Comment by kuerbel
6 days ago
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.
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.
Sounds like Seattle in the 2000's.
As soon as one of the locals found out you're not from there, you get the "Seattle Freeze."
Fortunately, I read about it in a book before I moved there, so I knew it when I recognized it. But that didn't make it any less uncomfortable.
I guess with SEA filled with expat tech people these days, it's either gotten much better or much worse.
> 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.
Literally what most expats go through in Europe. I live abroad for 6 years and here, a Central EU country, this also happens. I am trying to learn the language and even then I got told implicitly several times that I will still be treated as a foreigner, no matter how much culture and language I learn from the local country.
We can swap anecdata back and forth, but that doesn’t reflect my experience at all, now in my 4th European ‘expat’ (migrant, really) experience.
Aside from a few somewhat racist remarks outside Berlin, I’ve always been treated fairly. Speaking the local language definitely helps, and living in 50k+ pop. cities.
And then… you visit Switzerland. Very quickly you realise what GP is talking about. Switzerland is the only place where I’d love to live, but hate the feeling of being there.
That's interesting (and a really fun stunt to pull). I always had the impression that the situation is slightly better for other minority-dialect foreigners (Vorarlberg/Südtirol) compared to "vanilla" german speakers, but that might wrong...
Yes a “grützi” at the right moment is often priceless, especially when abroad.
seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"
If you’re part of the majority group, you really don’t see how cliquish people in minority groups are. Every time I get into a cab with another “brown” person, there is a Q&A. When they find out I’m from a muslim country, it’s all “my brother,” etc. I’ve always found it distasteful.
People in general tend to be very tribal -- it's in our DNA. When it's about "yay community!" its kinda nice but most the time it's "other tribe bad". I think this is a core to a lot of legislation.
Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.
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Is it cliquishness, or is it genuine joy at an unexpected connection?
The people who fixate on this stuff are projecting.
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Yes, we have a really well recognized Spanish team lead here, yet he’s mostly hiring Spanish people (in Switzerland), oh yes and one Italian is the exception.
Also we had a German team lead hiring Germans, well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.
Diversity back in the day meant Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering working together…
I’m an American and I just had the thought - if I was working in Japan at a Japanese company and I had the opportunity to hire, would I have a bias to hire other Americans?
Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.
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Yes, and that's normal (except for maybe eastern European cultures who better hire an American/west European).
May be each foreigner in mgmt position should pass some exam on diversification and swiss history?
Actually each foreigner to raise or get some state benefits should pass some exam?
> well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.
It's not easier dealing with people from your own country but it is biased. From someone who has hired hundred+ remote developers in europe for 10 years to lead them and out of those hired a total of 2 people from my country. Wouldn't have been hard either.
At the same time I see some managers doing this, currently in another fully remote company have a manager colleague that has hired 3 brazillians back to back. Go figure. Just shows you that it's a biased person in other respects (we all are) and that they make zero efforts to keep it in check (this is a decision you make).
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Because it is real, and there _is_ in fact a large difference in the propensity to do this across cultures.
This post is about Switzerland, and as said by parent a lot of this is about Germans in Switzerland.
Are Germans in Switzerland more prone to hiring another German rather than a French person, or Swiss person? I'm sure that such bias exists. But that bias is nothing compared to e.g. tendency for Indians to hire other Indians. Now of course some of this can be explained by economic opportunity. The extra benefit Germans can provide to other Germans by giving them Swiss job is smaller than for Indians.
However that only explains part of it. If that was all, then Chinese people should bias much more to hiring fellow countrymen than Japanese and Korean people, while the latter two should be similar to each other. This is definitely not the case (note that we're talking about immigrants here, not 2nd+ generation).
I'm sure there's been research on this subject, and there will be some cultural trait that proxies for how much immigrants from country X bias towards hiring others from X.
I can even give you a proxy for funsies: embassies. Look at the employees at the embassy of country X in country Y. How many of them are from country X and how many are from Y? Now compare that across embassies. You'll see a lot of similarities with what I've sketched. Sometimes you'll see that both the embassy of country X in country Y, as well as that of country Y in country X (the other direction), are both primarily staffed by people from country X! In those cases it's common that country X has a much stronger bias than Y towards hiring people from their own nationality rather than based on aptitude.
Because it's an unfalsifiable claim. If you need to bring in highly skilled people and most of them come from X Y or Z, it will be near impossible to distinguish in-group preference from a continuation of skilled immigration which for most countries that practice it, is beneficial for the economy.
Also hiring is often based on trust and networks. People refer others to their company and jobs. That trust tends to work out pretty well for companies. If people get laid off they tell their friends and their friends pass on opportunities to them or try to help them find new jobs. And people tend to make friends with others they share a culture and language with.
If you add a bunch of barriers to make companies have to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity or culture, that slows down hiring and can be an extra regulatory burden for what reason?
There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.
When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives.
Then those white men feel spurned. They imagine they weren't hired because they're white. It's an easier pill to swallow and then the next thing you know DEI is the great Satan of low IQ white men.
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I think it's pretty logical, though perhaps it is correlation rather than causation.
Say I am hiring as a native English speaker in a Chinese company (while of course still knowing enough Mandarin to survive) and I have 3 candidates, one of whom also speaks English fluently. I would definitely be biased towards the English speaker, because I would work better with them.
Now, it doesn't really matter what their ethnicity was, but there is a higher likelihood of them being of the same ethnicity. Especially if my first language is niche, the chances of hiring the same ethnicity would be higher.
I've been on the receiving end of this before, being hired in part because I spoke English due to my manager while the rest of the company was primarily Mandarin
The broader concern seems to be “outsiders taking our jobs/raising house prices/voting in elections” etc etc. Anything perceived to be done by “outsiders” is an issue.
Americans/British saying this about non-white immigrants. Switzerland about Europeans. India saying it about Bangladeshi migrants.
It’s like people dislike others who are worse off them.
No it's people disliking importing the cultures and problems that made those people worse off in the first place.
>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?
I mean there is a tendency for people in the middle class to go all NIMBY and not want additional housing to be built which drives up the cost of housing. It's good that there's a middle class but there are also things that people in the middle class do that aren't good. Like drive f350s on their 40-minute commute to the office.
The middle class can’t afford F350s today.
"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?
Maybe its a bit like Brexit, i.e. not rational immigration being one of the major issues when it did nothing to reduce the immigration of (non-white) people from third countries and EU migration was rapidly decreasing anyway.
Funny enough, the voting of this weekend mentions as argument also "the lax asylum politics in the EU" while exactly THIS weekend the EU is strengthening a lot, and I mean quite a lot, the asylum procedures and including border controls. I guess they had to push it quickly before the Swiss voter notices...
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.
No it isn’t racism as Germans had the same skin color. Keep in mind that Germans aren’t stereotypical anymore.
In Switzerland live over 41% migrants and children of migrants (just 8.4%). So the native Swiss are not just “surrounded” but greatly diminished.
It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years.
Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”
Maybe we should just keep expanding it. Declare everyone white. Black people are just white people with more melanin.
Then we can be racist about aliens from outer space.
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Yeah, sure, it's nationalism instead of racism.
Born on the wrong side of the Rhine? F right off.
No better at all. Worse, arguably.
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Racists havent heard of Ashbys Law of Requisite Variety.
Its also why they get left behind by everyone who has.
Its an ever growing complex and unpredictable world. Sameness is not a strength in complexity theory.