contributors to welfare state too.
Interesting. By what cost does this measure loss of freedom due to increased surveillance, decreased freedom of movement especially for women. Also increased cost and decreasing quality of police, law, education, or even street cleaning…
Extra-EU immigrants are not uniform group. E.g. in Denmark non-western migrants at some point are (weakly) positive net contributors to public finances, but MENAPT immigrants are on avg. net negative their entire life. https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...
> In Germany extra-EU immigrants are on average net contributors to welfare state too.
All the data I find shows them contributing less than natives, and even MORE less if corrected for age. https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/232517
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This is wild. Who are they and what kind of work are they doing? I would like to learn more about this phenom.
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Are the people supposed to eat rocks? Agriculture takes a lot of land but people need to eat.
If anything agriculture is going to require more land in order to be sustainable.
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The Netherlands is completely tiny compared to many of the countries people are coming from, and the land is allocated. You can't replace the farms with suburbs throughout the country, and even if you did, then what? Is it allowed to be full then? Or should people still leave their much more land-rich origins to come anyway?
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Does EU have the USA problem where most farmers are basically sharecroppers where they are mandated where they can buy their seed, buy their fertilizers, where they buy their chicks/sows/calfs, what equipment they can buy, how they can repair their equipment, where they can sell their crops, and at what specific prices all from a single undemocratic corporation?
In the USA it's basically corporations that run everything and drive the farmers into poverty where said corporations can then buy their land and rely on undocumented workers to keep the abuse going.
From the outside EU farmers seem to have better labor relations, but don't know.
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most of the immigrants are highly educated professionals, big tech, pharma and meds. it‘s not the „empty“.
I think at least in Germany it's not true - among people coming to Germany there are more refugees of various kinds than professionals
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They definitely aren't, but whomever they are they still requires houses, power and water.
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France is mostly empty by Europe's population density standard though, so even though it was likely not the intent of GP, it kind of works in that context.
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Can you back up your claims? I don't have a dog in this fight, but do notice people ridiculing migrants as "doctors and engineers".
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citation needed
That’s to the US. I believe in Europe it’s Arab hoipolloi
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!
Xenophobia is on the rise across the board with the rising unequality and an alliance between extreme-right elements of the society and the wealthy class that wants to use them to destroy democratic institutions and take over the power. Rationally with the ageing population we actually need managed mass migration but instead get managed mass hate and unmanaged migration.
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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.
> Global freedom of movement was an inalienable right until European colonial powers noticed some of their colonies' peoples wanted to move to Europe.
What an absurd assertion. Where did you learn that? Read up about Roman border control and immigration policy, and what they required of immigrants into Roman territory.
We should not fulfill our imagined moral responsibility to the third world if it has real cost to the people already here
The second paragraph is a reasonable political position, but the first is blatantly ahistorical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#Antecedents.
There was no global freedom of movement. Ever.
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.
This is a deeply dishonest characterization of the FCAS.
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Seriously? This keeps happening over and over.
>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.
Sometimes members are added just to prevent the EU from working better together, the reason why UK pushed hardest for expansion in 2004/2007. Funny how they'd leave the EU a few years later because of a vote that might've been decided becsuse of the 'polish plumber'.
But what did Romania experience?
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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.
>These kinds of morally-superior, we'll show them, type of attitudes
This is a strange framing that itself usually comes from a standpoint of moral superiority. When you sign agreements with a governing body, like the EU on freedom of movement, and you break that agreement then there's consequences. And I don't mean that in an underhanded agressive way, but just literally you've broken the terms you had negotiated.
The superiority complex really often seems to come from countries like Switzerland or the UK in the Brexit situation. Countries that already have often privileged deals and then decide to forfeit them, which they are allowed to do, it's not an attack on their sovereignty, the EU is not mainland China and Switzerland or the UK were not Taiwan, they're free to do what they want, they just can't have their cake and eat it too.
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> sure you're also staunchly against Scotland and any referendum to join the EU, and against Catalonia becoming independent as well?
Why? I think the first is a good idea and the second fine if that’s what they want.
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> 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.
This would be a hilariously dumb reason to be anti-EU when the other major Western power, the US, has had a much bigger "we'll show them", strongarm attitude for much longer.
It's the opposite of what you think, if some countries get privileges without following the basic principles, then the EU would be unpopular.
You are mistaken. I am pro-Scotland independence and EU admission but anti Catalonia independence. Simply because the former will expand and strengthen the EU and the latter will divide and weaken it, especially since it's supported by Russia.
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Those "guillotine clauses" mostly exist because member states didn't want to cede their sovereignty to the EU. If a treaty covers areas where member states have shared or full responsibility, it must be ratified unanimously by every member state. (Which in some case requires ratification by regional parliaments.) Any changes to such treaties must also be ratified, which means there will be 30+ parties negotiating and trying to win new concessions.
Sure, and I didn't shoot you, I just sent a bullet in your direction.
Especially after we saw how happy the EU was to negotiate (they didn't budge) when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swiss_immigration_initiat... passed.
The new initiative is basically the same, but with no leeway to ignore it.
(that said I suspect if it passes, there will be something tied to the bilateral referendum in 2027/28 to try to supersede it)
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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.
It wasn't catastrophic to the British economy. Why would Switzerland be so different?
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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).
It's crazy how people really don't get the difference between free movement and Schengen.
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.
That seems like an unreasonable interpretation of what I said, which was just pointing out the futility of the Swiss position. EU can impose its will at essentially zero cost no matter what the Swiss do.
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?
Of course not. But expect it and prepare for it.
Change may be inevitable but not every change is and we shouldn't stop insisting that things change for the better.
> we shouldn't stop insisting that things change for the better
I never said we shouldn't.
What I meant by "Change will always be coming. Embrace it.", is to accept it as a reality, be ready for it and prepare for it. That means, be ready to resist negative change and accept positive change.
Even after successfully resisting negative change, the end state may still be different than before. This is what we have to accept and be ready for, mentally.