Comment by mrtksn
7 hours ago
Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
It’s first “I don’t want illegal immigrants”, when the immigration is legal they start doing things like take back control(UK) or sustainability (Swiss).
What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago or robots now.
I find it annoying that they screw other stuff just because they don’t want to face the truth about their character.
Probably the solutions mentioned (sex/robots) are not the only ones. Many complain loudly about what might be a minority of the workers, so just knowing more people would have improved their opinion. Others do not have anything better to do, and they pick up this type of "crusades" with low impact on them, but big impact on others.
But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.
>More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.
They don’t want the working class southern Europeans around, they don’t have problem with the rich southern Europeans.
I wont call this xenophobia. Its just rich people annoyed by the poor hanging around outside the working hours. They often even like their poor people that do their things, they are actually annoyed by the other rich peoples employees or the kids of those employees who are seen as not as well behaved as theirs.
They don’t want Germans around!
They don't mind Austrians tho.
Germans are kind of disliked in the rest of DACH.
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Who told you that? Swiss don't even want Germans, which is actually the biggest minority apparently. FFS, Germans! The original racists.
PS. I am German.
> Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
> It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
And it can happen implicitly or explicitly. Witness Jackson Hole. None of the workers can afford to live there and the nearest towns are not close. So the residents arranged a coach service to bus the workers in. And at the end of the day, and out. Yes, to their homes, but best believe there is a very limited window of return coaches which leads to a feeling of almost a sundown town.
>What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago
Unprotected heterosexual sex and births were decoupled 55 years ago. Almost as tenuous is the link between births and well raised children who can and will provide the labor that is wanted.
They don't want their son to do it because immigrants prevent the salaries of those jobs to rise naturally. Mass immigration is capitalism's answer to the Baumol law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the bourgeois left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.
Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.
Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?
That's as stupid as it is old. Locals would do it for a proper salary. But the same locals do not want to pay the proper salary!
Turn the brain on from time to time!
The locals are mostly workers, not capitalists with companies and salaried workers, so it's not "locals" exactly.
Looks you forgot yours at home. Lowering expenses (so wages) in a competitive free market works exactly like doping in cyclism: you'll be forced to if you want to stay alive.
But even without considering that, the business-owning "bourgeois" class not caring about their nation has no reason to be left unchecked by those whose job is to run a country.
Why don’t you let people decide who works with who in a free market and if you are worried about low wages introduce higher minimum wages.
Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.
Just ridiculous.
Most salaried people don't choose their coworkers, their bosses do.
Weird to see free market and minimum wage in the same sentence. The people that I know who voted yes on this don't want the people at all, no matter if the wage. They don't want the population density and they don't want the dilution of their culture
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Immigrants in Switzerland don't "live like slaves," and I'm perfectly happy I don't have to clean the sewers, thank you very much.
Mainly because immigrating to CH is actually not that easy. Compare that with France or Germany.
I’m somewhat sympathetic with that critique on mass immigration in regards to dropping wages at the low end, but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
Everytime I get into the weeds with anti immigration people I feel like I run through the IQ meme with “it’s just racism” on the low and high ends and {insert whatever alternative argument they have} in the middle.
> I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
How wouldn't it be just as racist to attack companies for hiring immigrants?
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You think it is better to have people complaining about companies hiring completely legal migrants than seeking to reform the system in the first place?
Governmental policy is the appropriate place to focus attention - not Twitter outrage campaigns about random companies following the laws that were democratically put in place
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> but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants
They did this already back when Reagan granted amnesty in exchange for stronger border protections [1], it just hardly ever got enforced because employers are good at lobbying. This is slowly starting to change [2].
Despite this, yes, it is xenophobia. As much as they hate to admit it, opposition to immigration usually stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of a country, not an economic zone. Though the economic case for immigration has also been debunked [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/28/employ...
[3] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigr...
> The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary.
apologies, but those of us in the Left agree more with the second part of your sentence than the Left. Are you mixing Leftists and Liberals, perchance?
Yet leftists will always agree to import migrants to undercut locals, in harmony with the capitalist bourgeois class. Besides, I have heard this argument said to me irl a countless times by people with leftist ideas.
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The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers. If the person paying that Sri Lankan were to go to jail for his violation of labor law, the situation would be different.
Not really, labor laws in most places are the bare minimum acceptable. In Latvia, they are now hiring Indian truck drivers to compress even more the salaries.
Given that Latvian truck drivers are already the cheapest of the EU, you can figure out that legal is not the problem.
> The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers.
Which is made easier by immigration. In addition to the simple law of supply & demand, it also impedes unionization:
Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...
Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the United States - https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-reduce-unionization-uni...
Racial Diversity and Union Organizing in the United States, 1999–2008 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253
Amusingly, the ComputerWeekly article (citing the Business Insider article) omits the direction in which diversity affects unionization risk [1], while the two wikipedia articles (again citing the same Business Insider article) [2,3] strongly imply that diversity increases unionization, so the opposite of what their source is saying!
[1] These “risk scores” are calculated from over two dozen metrics – including employee “loyalty”, turnover, racial diversity, “tipline” calls to human resources and proximity to a union office – and shows the likelihood of employees in that location forming or joining a union. - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
[2] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community, and calls to the NLRB were named as contributors to "unionization risk." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon#Opposition...
[3] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community and calls to the National Labor Relations Board were named as contributors to "unionization risk". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_and_trade_unions
I find it hard to believe the kids of the Swiss elite would be cleaning sewers if not for the low pay.
No no, they would have totally done it if the immigrants didn’t suppress the wages and the pay was %15 higher. Now they need to do some office jobs for 5 times the pay since the unemployment rate is %3. There are no Swiss sitting around and not cleaning the sewers because the pay was too low, it will have to fetch workers from other industries.
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I grew up at the border. A friend, who wasn't the brightest of the bunch, found a job to flip burgers at McDonalds after highschool. He was paid a salary higher than the French median wage. Not all Swiss are "elite", far from it.
Switzerland has onlite elite kids? What do all the Swiss with <80 IQ do for a living? They're probably not gonna get a job at ABB, Google, UBS or ETH.
You’re not really accounting for where the money for those “naturally rising wages” come from. A restaurant in the US is making the same (or frankly less) than it used to 10 years ago accounting for inflation. They can’t really afford to pay people more because of the higher consumer index. So the only real option is shutting down. Or in the US for farming. They already run on razor thin margins with a lot of variability from weather, pests etc. They were essentially making it work because of illegal immigrant labor. Now that Florida increased its crackdown on illegal labor around 30% of orange orchards have disappeared in a few years and probably a lot more as time goes on.
If you want to go back to your ethnostate fantasy, people are going to have to go back to consuming what you can produce in your own country. So Switzerland is going back to a diet of essentially bread and cheese and frankly I don’t think they grow enough grain for the bread.
It's ok to have less restaurants? I prefer to have less restaurants and staff that isn't treated like slaves?
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Pedantry, because the crackdown on labor certainly didn’t help, but the Florida orange orchards shutting down is mostly due to the citrus greening disease that’s wiping out the farms similar to how the gros Michael banana was wiped out last century[1]
[1] https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-03-23/florida-oranges-cit...
Locals are not going to clean sewers and you know it. Society in general made it very clear over the last decades that jobs like that are shit, only losers are doing them, and that you need a degree to be worth something. If you want to blame something for this, blame neoliberalism. It helped create a culture in which educational credentials, professional careers, and market prestige became dominant measures of success, making many forms of manual labor appear less desirable.
In France, locals clean sewers. I know several sewer workers, who enjoy very early retirement (54 years old, only 12 years of sewer work). https://www.brut.media/fr/videos/france/societe/les-metiers-...
You just have contempt for your fellow citizens, people are happy to do hard jobs if they are getting rewarded for it. This is also why you often find locals in equivalent jobs that can't be done by migrants (such as historical monuments restauration), but are equally hard (and better paid).
And I'm ok with restaurants being much more expensive. Anyway in France it's mostly pensioners that go there anymore.
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