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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.
For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.
I hear you, I'm trying to find the bright side in "community" where people who don't know each other at least treat them as "brothers". The insular part is fucked and we need need to evolve past that.
> For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.
Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.
tribalism, Us vs. Them, racism, patriotism/nationalism, etc all seem closely related.
In terms of social life, and romantic life, it's interesting how heavily we rely on shared/common background, which tends to cause this clustering effect.
The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.
That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.
Did I even write anything about political contents of your signalling? I believe I didn't. I also didn't "reveal" anything particularly bad about you. I said that your urge to ring it is of the same social nature (aka tribal), we (humanity) have been exhibiting for all written and unwritten history, while the message itself expressing that you're above it makes it contradictory in ironic way. No matter what your signal proclaims, the process of tribal-building around it is most certainly divisive[1], with obligatory bit of outwards directed derision. So... then you reacted with suggesting I'm some sort of morally inferior outgroup voice. Which I think, proves the point you have missed.
[1] Which is not always bad. This is core mechanics of our competitive adaptiveness probably. It's just that being more aware of this gives us a chance to be better in more universal terms with other humans. Including in politics, of course.
P.S. If you felt offended, sorry! I can't say I care too much ngl, it's the internet after all, but it wasn't my intention either. I also didn't downvote you.
I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.
You've got it backwards. That's a defeatist take that results in the exact kind of misery and cruelty documented in detail throughout history. Society prospers when people look past their differences and work together to improve things. It suffers when demagogues successfully divide the public and exploit the chaos to loot the resources required to improve the lives of everyone. Making punching bags out of a group of people is sure way to create instability.
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.
I’d disagree. I’m not American or British but and in my experience Americans or British are the least ethnically biased people on the planet. Any other group, I could believe that they are biased but not Americans, or British. Something in their particular culture right now.
You’re responding to an American who says he’d be biased towards Americans and telling him he’s wrong.
Maybe Americans are the least biased (though being an American I am not so sure) but that doesn’t mean we aren’t biased (even if sometimes for legitimate reasons like ease of communication).
Now this I disagree with. I expect that you are interacting with a specific subset of Americans. A lot of Americans are deeply racist and xenophobic and I believe that the average could definitely get lower.
I guess I work in tech. Maybe it’s different elsewhere but even there I think it’s probably lower than most of the world among similar classes of society.
So I actually agree with you here. America has a deep, ugly pit of unconstrained racism, and a less deep pit of quiet racism that permeates a lot of society. But so do many (and very possibly most) other nations, where the level of racism is often even worse, just with different targets than Americans. I think in a way America is much more aware of our tendencies than other nations.
It isn’t just a lack of ethnic bias, it’s a belief in capitalism or professionalism or “enlightened self-interest”: hire the best person for the job, and everyone will be better off.
I've actually been in such a situation and I didn't. Or if I did have such a bias it must've been rather small as none of the applicants benefited from it.
> 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).
I've seen this kind of thing happen not through bias but because good people know good people, where by "good" I mean highly competent. They knew each other through university and other regional connections, so they happened to have the same ethnicity as one might expect from such a regional commonality. One got hired, referred another, and it cascaded. They were great to work with and highly competent, so I don't think there was bias even though it might appear that they're was.
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.
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.
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.
Are the “mediocre white men” the ones with a 27-29 MCAT/3.4-3.59 GPA, who have a 21% chance of admission to medical school whereas a hispanic student in that same range has a 61% chance? Are those the “mediocre white men” you’re talking about?
> The companies get … more diverse perspectives
That makes no sense. The premise of non-discrimination laws is that someone’s ethnic background doesn’t affect their “perspectives” in ways that are material to employment.
From the report 'Specifically, Black males received sentences 13.4 percent longer, and Hispanic males received sentences 11.2 percent longer, than White males'
So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites? It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.
> So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites?
Yes. Your report shows that white men are more often given probation, which explains much of the difference. That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.
Your report also shows that black women received 6% shorter sentences than white women. So there seems to be more at work here than black versus white. We need less discretion in sentencing across the board.
> It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.
That describes people who point to sentencing disparities to justify affirmative discrimination in school admissions and employment.
> That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.
And yet, if I look at your comment history, you seem hyper focused on discrimination in admissions. I don't see a single instance where you even attempted to advocate for broader elimination of discrimination. It has always been a few narrow instances where whites were on the receiving end.
You’ve got it backwards. There’s 19 million people in college and graduate school, compared to under 2 million people in prison. And my contention is that the discrimination in admissions carries through to the workforce, at least to white collar jobs. There’s 70 million people in white collar jobs.
> The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong
Yes. And the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college and medical school admissions.
So why is it unreasonable for the people you call “mediocre white men” to conclude they’re being discriminated against? If Harvard and other elite universities are willing to go to the Supreme Court to defend such discrimination, doesn’t it stand to reason—absent data to the contrary—that the myriad companies and institutions run by graduates of those universities are doing the same thing?
>the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college
Congratulations you found the one place where a black person might have an advantage. Meanwhile virtually every other aspect of American society disadvantages black people and the supreme court ruled against those colleges.
College admissions and the job market are apples and oranges. It isn't actually safe to assume the same thing must be happening in both. It isn't. There's an unofficial affirmative action favoring white people across much of the job market.
> There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.
How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?
> 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.
I just don't agree with this idea of "giving a more fair shot" if it's enforced because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments. I don't like it to bolster diversity and I don't like it to cut diversity (what many white nationalists in the US wish would happen in industries that hire from abroad like tech).
It's also not even defined what a fair shot means - once you discard merit and start trying to counter for all kinds of past or inherent disadvantages there is really no end to it.
A fair shot would be hiring based on qualifications and not race, relion, etc.
There seems to be no end to people wanting to perpetuate a status quo that advantages themselves.
You might feel differently if you were part of a group that faces discrimination at every turn.
How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?
Usually someone who feels discriminated against will get legal representation, file a lawsuit, and use the discovery process to strengthen their case. They can compare their treatment to that of people who don't share their minority status. They can show internal communications. Call witnesses. compare the companies workforce to other similarly positioned companies.
> because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments
1. So what?
2. People's judgement should be second guessed if they're racist.
3. One of the easiest ways to reduce discrimination in hiring is to replace names on resumes with numbers before letting hiring managers access them. Which barely slows down anything and eliminates a variable that isn't relevant to the candidates qualifications.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah it's much better to make your money by enabling the worlds worst dictators to steal money from their populations. In fact it's all the other countries taxes that are paying for the swiss social security, because of all the aid money being funneled into swiss bank accounts.
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.
> 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.”
This idea is mostly a modern fabrication. Various more granular ethnic biases were of course present throughout American history, but those were never conflated with racial categories: in times and places where the white vs. black racial division was relevant, the ethnic groups you're referencing were always considered "white".
And the types of discrimination that people in white ethnic groups sometimes experienced was of of a type and of a degree vastly different from that experienced by black people. They're really two very distinct phenomena, and weren't evenly distributed throughout the US -- black people in the South had the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other horrifying things to deal with, whereas white immigrant communities in the Northeast or Midwest never experienced anything remotely similar.
There is a distinction between racism and xenophobia, no need to assign the same label to everything. i.e. the thing about Italians was cultural an educated immigrant from Northern Italy would have been considered as white as a French (not that there a significant number of those in the US) at least.
Technically yes, but usually I think there’s a racist undercurrent to xenophobia.
The US stopped accepting refugees recently… except white South Africans. I’d say these people share no more culture or values with the average American than a Central American refugee. Maybe less. I’d much rather party with a bunch of Central or South Americans than a bunch of Apartheid lost causers.
If ethnically white people were pouring across the US border I don’t think many of our immigration hawks would care much, even if some were committing crimes.
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.
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.
These jobs are unpopular because the pay is shit, not because people don't want to do them, the government could simply have grants/bonus program for people employed in these positions so that the taxpayer money directly funds the bettering of the society and environment around them. Besides, Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.
> Besides, Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"
This was true before about 10 years ago. In last 10 years, there has been a dramatic rise (I mean millions of "technical interns") in low-skill foreigners living and working in Japan. (To be clear: I harbor no resent towards these people.) They work in any industry that needs cheap low-skill workers: agriculture, hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, manufacturing, construction, civil/civic maintenance etc. That said, the friction has been pretty low. The difference between the original late 1990s wave of highly-skilled foreigners (mostly bankers and lawyers) and the most recent wave for low-skill foreigners: The most recent wave arrives to Japan with some Japanese language. (They study in their home country and need to pass a test to demonstrate basic Japanese language skills.) In my experience, their "median" Japanese is much better than most highly-skilled migrants, which helps to reduce the integration friction. Also, the low-skilled migrants have a maximum number of years they can work in Japan. They either need to skill-up and get a better visa (I guess about 5-10% can do it), or they need to return home after their "technical internship" is complete.
> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"
Japan heavily utilizes foreign workers via a Gulf style guestworker program, and even that has led to the far-right Sanseito becoming Japan's highest rated opposition party and the far-right wing of the LDP winning internal party politics.
They get to keep their passports and can return any time, calling it Gulf-style is a bit much. There are abuses - so are there in Europe - but it's not like they sacrificed a thousand or so immigrant worker lives on the Tokyo Olympics in Qatar 2022 style.
I think they mean gulf style as seen by westerners. You can get a visa but you'll never be seen as a "local" nor granted citizenship. In places like Dubai multiple generations live without ever getting citizenship or a path to it and always with the notion you can be booted at any minute if you inconvenient the wrong person or run out of money.
Though I don't think this is fully true of Japan -- it's one of the easiest countries to naturalize in if you give up your other citizenships but does have the quality of always being seen as a foreigner. It's just that few people naturalize as Japanese because their immigration is most open to people from developed countries who aren't interested in giving up their birth passport to acquire Japanese nationality. If you just want a Japanese passport though no matter the downsides, I think it's one of the easier citizenship to get for an American to obtain.
This is no longer true. With recent legislation, you need to live in Japan for 10 years before applying for citizenship. In the old days, it was only 5 years, which is pretty short for a highly developed nation. UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are now much easier to obtain.
> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.
It's also one of the worst developed nation economies and has a massive old, shrinking population problem and is well associated with people having no kids, having no prospects for a better life, and having huge amounts of its population live alone shuttered from the outside world.
A good economy has many benefits and skilled immigration can significantly improve developed nation economies.
To be clear, the economic performance of Japan is pretty similar to Italy. They have incredibly low population growth (or shrinking), but their GDP per capita continues to increase year-over-year. Surprisingly, quality of life is pretty good in Japan and Italy (the second will be a bit controversial here). As long as you have a middle class job, your life will be pretty good.
You would think that such a terrible, untenable, broken economy as I hear the Japanese economy described (oh no, it’s not growing fast! The horrors of checks notes equilibrium) would precipitate a very dirty landscape, vast swathes of nature torn down, civility breakdowns, mass homelessness, and a high murder rate, bridges collapsing out of nowhere, etc.
I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.
Instead of those things, Japan has extremely high suicide rates, extremely low rates of coupling, extremely low rates of family formation, extremely high rates of loneliness, etc.
It's a place with no economic growth prospects, where you have to work far longer than people in other developed nations, and where your chance of companionship and having your own family is the lowest it can possibly be in the world.
> in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building
I struggle to see this. Central Geneva is full of beautiful, well-maintained green spaces and children's play areas with plenty of larger parks scattered around.
Geneva had an extreme shortage of housing while there were plots of land perfectly suitable for construction but older people willing to sacrifice their kids' future for the sake of today's comfort and for one more year of ignoring the world around them. This problem is no unique to Geneva though.
Compare the no build scenario to the scenario where you build one more apartment, but that one new apartment is smaller than you want.
In the no build scenario, the person who wants to move to Geneva doesn't get to, or they have to rent a room in an existing apartment.
In the scenario where you build that one additional apartment, a person moves into it instead. So they make a choice that that was better than their existing situation.
That choice is someone increasing their comfort level. There are lots of housing situations that are worse than a new apartment, even a very small one.
The mistake is not realizing that everyone who moves into a new unit is increasing their comfort.
I agree about bike lanes in Geneva, they should take the space away from cars. Their success is so phenomenal, that they are carrying more passengers/h in some sections than the much wider street they flank.
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.
EU citizens can freely live and work in Switzerland and vice-versa. It would be difficult to reliably cap immigration from other EU countries and stay in the Schengen Area.
When I was at CERN, it was before Schengen became a thing, so as Portuguese I had the same VISA issues as someone else coming out of the other side of the planet.
Worse, being at CERN wasn't a plus for the hiring process, I would need to apply to the position as if still living in Portugal, as my VISA was tied to CERN directly with a three month deadline to leave Switzerland after the contract duration.
It also did not help, that my fellow country folks do not have a positive image across the country, for various kind of reasons, which is another issue I experienced while living there, like being refused entry in clubs when showing a Portuguese ID card.
Eventually I moved back to another EU country, still I do visit Switzerland, from time to time.
Pity that right wing movements are taking off all over the place.
You're throwing a lot of words that you don't understand nor have much relevance to the topic.
Before bilateral agreements and the freedom of movement, not Schengen which was ratified much later and is completely irrelevant here, you needed a work permit, not a visa (lowercase), which anyway at CERN is the equivalent of a diplomatic permit given to all international and tax-exempt NGOs in Geneva/Switzerland. And of course you lose your CDL permit quickly after your contract expires.
Getting a B permit before FoM would specifically not have been as hard for you as for someone from another continent.
Getting a B permit in 2003 - 2004 was indeed hard enough experience that I ended up not staying there and refuse any job offer from Swiss companies to this day, regardless of the Swiss friendships I managed to make there.
My stay at CERN was temporary, and every single company where I had an interview clearly communicated to me that the paperwork to get a B permit instead of a Swiss national, or a foreigner with existing permit.
The need to switch permit status from the CERN diplomatic one into a B one, killed all conversations.
But lets be pedantic in the meaning of words instead, which I used for folks that never lived in Switzerland, that is what is relevant for the whole discussion about foreigners how experience Switzerland.
Bilateral agreements were signed in 1999 and freedom of movement enacted in 2002 so you must not have looked very hard. Also claiming that immigration from a country like Portugal was hard before FoM is extremely funny given the number of Portuguese immigrants in Romandie.
Words have a meaning and bringing diplomatic permits to the topic when they follow their own rules and are specifically outside any immigration quota is not particularly helpful.
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.
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.
Please raise your voice. It's heartbreaking that European naivety is slowly turning the continent into something more resembling your home. So many people have no idea how good they have it. Thousands of generations of responsible custodianship discarded in an instant for the appearance of progressivism. They won't listen to themselves, they won't admit what they are seeing. Please try to make them understand.
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.
"Diversity," really? You still drink this Kool-Aid in Switzerland?! Your growth rate is 0.75%! This is not going to lead to diversity but to replacement!
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.
Maybe some (or many) people believe that more people will make it less "lovely". I think this is a popular stance and I think many people are more than satisfied with the current population density of their area.
You understand perfectly that the number of people affects what a place is like. That growing a small town of 10k into a metropolis of 1M will change it. Yet you're pretending that you don't, that this is a completely new idea for you. Why?
Because it is the place it is due to the conditions it has grown in. Take away the EU and Switzerland loses a significant part of their economic power, which is needed to sustain being the place it is. Just like Brexit.
Switzerland's economy is generally much stronger than the rest of the EU, so the idea Swiss economic "power" (however defined) is because of the EU is a difficult claim to take seriously. Why doesn't all this EU-originated economic power help the actual member states?
BTW Brexit had no impact on the British economy. Check the ground truth stats if you don't believe me. There's lots of obfuscation on this topic and false claims as the British establishment tries to cover up the fact that it misled the population about the economic consequences of leaving, of which there were none whatsoever.
> The majority of economists believe that Brexit has harmed the UK's economy and reduced its real per capita income in the long term, and the referendum itself damaged the economy.
That specific statement has five citations and all of them are from 2016 or 2017, when Brexit hadn't happened and so they were merely speculating about possible future effects. So none of the citations supports the claim.
The citations also contradict the statement, "the referendum itself damaged the economy". Instead they admit the referendum's effects were better than predicted by which they mean there weren't any:
"It won't mean Armageddon, but the broad consensus of economists—whose predictions about the initial fallout were largely too pessimistic—is for a prolonged effect"
and
"Unlike the short-term effects of Brexit, which have been better than most had predicted"
Wikipedia is a hopelessly compromised source, you shouldn't rely on it for anything where a left wing activist might have strong opinions because they'll just straight up lie to you, unfortunately. Grokipedia's article is marginally better, but still makes the mistake of citing discredited analyses and making false claims based on them.
If you really want to know the truth about this you have to just go to the core data and see for yourself, because the space is full of claims made by people with a clear agenda.
That's not an answer. Raw data is useless without interpretation. There's a myriad of other things affecting economic development, which need to be compensated for.
Or does your "raw data" have a column for "growth deficit due to Brexit" showing 0?
Just compare the British economy with that of France, or its own prior trajectory. Very similar economies, neighbours, one stayed in and the other left. France establishes there was no unexpected growth surge Britain missed out on. Continuing on the prior trajectory establishes there was no direct negative impact from leaving. Put them together and there's your answer.
It's also a much smaller economy and Switzerland, unlike the UK, is landlocked and surrounded by EU countries. More than half of its exports go to the EU. Switzerland needs the EU more than the EU needs Switzerland.
European countries have traded with each other long before EU free movement. In fact, most countries today, EU or not, manage to trade just fine despite strict borders.
About half of UK trade is with the EU too and leaving made no difference.
As for "surrounded by EU countries", unless you're jumping in the same boat as joxdasba and claiming France, Germany, Italy and Austria will all simultaneously attempt to starve Switzerland into submission, that just doesn't matter much.
Is not accepting infinity immigration "taking away the EU"? And the population density is even more part of the conditions it has grown in. But much much harder to fix if it increases too much - shouldn't they take a precautionary approach?
Regardless, that's not the question I asked. I asked why the poster was pretending they don't know population number affects the quality of a place.
A rhetorical question is supposed to make you think, not state the obvious. Especially since the obvious has already been stated - it is the premise of the referendum!
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.
They're partially right, some cultures are awful by any common usage of the word. The problem of course is that they're dogwhistle implying that this means all Afghan asylum seekers must be part of such cultures and therefore must be awful, which is of course not true.
> implying that this means all Afghan asylum seekers must be part of such cultures and therefore must be awful
99% of Afghans believe in Sharia law according to Pew research, so you're right it's not quite all.
I understand some people will round up to 100%, but I don't personally. I do appreciate there might be 1% of Afghans out there who deserve compassion, but it's not exactly controversial to suggest that Afghans broadly are not good people by any normal Western standards. And if we didn't know this already, we now have plenty of evidence of this in the form of rapes of women and children in my country and across Europe by Afghan migrants we have shown compassion to.
If we could reliably select the Afghans who are more like us and have less of the cultural diversity, then great, but practically we can't do that and the odds are massively against us ever being able to do that.
The parent commenter seemed to be implying that we should be welcoming of diversity broadly, which is why I raised the question – because you'd have to be a pretty horrible person to want to bring Afghan culture into Switzerland.
I am from an immigrant background myself and my best friend is a Muslim asylum seeker. I am also pro-immigration. People can try to paint my motivates however they like. I know why I say what I say, and it's not out of hate, it's out of compassion.
Not that it should need to be said, but I'd urge people to respond in good faith rather than making assumptions about my character.
If this were the HN of ten years ago, I might have expressed similar sentiments.
Between the comments in this thread though, and the complete lack of moderator attention, I can only come to the conclusion that xenophobia is perfectly fine on HN - provided you couch it in the appropriate rhetoric and don't use any mean words.
I know people who have been victims from these far-right cultures being brought into my community. I have no tolerance for it. If you wish to call that xenophobia then so be it.
I'd highly recommend not visiting places like Afghanistan, not because the weather isn't nice, but because the people are awful. That's not just me saying that either, most Western governments will tell you not to visit either. Perhaps that's xenophobia, but either way I think it's correct.
According to PEW research 99% of Afghan's support Sharia Law. If you wish to present an argument for why this kind of cultural diversity is good for my community, then be my guest.
I live in the United States. Ardent proponents of the Christian equivalent to sharia law are quite literally already my neighbors, and are currently in political power to boot. Literal fucking Nazis are my neighbors too, and a lot of frighteningly Nazi-adjacent people are likewise currently in power.
If you’re asking if I’m afraid of proponents of sharia law being in this country when we currently have masked, armed, and anonymous brownshirts whisking people off the streets to be shipped off to concentration camps—sometimes in foreign countries—without any opportunity to appear before a court, and an entire side of the political spectrum cheering this on, then no, no I am not.
That said, if this country can’t manage to survive the mere existence of groups of people in this country with whom I vehemently disagree with on virtually every ethical, moral, and political front, we’re already doomed.
thanks for clarifying your personal situation, given the stated context my initial question was not a valid method of assaying your perspective, please let me try again. what would your reaction be if you lived in a peaceful place, and a violent neighbour moved in? to be clear i am not asking any question other than this one.
I suspect you are implicitly trying to make the point that a hypothetical afghani neighbor is potentially a violent person. Regardless, my answer is the same.
Violent people live everywhere. Many of them are native-born Americans, and are already my neighbors. Many native-born Americans even actively support clearly anti-American and fascist political policies.
If my neighbors commit violent acts, I expect and assume the law will deal with them. Until they have demonstrated otherwise, why should I presume that any possible neighbor is violent?
well i suspected you thought i was a xenophobe without me saying anything about it, so thanks for confirming my own suspicion! anyway it seems to me you think im playing some game to try and elicit a particular response, thats the only way i can rationalize your answering of many unasked questions. in future i recommend to avoid that as it provides more fodder for bad actors to turn upon you. personally my intention was to understand the type of person who makes accusations of xenophobia. thank you for your responses, now it is clear to me that cognitive dissonance is involved in this particular case (based on comment 2 'the law is violent' and comment 3 'the law should be trusted').
Gromer gangs were white just as often, but instead of addressing the problem evaluating it correctly and responding right wing extremists instead focused only the immigrants didnt give a single shit about the actual abuse and made it all about leaving the EU and in general promoting ethnic violence against all braun people. Literal riots.
And of course never talk about immigrant woman that get abused who gives a fuck about them.
"
Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination
...
Ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data were much higher in police data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Their data shows there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity in these police force areas."
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.
They could have fled for any number of reasons- that doesn't mean that they aren't exactly in sync with the culture they are coming from. And even if they aren't in sync with the culture they are fleeing- they very likely still hold radically different values than you.
I met a man from Afghanistan sometime last year, however, once we got past the introductions and realized we shared things in common- he opened up to me and began trying to make me realize the value of Sharia law in America, and how much better it would be here if it became the cultural norm.
That makes perfect sense. But clearly Switzerland, unlike America, barely has any proponents of Sharia-like Biblical law. This is a large cause of misunderstanding in threads like these by fellow Americans. Because the US has very similar people at home, it just looks like "potentially a little more of something there's already lots of, they'll never outgrow that existing group anyway, what are they even complaining about".
My point is not actually "potentially a little more of something there's already lots of," but rather that the shittiness of people is not well correlated with what country they're from. I'm sure Switzerland has plenty of shitty locals, even if it might manifest in a different way.
The reason I'm not afraid of Afghan refugees moving in isn't because I think their love of Sharia law will be drowned out by my other neighbors' love of Christian Sharia, but because I don't think it's particularly likely they're going to love government-imposed Sharia law in the first place.
Sharia law is quite big! So big that I'm fairly certain that there is at least one aspect of Sharia law that you would agree with, even if (as it sounds like) you are overall against. If you accept that, you can have a honest discussion of the merits and detriments.
I find it's best to break these things down and discuss them individually (or discuss how multiple rules combine to produce a particular effect, as the case may be): then it's easier to tease out which arguments are honest ("I genuinely think X is better, for Y reasons") and dishonest ("I think X is better for Y reasons, but I believe you'll find Z more persuasive, so I'll say Z"). There's also a phenomenon where people attribute beneficial (or detrimental) properties to one, visible part of a system, when they're really due to another: consider the arguments about capitalism versus communism, which are rarely actually about economic policy, and are more often about other (on the face of it, unrelated) policies of the state: your interlocutor might realise this after detailed discussion, if that is what is going on, when otherwise they might have gone their whole life without noticing the misattribution (as many people do).
Cultural exchange can be mutually-beneficial, even if you both go away thinking "wow, that other guy was an idiot".
Yes, I'm well aware of how big it is, and of course there are aspects of it that I do agree with. What I came away from the conversation with was "wow, this other guy has zero understanding of how important individual liberties are in the United States"
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.
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?
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).
> Wasn't Switzerland already a rich country by then?
In 1940, Switzerland’s GDP/capita was 2.9x [EDIT: the world average]; it peaked at 4.4x in 2000 and is now 3.8x [1]. (It increases linearly, long term, from the mid 20s until 2000.)
Relative to Western Europe, Switzerland was 1.6x in 1950, about the same as today.
In 1910 the foreign-born population was 14.7% and the drop around WWII was caused by other factors.
Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants. Arguably the wealth of today is the product of managing to avoid the worst of WWII and profiting from Switzerland's "neutrality" but that's an entire conversation by itself.
Well they were neutral, its just most folks, even otherwise smart ones, don't like true neutral behavior if it doesn't actually favor their side, hence such 'smart' snarky remarks I can see all the time, by people feeling they know history. Swiss accepted everybody, hundreds of thousands of refugees too, some parts even when it became obvious they will all face starvation since they were completely encircled by axis. Private banks accepted everybody's money, just like every global bank did before and after the war.
They secretly helped allies - check Campione d'Italia story for example. Thats very far from neutral behavior. And so on. But most people don't want to know facts, they want simple black & white stories.
It continues till today - they are officially neutral but look at their moves ie against russia during Ukraine war. Completely aligned with west (well apart from US which has top brass collaborating with their sworn mortal enemy). Look how their army looks like - 100% compatibility with NATO, 0% with russia or anybody else. They picked their side, they just don't boast around it, actions speak more than 1000 words.
It saw a fair bit of immigration before the war to get there. The war itself obviously helped enrich them by not being in it and also practically zeroed immigration. Immigration continued after the war.
There’s other factors, obviously, like early industrialisation.
>in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth
Such a claim would need terms to be defined, even before justification. Switzerland's mercenary attitude to immigration is well known, yes. I would argue that endogenous factors (history and culture) are far more important in explaining Switzerland's success. Neither natural resources nor immigration are determinative of a country's wealth. See: Japan, which historically has had neither.
Historically, Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states: immigration is strictly contingent on labor needs, and citizenship is almost completely out of reach.
If the referendum passes and the population crosses the threshold, Switzerland may need to remove itself from e.g. the Schengen area. All the remediations mentioned in the referendum are about suspending immigration.
All the butthurt people are going to come in here with screeds trying to upend a basic economic tenet that a growing population translates to economic growth if you can employ that growing population gainfully
The first time I was in Switzerland was 1985, and even then, I would not call it "homogenous." The people at the time spoke French, German, Italian, and Romanisch. Switzerland is an excellent example of the "harmonious" rather than "homogenous": it manages to integrate people from four linguistic groups into a well-ordered society.
China has 8-10 major dialects that are not mutually intelligible, but many would say that China is pretty homogenous. 90% of the population is classified as "Han Chinese," even though the subgroups are quite visibly different from each other.
While it's terribly fascinating for linguists it's generally understood that the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture.
> the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture
Switzerland speaks languages from the Italic and Germanic clades of PIE [1]. That makes them about as dissimilar as Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages are from each of them.
Helvetia is a confederacy specifically because Switzerland has never been particularly homogenous. Homogeneity explains, in part, Nordic and Japanese success, though less and less the former in the modern era. It does not explain Switzerland’s.
Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires. The Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment. Arguably it was the Swiss greater class homogeneity that explains their success.
> Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires
Swiss territory has been part of, variously, the Roman Empire, various Germanic kingdoms, the Carolingian Empire, the HRE and Napoleonic France. Swiss independence was really only enshrined at the Congress of Vienna, I believe at the courtesy of Metternich. Of Austria-Hungary.
> Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment
Source?
> the Swiss greater class homogeneity
Yes, Switzerland was universally poor and started becoming wealthy with less inequality than other nations in the 1920s. (Note that in the 1910s like 15% of Switzerland was foreign born.)
The homogeneity pitch just doesn’t work for Switzerland.
Thank you. If the source is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, the Founders were operating on bad information. Napoleon wasn't the "first successful foreign invasion" of the Confederation, unless we're being cute about how the HRE was organised.
"In early modern Switzerland, the Swiss Confederacy was a pact between independent states within the Holy Roman Empire. The populations of the states of Central Switzerland considered themselves ethnically or even racially separate: Martin Zeiller in Topographia Germaniae (1642) reports a racial division even within the canton of Unterwalden, the population of Obwalden being identified as 'Romans', and that of Nidwalden as 'Cimbri' (viz. Germanic), while the people of Schwyz were identified as of Swedish ancestry, and the people of Uri were identified as 'Huns or Goths.'
Modern Switzerland is atypical in its successful political integration of a multiethnic and multilingual populace" [1].
I know plenty of Swiss-for-generations Swiss whose complexions would not have passed as white a hundred years ago.
Switzerland does not have a homogenous population, and to a reasonable person who has travelled in Switzerland I think this is an insane thing to be defending. A significant proportion of the population (certainly for Europe) do not even share a common first language. Significant proportions sit on different sides of the reformation which is again a big deal for Europe. etc
Homogeneous isn't likely the correct word. Shared cultural norms and "harmonious" is often more accurately what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous".
> what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous"
The Nordic countries were historically ethnically homogenous. Switzerland has been a multi-ethnic place since like the Helvetii were being picked on by Caesar.
Then they should say white. I'm prepared to give a lot of leeway when conversing with non-native speakers but as somebody who has grown up within a culture that understands that the concept of cultural homogeneity cannot refer to native speakers of non-mutually-comprehensible languages or historically antithetical religious positions, if they choose to use the word in novel ways that's their problem not mine!
I don't know what the exact word is - I wouldn't quite say "culture", as there are clearly different cultural backgrounds at work, but just as with Canada mixing French and Anglo traditions, there is a generally homogenous Western European metaculture at work, premised on the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, the rule of law (and equality of opportunity under the law), freedom of religion, the importance of education and hard work, private property, and personal responsibility.
Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change
> it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world
For most people in developing countries, Swiss banks are places where politicians and rich people stash ill-gotten wealth (corruption, crime, etc), because they know the banks will never let the legal system get back the money.
Because it favors social cohesion and social trust, which are strongly correlated with economic success. Americans are reflexively thinking of race, but that's entirely incidental and basically irrelevant.
But Switzerland emphatically does not have a homogenous population. It has an exceptionally diverse population, linguistically, religiously and culturally. And yet as you say it has an exceptional record when it comes to cohesion and social trust. Living the dream!
The social cohesion of Switzerland is mainly within the linguistic communities. Many Francophone Swiss hardly speak a word of German (just as their Belgian counterparts don't speak Dutch). And a large proportion of Switzerland's "diverse" immigrants are in fact from just across the country's borders (particularly Germans). "Diversity" is not what explains Switzerland's wealth.
Absolutely agree, and of course I would never argue that "diversity" explains Switzerland's wealth. It occupied a pretty unique and interesting place during the Reformation, and maybe there is something there. But the idea that either diversity or homogeneity can explain economic performance is obviously not bourne out by any serious examples. I was thinking about Belgium (and also thinking about Harry Lime) whilst typing away--it seems a bit of a counterexample to Switzerland where the same linguistic and cultural diversity within a country can lead to very different outcomes and senses. Nobody would ever write "Il n'y a pas de Suisse" as Destrée wrote "Il n'y a pas de Belges"--long history vs short history and as always the Reformation upheavals explain it perhaps
1) While Switzerland combines several ethnicities and cultures, the fusion dates back almost a millennium. The Old Swiss Confederacy arose in the 14th century, before Italian, French, and Romansh were even recognized as separate languages.
2) The Swiss federal structure goes to great lengths to give autonomy to the distinct groups.
So it’s not accurate to say that Switzerland is “homogenous” in the same way Denmark is homogenous. But it’s not like Switzerland’s Italian-speaking population grew from nearly 0% to the current 8% over a period of a few decades. There is a common umbrella identity encompassing these groups that dates back a long time.
Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This is an extraordinary level of diversity for a European country, and as other commentators have noted it isn't like there's a lingua franca: a large proportion of Swiss do not speak the languages used by other groups fluently--for example, 85-87% of Swiss don't speak French at all!
This should be quite straightforward evidence regardless of your cultural assumptions, but many people may not be aware of the impact and cultural importance of the Reformation in Europe, which in general meant that nations ended up with a state religion that was either Catholic or Protestant. Switzerland was pretty exceptional and in the 16th Century (which is the important period here) the population was split pretty much 50/50. This religious diversity is pretty important to its history as well as to wider European history.
I wouldn't call that extraordinary diversity - these are all Western European. I note you've added a new caveat "for a European country" as a get out of jail free card, but this "diversity" is extremely long-standing and, still, exists within Western Europe, the cradle of a hilariously disproportionate percentage of all of the social, civic, scientific, and technological advances the world has ever seen.
Interesting statistics and I for one will back up your analysis. But the Alpine woolly mammoth in the room is that, in 21st-century Europe, "cultural and religious diversity" does not, for most people, imply a heterogeneity of Germanophones and Francophones, or Protestants and Catholics. It means something else.
Sorry if cultural history and facts are a bit dull. I don't really want to argue about *something else* though; let's leave that to the *something else*ists.
It's not that the facts you presented are dull. It's that given the massive extra-European population influxes since WWII, the "cultural diversity" of any given West-European country (including Switzerland) is now far broader than the linguistic and religious distinctions you keep mentioning. You surely know this.
It's not even true, 40% of the population has an immigrant background. And as for low crime, yes, blue collar crime. Please don't ask about white collar crime, we don't talk about that here...
Why do people say China is “homogenous” when people speaking Cantonese can’t understand people speaking Mandarin? It’s because those groups of people have been part of a common polity off and on since the Qin dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.
Similarly, Switzerland has been a thing, in various forms, since French and Italian were considered different dialects of vulgar Latin. The groups that speak the four different languages nonetheless share 800+ years of common political and social history.
I’m pretty sure people say China is homogeneous because 90+% of the population is a single ethnicity, and approximately 100% is “Asian” for some meaning of that word.
What you’re describing is national unity or identity or something like that, not homogeneity.
Kind of a funny example, since Japan got crushed by the poster boy country for diversity, and this nonsense about homogeneity played no small part in their arrogance in thinking they could win.
I wonder why this got downvoted. Are we not supposed to mention the war? Does it make people uncomfortable to be reminded of how their rhetoric mirrors that of fascists?
That doesn't make much sense. Do you think foreign money is directly paid to people who would otherwise be welfare recipients? Is there anything foreign money can't do, would you say?
When foreign money flows into the economy, it generates jobs, and because there is so much of it, these jobs can be well paid. And when you got a population that has a low unemployment rate and high wages, you consequently need to spend less money on social welfare.
> 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.
Probably the same as Britain, which didn't suffer any economic damage from leaving the EU. Look at current trade ratios, GDP and other core stats vs neighbouring France. No difference.
The EU single market is apparently not as important as it's cracked up to be. The EU has sanctioned Switzerland before and it didn't matter. And the Swiss economy is very strong.
One of those is an island, the other is a landlocked country that would quite literally starve to death if the EU decided to stop facilitating its access to international markets.
Switzerland exists purely at the mercy of the EU, it lacks the military capabilities to fight its way out to the sea and force an alternate reality.
The day Switzerland is able to conquer the north of Italy is the day they get to meaningfully negotiate with the EU.
Uh, that escalated fast! I really hope you're not European with threats like that.
EU tried all this bullshit with the UK too. Threatening to cut off electricity supplies and so on. The mask really fell, but in the end they didn't do it, they didn't even respect their own supposed red lines like cooperation on academic research. They meekly invited the UK back into their academic collaboration a few years later despite claiming at the time that it was a "privilege" tied to everything else by the laws of physics. So the idea an organization that weak is going to try and genocide an entire country over FoM is ridiculous.
At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.
What threats? I was simply pointing out the undeniable fact that Switzerland is utterly dependent on the benevolence of the EU.
The EU has unlimited ability to punish Switzerland with extreme precision and at a low cost, Switzerland has no meaningful ability to go tit-for-tat even at a very low level.
> At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.
Yes, you’ve succeeded at explaining why it makes a difference that Britain is an island. At the very extreme end, the EU would actually have to go to war with them instead of just issuing a NOTAM and sending a few cop cars to monitor border crossings.
Also, FWIW, at no point during Brexit has Switzerland been a better partner for the EU than the UK has.
The EU would have to rely on German, Austrian, French and Italian cops/soldiers to actually enforce any sort of physical blockade against Switzerland.
I am not certain if all the respective governments would simply obey such an instruction if they didn't have any beef with the Swiss themselves.
Which now means that the EU has to block not just Switzerland, but (say) Austria, which means compliance from four other countries (CZ, SK, SI, HU), which is even less probable etc. etc.
Ultimately, the EU is really good at processing papers, but doesn't have the power necessary to initiate physical punishments of this sort unless the relevant member states agree.
> The EU would have to rely on German, Austrian, French and Italian cops/soldiers to actually enforce any sort of physical blockade against Switzerland
Without these treaties, there absolutely will be permanently manned border checkpoints.
None of these countries love Switzerland enough to be willing to end the EU over it.
Manned border checkpoints are inevitable in that case, it would be an external border.
But of course a blockade isn’t a realistic option, the Swiss would fold immediately if they thought things were headed in that direction. You could never get to that point.
The point is that the EU can crush Switzerland with the stroke of a pen, they couldn’t crush the UK without going to war. Switzerland could never even consider a kinetic response, so its room to manoeuvre agains its vastly bigger neighbour is limited to begging for mercy.
It’s also important to remember that nobody in the EU likes the Swiss, they are notorious troublemakers who are tolerated at best and despised at worst.
I guess? I mean, I'm sure there's a non-zero number of companies that relocated HQ on paper as that's easy to do, but it doesn't show up in GDP or trade stats. There aren't any problems with imports/exports either. Actually trade ratios between EU/rest-of-world have continued on their long term trend, you wouldn't know anything had happened if you look at the zoomed out view.
There was transient disruption around the time of exit, which might be where those stories you remember came from? Maybe someone found a photo of an empty shelf and blamed leaving the EU instead of COVID for some reason. But forms and stamps aren't very effective weapons and people quickly adapted to the new systems.
Brexit is one of those topics that resulted in a firehose of propaganda by the pro-EU global establishment because what it represented terrified them. It undermined deeply held visions of the future in which all of humanity was destined to be united under one world government. So you can easily find a long string of false or nonsensical claims about it if you look. For example, there are a bunch of academic papers claiming economic impact from Brexit. But if you look carefully, they show a loss of growth vs fictional countries that don't exist, or they assume the EU would have experienced sudden dramatic growth out of nowhere and stuff like that. It's all just sophisticated forms of lying.
only there are several studies like this:
"These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%"
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34459
If you read them carefully, you'll find no such studies are using a valid methodology. It's not a hard question to answer either, just compare like with like.
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.
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.
Im sure the ecology is much improved by letting people stay where they are and be poorer. In fact we should start to remove people from all rich places so the can live in sustainable poverty.
Leaving those climate refugees where they are wouldn't mean they were poor, it would mean they were dead. There are all kinds of irrational extreme positions that would maximize environmental protection. Certainly the best thing we could do for the environment would be to kill ourselves off, but very few people would argue for that. Instead it's better to go for something more balanced and limiting the number of people coming in your country to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable.
> to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable
Is the land in refugees home countries better able to sustainably support the populations on average, whether moving because of climate, lack of a way to support the people, etc?
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.
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.
You think people who support border controls are simply prejudiced based on skin color? Like, their problem with Little Mogadishu or Little Bangladesh is that people in those places don't need sunscreen? Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?
That's literally not what he said. He's saying the majority of people supporting border controls are not racist, but the vocal minority are the ones who "boast about arrests" / "make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs"
This seems like a sarcastic/unserious comment, but based on my interactions with people who are supposedly anti-immigration - yes, it's entirely based on skin colour.
Someone from India, China etc whose family immigrated in the 1800s to work in gold mines/railroads etc and probably has deeper roots in the country than the person criticising them = immigrant, bad, shouldn't be here. Somehow simultaneously taking all the jobs and living off the state and not contributing.
Someone from Europe/America/Canada with white skin who either came here as a child or was born here to immigrant parents = not a problem at all, they "don't count" for some reason.
I agree the people who lump children of Chinese railroad workers in with illegal immigrants are racist. But it’s the pro-immigration folks that do that pervasively, under the label “people of color.” Meanwhile, you have to look at pretty fringy parts of the right to find that.
>Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?
You do realize who a great deal of the "southern Italians" in certain parts of New York and New Orleans actually are, right? Or is your point solely about religion?
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.
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.
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.
"Full countries" is a lie. You hear it often here in the Netherlands.
What they don't want you to hear is that 54% of the land in the country is owned by agricultural companies[0], benefitting a tiny fraction of the population.
If they're exporting crops that's about feeding somebody. People who would have to try to get their food elsewhere and have to worry about the standards/quality of those new sources. It's even perfectly fine for people to grow and sell flowers. There may be ways to make it more efficient, and maybe the government should be encouraging that so they can buy up some of the saved land, but I'd bet there are ecological consequences to paving over flower farms too.
Economically it would make more sense to import food from France, Spain etc. it would reduce the cost of living for the overwhelming majority of people with limited negative economic impact.
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?
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.
Swiss here, living in a small town quite close to farmers. I would expect if it was the case here, I would have heard about it, given my proximity. I'm aware of this "arrangement" in the US, never heard of it happening anywhere in the EU - I haven't done a comprehensive study though, maybe someone with more knowledge can say more.
Considering EU farmers tend to riot with their tractors in the capitals of countries which try to control them I doubt it.
AFAIK Norwegian farmers fear of things like this was what kept Norway out of EU even with two referendums (or at least one of the distinguishing factors).
And literally all the limits on those things are artificial. Its the same right wing idiots that want this referendum that prevent smart transportation infrastructure in cities, that delay important transportation investments, that prevent bike infrastructure, that had the brilliant plan of buying cheap energy from France and Germany and so on.
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.
Which is so weird! France has large amounts of good farmland, some of the most modern (and unified, unlike Germany) government in Europe for a long time etc... no obvious reason to have just half the population density of Germany.
France used to be “the China of Europe” (which is why we kept being at war with the whole continent at once). Had France followed their neighbors' demographic, it would be home to more than 200 million people today.
The demographic collapse of France in the 19th century, while Germany kept growing, alone explains the French defeat in 1870 (and then the two world wars).
> no obvious reason to have just half the population density of Germany.
France was historically always focused on Paris, because that was where the Emperor was. If you were not a farmer, there was little reason to live anywhere but Paris or other large cities.
In contrast, Germany historically consisted of thousands of small fiefdoms that each held some sort of local importance and each held authority of some sort. The Kaiser was pretty far away and only mattered in practice when the Kaiserreich was involved in some sort of conflict.
> France was historically always focused on Paris, because that was where the Emperor was.
So much misconception in such a short sentence…
First of all France only had an “Emperor” for a few decades (10 years for Napoléon 1er, 17 for Napoléon III).
Then, Paris wasn't even the King's main residence for a good part of French Monarchy (the Loire valley (hence the list of famous castles here) and Versailles both aren't Paris).
Centralization around Paris built up progressively, but it's really the French revolution (which came with the suppression of the old regional Parliaments) which made modern France the way it is. And the US is the only place where you can claim that 200 years of history counts as “always”.
As I said in a comment sibling to yours, this has nothing to do with political organization, it's a consequence of demography: French people just stopped having babies one century before other European countries (and two centuries before the rest of the world).
That's a tough question, really. AFAIK the causes of the demographic transition in general are heavily debated among specialists and if we cannot exactly pinpoint what's driving the decline of birthrates happening right now, it's going to be even harder to pinpoint the causes for something that happened more than two centuries ago.
More importantly, education isn't everything. Half the economy runs on work that doesn't need higher education and that locals largely won't do: cleaning, care, hospitality, construction. The Spanish and Portuguese speaking workers doing those jobs are propping up a standard of living for everyone.
Geneva has the highest minimum wage in the world precisely to try and avoid the "working poor".
Also the "consuner spending is increasingly debt" is very US centric view. The situation in Europe is less extreme and totally absent in many countries.
> Geneva has the highest minimum wage in the world
I was surprised when I read this, but I Googled, and it looks true. Minimum wage in Geneva is 24.59 CHF per hour. Wow! With 1.5 working parents, you can definitely live on 1.5 * 2000 * 24.59 CHF = 73,770 CHF (92.5K USD) per year in Geneva. (To be clear: I am not writing this sarcastically. I think 74K CHF per year will definitely not be "working poor" in Geneva.)
This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.
> This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.
There can be situations where the market for a particular type of labor does not exist. Populations aren't infinite, and if there are enough good paying, desirable jobs for full employment, then there may be no one available to do a job economically.
For example let's imagine a hypothetical town where only residents of the town are allowed to work in the town, though they can provide services to those outside of the town. Let's say 100 people live in this town, and they are all doctors. There is a hospital in this town that needs 100 doctors to run. There are other jobs to be done in this town - someone needs to pick up trash, someone needs to mow lawns, someone needs to sell food, etc. Now if you pay someone a doctor's salary to pick up trash, they could potentially leave the hospital to do that job instead; but then the hospital is understaffed. Something isn't going to get done; indeed in this scenario where there are a lot more jobs to be done than people to do them, a lot of stuff isn't going to get done, no matter how good the pay is, and the jobs that are done will be insanely expensive.
In this case you would simply allow people from outside the town to work in the town, or get more people to move into town. If you scale up this scenario to cities, provinces, and ultimately nations, it's clear that at some point you must choose between structural unemployment (ie number of workers greater than number of jobs to be done), bullshit jobs (people who would be structurally unemployed are hired to do unnecessary tasks), a managed economy (employment opportunities restricted to ensure necessary work gets done at any population level), or immigration/emigration of labor (labor supply varies to meet demand) regardless of wages. In practice you'll likely get a combination of the above.
The market for anything isn't infinite. When S/D shifts the market price changes to reflect that. The price reflects the relative supply and demand. You seem to be operating under the delusion that prices must be fixed at where you desire them and that no market existing there is a failure. In fact the availability of goods and services in a market is a function of your willingness to pay a market price for them. If you don't objectively value such goods and services they won't exist for you. It's not the responsibility of everyone else to subsidize your lifestyle because you're not willing to pay market prices.
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.
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.
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…
But this paper is not about extra EU migrants but all migrants.
And even then if we control for age they say they are contributing less than natives.
I think it would be very odd that less educated people on average contribute more than natives, especially if they are at risk of being discriminated when looking for a job.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
Yes, by doing the poorly paid hard labor jobs the locals didn't want because they can chill on welfare, you know, the whole "muh labor shortage" bit.
It's not like Germans, Dutch etc or the "new europeans" they imported, were rushing to wiping the asses of their elders in their own care homes or picking fruit all day in the sun on their own farms.
What was left to send home after that wasn't "significant" by any stretch, after paying taxes, rent and CoL to further boost the local economy and the wealth of the local asset owners.
Banks, energy, telecom, defence, oil & gas companies had to be sold to French, German and Austrian companies for below market value, so those countries would lift their veto.
Same with joining NATO TBF. We had to buy some overpriced shoddy used F-16 from the US with a lot of miles on the clock, for the same price of brand new Swedish Gripens just so the US would accepts us in NATO.
So if history does indeed repeat itself, Ukraine will also have to sell off vital industry and resources to major EU corporations to get in. Like all those new shiny drone startups they have. Safe to assume Rheinmetall or Dassault will want those under German/French flag before Ukraine is allowed in the EU. Same with oil, gas and rare earths.
Basically EU and NATO are two tier institutions. First there's the whales, the big players who are founders and make the rules, or get invited to join, and then there's the scrappy low level players, who need to beg and offer monetary dowry to be allowed to join. In theory everyone is equal, except some dogs are more equal than others.
Because everything in the world is transactional pay-to-win. There's no charity and no handouts. If you're being invited somewhere or given something, it's because something from you is expected in exchange.
@throwaway85825 Yes, except that was non negotiable form the US side. "You buy our overpriced junk or take a hike, I don't care if your poor country can't afford it." Leaked cables between our leaders at the time.
Also food for thought to MAGA who keeps thinking that US acted like a charity for NATO.
Romanian banks were looted by Romanians in the 90s: see Paunesu brothers and BRD. Also see Dacia Felix bank, Bancorex.
Romanian telecom: post communist crash Romanian telecommunications were a disaster. For example two different phone numbers shared the same line (a.k.a. Cuplajul). In late 90s some western telecom companies started investing in Romanian cellular networks- they built all the tower and network infrastructure. I do not understand what you mean when you say the west stole telecoms from Romanian - the west actually built it.
Energy, oil and gas- the heydays of Romanian oil producing days were during the WWII when Romania supplied a lot of the oil used by the Germans. After that Russians took whatever was left over because of war reparations. Since I can remember Romania did not produce oil - it was dependent on Russian imports during communism for example. So there was no oil and gas for the West to steal either.
Re: NATO - in the 90s and early 2000sn Romania wanted to join NATO because that particular generation remembered the Russian all too well. The priceRomania paid was enforcing the embargo on the Serbs during the Kosovo and Bosnian wars.
Re: F16 - romanians are flying some hand me downs from Holland which were purchased at the dizzying price of 1 euro.
I am sorry, but you sound like a Romanian nationalist, one who unfortunately is convincing enough do that the current generation does not know how much better their lives are because of EU and NATO. But who knows, maybe they will get a chance to find out…
>Romanian banks were looted by Romanians in the 90s: see Paunesu brothers and BRD. Also see Dacia Felix bank, Bancorex.
What does this unrelated thing, have to do with what I was talking about, like banks like BRD being sold to French Groupe Societe Generale and BCR by Austria's Erste Group. Bringing up random whataobutism isn't arguing in good faith.
>Re: F16 - romanians are flying some hand me downs from Holland which were purchased at the dizzying price of 1 euro.
Just do some googling mate before talking:
The U.S. Response: "Not Our Problem"
The leaked WikiLeaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest revealed that U.S. diplomats and visiting Pentagon representatives had absolutely zero sympathy for Romania’s economic misery.
The cables showed an incredibly aggressive, transactional approach by the U.S.:
The Ultimatum: U.S. representatives told Bucharest that if Romania chose a cheaper European alternative (like the Swedish Gripen or the Eurofighter), or if they tried to delay the purchase due to their financial crisis, it would severely damage Romania's political standing in Washington.
The "Don't Care" Attitude:
American officials explicitly communicated that Romania's internal economic issues were their own problem. The U.S. objective was to secure the deal for Lockheed Martin, lock Romania into the U.S. defense supply chain, and ensure Romania paid its "dues."
The "Political Insurance" Reality
The cables exposed a deeply cynical dynamic that shocked the Romanian public when WikiLeaks published them:
The U.S. viewed Romania as an easy target: American diplomats noted internally that Romanian politicians were so desperate for a security guarantee against Russia that they could be pressured into buying things they couldn't afford.
The Romanian capitulation: Desperate to keep Washington happy, the Romanian Supreme Council of National Defense (CSAT) bypassed normal public tendering laws in 2010. They officially approved the acquisition of second-hand American F-16s, admitting privately that it was a political decision to appease the U.S., despite the fact that the country was in the middle of severe, painful economic austerity.
> Since I can remember Romania did not produce oil
HEllo?! Austria's OMV buying Romania's oil reserves for the rock bottom price of 600 million Euros in order to lift EU veta? Then pulling the same shit again for lifting the Schengen veto? It's an extortion racket.
>you sound like a Romanian nationalist
Pointing out the crimes of our partners and allies is now "nationalism"?
If you take everything, direct EU money plus other money from governments, foreign investments by companies, remittances from Romanians working in the EU, other aid money that flows in large amounts, not to mention market access and so on.
Anybody who rationally without nationalistic blinders evaluates that will come to the same conclusion. The idea that a Romania independent of Europe, with its shitty Post-Communist economy and the shitty companies it had could have done massively better is frankly delusional.
The idea that all foreign investment and foreign companies operating in other country is negative and explorative is simply wrong. That is the case both for individual works, company productivity and the countries economy. This has been shown to be true in tons of management studies. Insofar as Romania had issues, it its own internal corruption and other issues that they handled less well then Poland or the Baltic's.
> Why doesn't US, China or Russia want that type of help?
Russia did want the economic integration, foreign investments and so on, they just wanted it less then being an imperial power lead by a dictatorship.
If you think that is a better path for Romania then integration with the EU you are utterly braindead.
As for the US and China. The US already has its own set of alliances and cooperative agreements. It also is geographically very different and its so rich that if it was part of the EU it would be a net contributor.
China is again a dictatorship with like 1 billion people that believe they can build a system like US or the EU has themselves. And they of course did take at least large part of that package when they opened to the US and integrated the economy far more. They had foreign investment, much loser capital markets and so on.
To compare Romania Post-Communist situation with any of these, is laughable. And non of those paths are even remotely even an options.
Romania could be more like Poland, the Baltics or more like Ukraine or maybe like the Post-Soviet 'stans' just with less gas.
And of those options its perfectly clear what the right plan is.
If you have some brilliant alternative plan for Romania please share because apparently you are smarter then literally every other post Communist leader in any of those small countries. Or better yet, try to get elected on that platform. Just be aware that the massive amount of direct money and other benefits will go away, and then go watch how many people will still vote for you.
Realistic best case for that plan is that you become Belarus.
Please don't go on lengthy off-topic rants just to put words in my mouth to disprove things I never claimed.
I never claimed Romania would have been better under Russian than the EU. I just asked you to show me that your claimed "help" they gave to Romania came from a selfless position without any financial strings attached in return for said help, because it wasn't.
Corporations in US, Germany, Austria, France, profited immensely, and still do from their operation in Romania they bought with cents on the Euro/Dollar. In fact, they often make higher profits fleecing consumers and customers in Romania than those in their home countries. EU and NATO accepted Romania because they could profit from them, that's it. I know, I worked for German and Dutch MNCs and saw the numbers coming from their offices across the world. Their offices in Asia and Eastern Europe were bringing in significantly more revenue per worker than those in NL simply because the consumers and workers in those countries get much worse deals than those in NL and Germany. It's basically neocolonialism with extra steps.
That was my point, that EU and NATO orgs are purely business transactional and nothing you get from them ever comes for free, and nothing in your follow-up comments disproved this, you just went on offtopic rants throwing accusations in my direction.
Later edit: also, on the NATO side, many Romanian troops died protecting US interest in Afghanistan, because I guess that's where America's borders are somehow, when they invoked Article 5 after Osama hit NY with two planes. Well in that case, a Russian drone hit us last week. Can US troops now please go die for us by invading Russia? Thanks. No? Well then that's the double standards I was referring to, that we only exist to serve their interests, buy their shit, die for them and that's it. Where is that mythical benevolent "help" you talked about?
I'm surprised to read this on HN. Normally I stay away from this crap, but today I'll bite: the Romanian government did very well to sell Romtelecom, BCR and others. And I hope they'll sell more, like Tarom and other money sinks.
Purchase price in jet deals is never straightforward because every deal is different. Variables could include: training (school + flight hours), weapons, contracted maintenance, spares, airfield infrastructure upgrades, engine overhaul etc. The only real way to compare is cost per flight hour.
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 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 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.
This is pointlessly argumentative, but I'm just going to continue having a conversation using the terminology brought up by the OP and what I interpreted them to mean. It seems to be working just fine for us.
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.
>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.
> 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.
I don't think so. Even in the case where the Swiss or UK are breaking agreements or demanding changes to those agreements, it isn't something that's uncommon as countries and nations and companies and all sorts of entities break or renegotiate agreements or contracts all the time. In the case of Switzerland let's say they no longer feel the EU's freedom of movement policy works with the existing agreement because the EU has failed to protect its borders. You're painting a breaking of the agreement in the sense that nothing has changed in the agreement, but that may not be true and so breaking the agreement by the Swiss would have actually been because of a break in the agreement by the EU.
These interactions taking place and then now all of a sudden the Swiss are to be the recipient of some draconian action "we'll show them" is not really that strange given it's relatively straightforward to see how these two entities can reasonable come to a disagreement which may or may not resolve itself.
Sure it did. Spain just gave 500,000 "undocumented migrants" a residence permit. They can now freely move throughout the continent. That sort of act was never envisioned when the Swiss agreed to FoM with the EU, which for most of its history was used only by a tiny minority of people all of whom had a similar culture.
The EU/Swiss agreements don't have to be negotiated as a whole. The whole guillotine clause schtick exists only to try and transfer as much power to the EU Commission as possible. Nothing stops European countries being reasonable and looking for ways to work with each other on whatever areas they can agree; it's a deliberate ideological choice to refuse.
What EU-Switzerland agreement was broken by the EU by this action of Spain? And please do be exact which one and how. Otherwise stop telling lies.
> Nothing stops European countries being reasonable and looking for ways to work with each other on whatever areas they can agree; it's a deliberate ideological choice to refuse.
Yes, and it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members') interests against the interests of other countries. Which is why neither the UK nor Switzerland nor other non-members can pick and choose. Makes them understandably unhappy of course, but so what? They are protecting their interests and we are protecting ours.
The treaties don't explicitly say "you may not grant residence en masse to city sized populations of illegal immigrants", because not doing that was considered so obvious it didn't need to be said at the time they were written. Such treaties don't cover a lot of possible but unlikely eventualities, which is why it's bad and wrong to make treat renegotiation artificially difficult.
> it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members') interests
It doesn't protect their interests. That's the whole point. If it were about protecting the interests of European countries they could negotiate their each interest individually and independently with each other. The EU construct is deliberately designed to ignore the interests of any specific member state in favour of the interest of a new entity, the European Union, which has an entirely separate set of interests that don't correspond to the interests of the people living in it.
> Which is why neither the UK nor Switzerland nor other non-members can pick and choose
They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully. Hence why the EU/Swiss relations aren't governed by membership and why the EU has agreed to work with the UK on various interests without requiring membership (despite denying they'd ever do this at the time).
So no treaty was broken? Why did you write "Sure it did" when you know it wasn't?
> They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully.
They didn't. What happened was that some parts of some treaty were renegotiated or amended and agreed by both parties. Which is quite common in any such relationship.
You can use that definition of breaking a treaty if you like. But it's not a good idea. It sends the world a message that negotiating with European countries is dangerous because to avoid getting screwed you'd have to write down all known common sense and social conventions in the text of the treaty, and probably include the contents of a specific dictionary as well, and even then they might just do something crazy you never predicted whilst claiming the agreement was being respected.
Note: this argument was actually used by the pro-Leave faction in the UK. They explicitly argued that any deal Cameron reached with the other EU member states would be worthless because European countries can't be trusted to honor their agreements when it becomes ideologically inconvenient. And that argument landed, which is why Cameron returned with a vaguely worded emergency break deal and then never mentioned it again - nobody took it seriously, and he was forced to campaign on the state of the union as it was, and lost. So these tactics do have a cost.
Treaty law just doesn't work with 'common sense and social conventions' any more than compilers that won't compile your 'common sense and social conventions' text. You have to say exactly what you want, nothing more, nothing less. That's the work of lawyers and negotiators. As my lawyer friends say, well-written agreements make good friends (and vice versa).
But also note that you are the only one against Spain creating a path for a group of people that live there to gain legal status. No one mentioned that as a specific issue worth raising at international level. It's a non-issue.
> But also note that you are the only one against Spain creating a path for a group of people that live there to gain legal status.
Nah I have an issue with it too, conceptually. You're basically rewarding bad actors for breaking rules and laws which is unfair to those who were and are trying to immigrate legally. At a minimum.
Immigration isn't a moral good, it's just a switch we can flip on or off. Too few people? A given society can have more permissive rules. Too many people? Have more restrictive rules. Being an immigrant is just a random status one has by virtue of moving to another country - it's just paperwork.
>it isn't something that's uncommon as countries and nations and companies and all sorts of entities break or renegotiate agreements or contracts all the time.
what the Swiss are trying to do here is very uncommon, in fact it's so uncommon literally nobody has ever done it before. No country in history has imposed a numerical population cap on its population, and in addition, freedom of movement isn't a detail. It's the very core of the Treaty of Rome and the Schengen agreement that Switzerland is part of. That Europeans can now move freely between countries is the bedrock achievement of virtually all its labored for.
And the EU is not going to do braconian measures, the EU does not bully its smaller neighbors. Britain wasn't intimated, threatened and nobody tried to interfere with it when they wanted to leave. THey decided to do so and did. Swizterland can cap its population and deny freedom of movement, nobody's going to bully them, but they're obviously not going to have the relationship they had with the EU.
To even rhetorically compare the EU to the US (which has threatened to annex an ally's territory) or China (which throws minorities into camps and threatens a democracy with force) is pretty damn absurd. Ask Taiwan if they want to trade places with Switzerland on the world map if they could.
> what the Swiss are trying to do here is very uncommon, in fact it's so uncommon literally nobody has ever done it before. No country in history has imposed a numerical population cap on its population, and in addition, freedom of movement isn't a detail. It's the very core of the Treaty of Rome and the Schengen agreement that Switzerland is part of. That Europeans can now move freely between countries is the bedrock achievement of virtually all its labored for.
I think you are putting this referendum on a pedestal it doesn't need to go on. All countries control population to some extent, whether that's in how they support parental leave or how they support mothers, or through immigration control, quotas, points systems, &c. Switzerland is just adding in another wrinkle. Plus all legislation was at one point new.
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.
I don't think it would be - you're focusing on the actions of the territory (for lack of a better term) and ignoring the parent organization.
It's a bit of a stretch to be upset at Switzerland who would be serving in a role similar to Scotland or Greenland here for voting to take an action and then being ok with it in other instances. There isn't any consistency in this position in how you are picking and choosing what sovereignty you respect and what sovereignty you don't respect. Well, you can be consistent if you are in favor of the EU as an imperial organization that seeks to enlarge itself and punish member states, but I'm not sure if that's your belief.
> You’re muddling wildly different situations with wildly different levels of sympathy.
I'm not sure they're really that different at a high level. The population of Spain would vote against Catalonia leaving. The population of the UK would vote against Scotland leaving. How can these groups (Scotland and Catalonia) self-determine to leave?
The UK government let Scotland vote, it didn't allow the entire nation of the United Kingdom to vote on it. And they allowed it because they know it will fail and the smart thing to do if your aim is to keep the UK together (much to Russia's dismay of course) would be to let these referendums proceed when you know they don't have the votes and then they'll sort of fizzle out over time. You did support Brexit though, right? I mean they voted on it after all.
> Greenland is a proposed military invasion and unilateral annexation.
I don't think that is/was the only option on the table nor do I think it was a serious threat albeit it did have the intended effect which was to help scare the EU straight on spending a lot more on defense in Greenland.
But let's say the US pulls together some package deal for Greenland, say, hey everyone who lives in Greenland if they vote yes to join the United Stats they get a million dollars and American citizenship (it could be something else, just a random example) and if they do so of course Denmark and the EU would be against it, but why? It's morally no different than dangling EU membership and billions of Euros in eventual aid to Scotland if it were to leave the UK.
> The UK government represents the UK. Everything doesn’t need to be a referendum.
> Irrelevant. They allowed it.
Respectfully I just don't agree with your framing here. Another wrinkle could be Northern Ireland if we want to go into this further with the UK specifically.
> But it was on the table. That makes it distinct from the other examples.
It was on the table but it seems that it was on the table as a bargaining chip for a different aim which was to scare the EU straight on spending the money necessary to secure Greenland and these arctic routes. While I agree that the situation itself is distinct, that's true of basically all separatists movements, whether that's Scotland, Taiwan, or Catalonia.
Setting aside American "threats", we can look at tools the United States could use, similar to tools the EU can use with respect to Scotland, to achieve a popular vote in favor of secession that would be detrimental to the organizing entity (UK/Denmark). At what point is such a thing hostile, and at what point is it simply a population exercising what we consider to be a fundamental right? Is Spain being undemocratic by not even permitting Catalonia a vote on independence?
How do you feel about the separatists movement in Alberta? Would you fully support that as well if they decide on a referendum in Alberta to leave Canada? What about Quebec? Genuinely curious.
Directly, no, but it's very relevant to our discussion about secessionist movements that sprung up.
Don't you find it interesting? I would think you would support it, or do you not?
Strategically the government of Canada should do as the UK has done and permit the referendum precisely because it's very likely to fail and to not permit it gives secessionists ammo for further action and debate.
Well there's anyway going to be a referendum about the bilateral. (which is why I find the initiative somewhat stupid, you can vote on the real deal in a few years, about whether people want or do not want to have agreements with the EU, instead of hiding it behind a fake/emotional reason)
For Switzerland it would be significantly worse since they are surrounded by Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. So all trucks would be stopped at border. Food prices are already super expensive and this would make it worse.
They think it's a failure because their political class refused to use the new powers to implement the will of the people on immigration, not due to economics (which, again, were not affected).
Brexit was a referendum on immigration. It was the number one issue. Yet, successive governments since Brexit have turned immigration up to 11. No wonder they think it's a failure, the will of the people was ignored (and it's having real political blowback, with both major parties about to get reduced to dust according to polling).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> the idea of economic destruction akin to what the UK has suffered abhorrent to you?
Yes. But I don’t think Brexit is comparable to what is being proposed here.
In Brexit, the UK invoked Article 50. In this case, the EU would have to execute its Guillotine clause. That dramatically changes the framework for and thus possibility of renegotiations.
There’s not going to be negotiations to drop the core principles, I don’t know why bunch of people keep imagining this. UK was let go, Switzerland will be let go too.
Hoping different outcome by negotiation over this is like hoping for negotiating your way out of your gym membership payment when still attending. Not going to happen unless you become a charity case or insignificant, being significant is not a strength its a weakness when you are looking for charity or special treatment. Switzerland can imagine being too important to loose just as UK thought and they will be let go as UK.
I guess leaving EU can be useful to those who want to do things to Switzerland just like they did things to UK.
They are in a position of having no seas and only EU on every side, which means things are getting more bureaucratic the more EU-Swiss relationship sours. Think border checks on the ground and flight restrictions in the air and the less than 10M rich people in the mountains can now trade only among themselves.
Swiss can have their policy, who said they can't have it? It's just that they can't make EU have the Swiss policy. If Switzerland wants to be a 3rd party country, they can do that and negotiate visa regime, import/export controls etc with EU like everyone else who is not part of EU or don't have a deal. They can be like UK or Turkey for example, or be have entirely different relationship.
It’s up to the Swiss to decide regardless, if population limit is more important than being integrated into Europe they can do that. What they can’t do is to have equal access to the single market like the other EU countries without the obligation that other countries have.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
I'm not saying this is wrong, that makes a lot of sense. But on the other hand why have I never heard of other, much more dense countries facing this problem? I just never hear of Japan, China, Germany, Taiwan, etc seeing overcrowded trains and raise their hands saying "there can't possibly be a solution!"
Germany's passenger rail is notoriously failing. China is big and empty compared to Switzerland so there's lots of room to build. Japan's population is stagnant, and so train use might be stagnant too. (No idea about Taiwan.)
What does it have to do with they way they have to manage way higher population density? Singapore is 2/3 Swiss population on 1/3 of the Canton of Vaud.. They are 18 Chinese cities with a population over 10 million.
It's not impossible, but Switzerland's geography means tunneling is involved in adding capacity which makes it very expensive. Also the beautiful synchronisation of a country-wide integrated timetable where you can reliably get between any two places in the country with connections that always make sense is a point of national pride.
Japan, Taiwan and China all added dedicated infrastructure which took a long time and cost a fortune (vs the shared tracks currently used for intercity/regional/European freight). Tokyo accepts famously absurd levels of overcrowding during peak hours. Deutsche Bahn in Germany is widely thought of a joke due to chronic underinvestment meaning on-time trains are surprising.
That said, these technical concerns have nothing to do with the 10 million proposal. It's worth asking why a camp that spent decades opposing sustainability legislation has suddenly discovered the word now that it can be pointed at immigration.
And it is in fact so full that traibs crossing over from Germany sometimes get denied entry into the Swiss networks because there's no room to fit them in the schedule.
uh they get denied entry if they are late because german trains often are and it wreaks havoc on swiss timetabling where trains still generally depart to the minute and many commuters plan their day around making connections with a 2 minute change time. if the ICE from basel to zurich is late then switzerland runs their own replacement in its spot and denies entry to the german train to avoid knockon delays.
yes the schedule is full but its not just no space for more trains, more no space for unpredictable trains
The Netherlands should do this as well, maybe DB will then at some point figure out how to run a train on time. The ICEs from Germany are more often late than on time, which then causes delays for other trains using the same tracks.
Jup, quite common in the Netherlands. There are 10 minute trains from Utrecht to Amsterdam. And form Rotterdam and Den Haag to Schiphol. And from Utrecht to Den Bosch and Eindhoven.
Most of these are double decker trains and long platforms so they move a lot of people at once.
On a weekday at peak hours, there are up to 20+ trains an hour, with commuter trains continuing directly into Metro systems, and directly onto different commuter lines on the other end.
Seems like it's 4 per hour on Rotterdam/Utrecht, seems similar to Geneva/Lausanne with 6 per hour.
In any case, I think commuters are fine with every 15 min, as long as there's enough seats. (for long distance like trains, my feeling is that frequency below 15min doesn't have a lot of impact, unlike shorter distance public transport like tram/bus/subway)
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.
> 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.
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.
This is only about the Schengen, Switzerland is not a part of the EU, and even before the Schengen, the borders between the EU and Switzerland weren't heavily controlled. I got in trouble at German airport for going by train from Lausanne to Milan, and then plane to Berlin, I had no entry step into the Schengen because they didn't bother doing that on trains (pre-Schengen).
Everything else is negotiated under separate treaties. This would revert Switzerland to pre-Schengen, which is sad, but it wouldn't be suicidal.
> This is only about the Schengen, Switzerland is not a part of the EU
Not really, the bilateral are a package and the EU doesn't want CH to pick and chose.
If freedom of movement stops, a whole lot of thing also stop. It happened the last time SVP got something similar voted on (introduction of quota for foreign immigration), on a smaller scale (erasmus and horizon which are the higher ed and academic research collaboration, CH was a heavy recipient of the latter).
> the bilateral are a package and the EU doesn't want CH to pick and chose
It really depends who is in power where when and if the 10mm limit is crossed. If there is a conservative in Paris or Berlin, chances are Switzerland can simply abrogate Schengen.
Schengen is a minor treaty about border controls. The actual issue are the Bilateral I agreements, which link free movement with many aspects of free trade. If Switzerland drops that, it needs new free trade agreements, which take many years to negotiate and ratify.
I think we do bilaterally with our trading partners/border friends.
Freedom of movement across the EU has created a massive backlash. Politicians can keep ignoring that. Or they can modify Schengen, perhaps by admitting that FOM makes immigration decisions a collective one. (Germany letting in a massive wave of immigration means a massive wave of immigrants for everyone.)
How did it not work out? A lot of things the EU claimed were red lines ended up being crossed. Look at the Horizon programme. Supposedly an inviolable "privilege" tied to FoM, the UK called the EU's bluff, left, and UK is now back in Horizon anyway.
I wish Schengen would one day apply mirror visit policies, to make countries taste their own poison. Like - "Ok UK, you want out of Schengen? Fine. You will now pay 162 EUR for a single one time entry per person. Thank you very much for your interest.". Or "Oh, you want a 5 year multi entry visa, which EU can grant for like 30-60 EUR? It will be reciprocal 1086 EUR for you. It was a pleasure of doing business with you, sir.".
And do the same with every other renegade, including reciprocal mirror tariffs and stuff. Want to play games? Let's play them together.
Switzerland was part of Schengen from day one… New EU Entry exit/system will put CH in the same boat as UK with mandatory control at the border with scan of face and finger print + travel authorization. Switzerland would be completely locked.
But some people are going to be happy as it would mean no more grocery shopping on the other side of the border.
Switzerland officially joined the Schengen Area on December 12, 2008
March 26, 1995 (The Implementation): The Schengen Area officially became effective on this date. Internal border controls were finally lifted among seven member states.
Makes far more sense than the “population must increase forever” pyramid scheme the rest of the West is running. Check out Canada for a look at what happens when you try to juice GDP via population growth at the expense of literally everything else.
The data/facts disagree with you. In a low birth rate society a constant influx of new tax payers is required. Without it you end up with decades of stagnation like Japan.
1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own
2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it
This sounds like a strong argument for having a stable cap. It's not a total immigration ban and would freeze population at a steady state. This makes all of the boom and bust problems easier, not worse
Pop increase faster than housing / good jobs. The usual. Tried to juice economy post covid with MASS Indian immigration, for reference peak "Chinese" immigration was post HK handover was 60k, settled at 40k per year, lots of Chinese wealth transfer to Canada. Indian immigration went from 60k per year to over 140k, outrageous amount. Bluntly, most of west including Canada gets second tier immigrants, all the good opportunities in US, Canada doesn't get to retain tier1 talent, and Indian immigrants are in aggregate less wealthy. The entire point of brain drain is to get best brains, or in lieu get wealth. Canada got neither. This not knock on Indian immigrants, who work just as hard as every other, just acknowledging value proposition is not the same.
The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.
Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.
Canada is really bad with housing and inftrastructure. Blame immigrants not crack head white politicans who see bike lanes as the devil take car and oil money whole worshiping Trump and far right parties all over the world.
Immigrants not worth their economic value are the problem. That's not blaming "immigrants" but "immigration policy", which like housing policy - failure of politicians. But ultimately immigrants, who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat. And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
The overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it and long term they all are because they have more kids. Every immigrant who comes grown up with minimal education is a huge benefit.
Also its acceptable to have some immigrants who are not 'worth it', because it is something that is literally good to do, you are improving peoples lives.
> who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat
Mostly because of far right misinformation.
> And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
Its a falls believe that removing immigrants is somehow easy. Its not, its politically as hard as building new transit.
The difference is that building new transit is going to be great for everybody, specially Canadians who already own property or just live in the region, while focusing on removing immigrants will hurt everybody on net.
So the right solution is to focus on solving the fundamental problems you have no matter if immigrants or not.
A lot of people on the internet blame Canada's malaise on their historically lax immigration stance.
While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.
Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and
1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)
2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)
3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)
6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)
7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech
all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.
At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.
THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.
Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.
Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.
Serious question: what is ONG? I assume it's like LNG (liquefied natural gas), but after multiple searches, all I can come up with is Oklahoma Natural Gas, NGO in French, and On God.
No country is running a "population must increase forever". You only hear that when the public pensions are discussed because they are unsustainable. The argument is not " population must increase", it's more "human labor is the most critical resource and we must get as much as we can".
You can fear the results of runaway immigration in the short term, like cultural clashes, organized crime and brown people in your neighborhood. But you can't deny the results on the long term when you allow talent to go to your country and end up with more nobel laureates of New Zealand origin than New Zealand.
But either way, European nations are nearly all screwed - their expenditure on pensions and healthcare will quadruple in the coming decades as the demographics change heavily towards elderly peple.
Here in Nova Scotia, Canada, mass imigration is driving the most intense building of everything boom, ever. And it just went up a notch.
Plenty of Swiss imigrants as well.
And somehow despite this, the European economies had the biggest share of global GDP back then.
And now they're more integrated than ever, have more immigration than ever, have created the EU as their "big daddy" leader and enforcer, and yet they can't stop losing share of GDP to the rest of the world. Stange. Maybe they should hit the brakes for a second and reflect that their current course of action isn't the cure but the disease.
Like ASML, Concorde and Airbus were created via European cooperation when EU was a nascent baby and present day Schengen freedom of movement did not exist. Now we EU bureaucracy, open borders unlimited freedom of movement but haven't created the next Airbus or ASML. Food for thought that the EU is tackling the wrong issues on its economic stagnation. Maybe the solution is not more EU, but less EU.
The root issue was already visible in the 1970s. When birth rates drop below replacement, you eventually end up with a society with more old people than kids. And when you have a society like that, you naturally invest more in maintaining the society and less in building the future.
Yeah lets compare the world now to a world pre rise of Japan, East Asia and China. Im sure less European imtegration would have resulted in Euro dominance continuing.
I agree more bilateral agreements are good but having even more fragmented markets is not and was not a long term model of sucess.
It's not the population cap, but that bilateral agreements with the EU depend on the free movement of people. Without it, Switzerland could lose access to the EU market, which accounts for 51% of their exports. Switzerland cannot just choose whatever they like from the agreements and cancel what they don't. They will have to accept whatever in order to keep in the EU common market, or the country will suffer massive troubles. Switzerland needs the EU much more than the other way around.
Plenty of us remember when Switzerland was not in the Schengen though. This might be good for Americans, who haven't been able to get working visas in Switzerland since EU countries now have priority. But otherwise, I don't see much changing beyond border procedures.
True, maybe. It is really hard to say. I'm not pro leaving in any sense (beyond being an American who used to work in Switzerland and wouldn't have that chance today because of the Schengen).
Most of the downsides would be on the goods side. Swiss companies would loose market access and the chance of "better" trade agreements is even worse then the UK, especially currently.
When you drive through there is someone standing looking at the line of cars and if they don't like the way you look they point to the side and you have to explain yourself and your cargo. It's like an arbitrary border control right now.
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.
> 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).
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.
> There’s never anything sane with population caps by fiat
Why? It’s repressive if done to cap a natively-growing population, since that means government controlling reproduction (à la one-child policy). But government has controlled immigration for generations.
I’m asking as someone who is genuinely on the fence on this vote.
Saying that you’re going to cap your population necessarily implies you’re going to take policy measures to grow no further than the capped amount, which are by their nature, repressive.
That said I did see in some other comments earlier after I posted this that this is a back door way to axe the Swiss-EU bilateral agreements all at once. I don’t know how true that is, but if that’s the goal, Switzerland doesn’t need to take such a back door approach. Just put it on the ballot like everything else.
It was put on ballot as such, and overwhelmingly (by Swiss standards) rejected. Now it's time for trying different backdoors (not the first try either). It's a constant circus, EU and the EU citizens being the demon eating at the Swiss well-being.
Immigration is being controlled, EU immigrants require a work contract to come here (and consequentially 80% are employed with the rest split between spouses, kids and students). I strongly prefer this system over having some random bureaucrat in Berne decide who is "valuable" and who isn't.
> Why? It’s repressive if done to cap a natively-growing population, since that means government controlling reproduction (à la one-child policy).
There's a point where caping even natively growing population is actually the right move.
There's plenty of overpopulated shitholes (Mumbai, Dhaka, Cairo, Bangladesh, etc) where it would have been an absolute blessing if government was controlling reproduction or put a population cap in place.
If you think capping population is wrong, go visit Dhaka, I highly recommend it.
If you're still on the fence after visiting Dhaka, you're beyond saving.
Maybe not a legally smart move, but morally... when was it signed? Perhaps way before some EU countries decided to stop enforcing their borders beyond the performative level? And since these agreements basically force countries (especially rich countries with socialist systems) to somewhat share the burden of that choice they didn't make, I don't blame them in the least.
These agreements do not force countries to share that burden.
Freedom of movement for EU citizens. Migrants and asylum seekers don’t have the right to live and work in Switzerland because of our EU agreements.
A migrant or asylum seeker living in Germany has 0 right to move to CH.
We do have some asylum obligations from the Dublin accords and from global human rights laws, but those we can regulate ourselves separately anyway. EU doesn’t care. Countries within EU do it already.
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.
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.
You are assuming there won’t be free trade agreements. People need to stop saying what happened with Brexit will happen with Switzerland. Two completely different countries governed in two completely different ways.
The EU would be really stupid to give you a good deal. Like, for self preservation purposes alone it would be really beneficial if Switzerland would just really suffer after leaving the EEA especially because a lot of shit was going down in Europe and the world after brexit. Can’t really point at the cost of living in the uk and say that’s brexit when petrol is almost 2€ in Germany as well.
But a Switzerland that just collapses surely but surely? That’s gonna send a message.
What products are you thinking? Chocolate and cheese are actually not that relevant as some people want it to be. Gold trade, software, banking however is unlikely to decrease a lot no matter the border rules.
I take this question as a joke, it would be regrettable to know so little about Switzerland yet comment like this. Because more than half of the Swiss exports are chemical and pharma, then come machinery and electronics and... and yeah, food altogether is 3% as well.
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.
Looks like it’s 380 in the Swiss Plateau (you might be mixing up sq km and sq mi), which puts its at about ~70% of the population density of the Netherlands as a whole.
But Belgium does suck. I drove from Amsterdam to Paris in the early 2000s, and Belgium stuck out as being obviously worse (dirtier) than the other two.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't work as straightforward as that.
To have a healthy immigration channel, especially if you want younger/educated/skilled/etc. the pipeline needs to be active and streamlined. Jobs, housing, a well-beaten path that is predictably navigable is incredibly important for a migrant, since they're taking a lot of risks moving there.
If this referendum blocks EU movement, it will choke the pipeline that's filling positions that takes in a high amount of immigrants like healthcare, agriculture, etc. Once it dies out, people may not be as willing to move if they're the one paving the path.
Historically, the US has been quite successful in this area. Migrants from Philippines dominate nursing, Mexico for agriculture and Chinese/Indians for Sotware/Medical.
The migration path has to be vastly superior to their current living for this to work, if they want the same immigration. Or else, it will be mostly people who are truly in a terrible situation who'd be willing to take a chance.
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"?
It makes perfect sense. Differentiating between a good and bad ones is the easiest thing ever.
1. Are they a net benefit to the country's finances? Do they pay more than enough taxes to cover the public services they use and then some. Or are they just a leech on the welfare system and a burden to society in general.
2. Do they integrate well into the society? Do they commit crimes?
3. To whom is their allegeince? The society they live in or the one back home? Do they promote the interests of their own ethnic group at the expense of the natives?
The first two are already available to state, tax, crime, welfare records. The third can be found out with a simple investigation.
1. As long as these are measured they are not a problem: Switzerland - and most of the EU countries - do simply not have a problem with poor people leeching the welfare systems, but rich people not paying their share: tax evasion by the rich is a problem going into the billions while social security fraud is around millions.
2. That's also measurable by crime stats and Switzerland is really tough in re-patriating people that broke the law.
3. That is something you cannot measure and where you cannot guarantee freedom or fairness in a society. What if I were to deem you too stupid to vote because you're advocating for a fascist mindset that might overthrow the democratic fundamentals? You wouldn't want that, I suppose.
So there's nothing to be done that's not already been done.
And to the fallacy of my argument you are hinting at, it truly is one of the difficulties. I think as a migrant your contribution should be to assimilate and assist with the country's interests. You must not be a freeloader. If the country wants to get rid of migrants, then thats it, they will stamp you out. Welcome to reality. In the meanwhile I will do my best, like everyone else should, to be a 'good migrant', which usually means: learn the language, treat people with respect, don't commit crimes, do not not abuse the welfare system, learn the cultural norms, take part in cultural activities and list goes on.
From a logical standpoint there really is only one rational step you can take: you have to leave because you are a migrant.
And that's exactly where all of this thinking falls apart: in an equal, democratic society no group should be able to decide who's a good or a bad citizen. There's only the laws of the country that should count and everyone has to obey.
You should soften up your idea of "migration" because there is no inane biological quality in humans that make them good or bad.
99% of "immigration problems" are because of poverty and inequality (both too little or too much money can influence behaviour) and not because of some sort of gene that makes human behave badly.
> 99% of "immigration problems" are because of poverty and inequality
That's just made up claim there's no evidence to support this. Even if it were true it's not the taxpayers responsibility to import all the degenerate murderers and rapists from all over the world in the hopes of civilizing them.
Why should someone from a developed country agree to give up their safety and wealth to run this ridiculous and deadly experiment?
> Even if it were true it's not the taxpayers responsibility to import all the degenerate murderers and rapists from all over the world in the hopes of civilizing them.
That's just not how any of this works and I think you know it. You're just being obtuse, although I don't know why.
No. I have to leave when they decide I have to leave. Generally migrants are not a problem, unless they cause a lot of problems (UK), or there are way too many of them even if they were so called good migrants (again UK). Even some of the most anti-immigration political parties in my country (ethno-fascist actually, not my opinion, it is their policy) are not saying 100% no to migrants, but they have to check a LOT of marks to be here.
I have to say, that not every country is the same. United States from an outsider perspective seems like you could come from anywhere and look like anyone, as long as you pleadge your allegiance to the flag and become and 'American' you will be accepted. This is probably because US has a short history, and it wasnt too long ago when it was literally all migrants.
What constitutes a good migrant is up to the natives and the government of a country to decide. At the end of the day it doesnt matter what how good of a migrant I think I am. Any day the native population can turn very hostile and ram any migrant out of the country for any reason, be it crime record, ethnicity or something else.
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.
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 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).
The entire human population can fit within Los Angelas. It’s not a good metric in general. Pressure on public services, resources and housing is far more useful
The entire human population could stand there: each person would have roughly 1.5 to 5.4 square feet of space—less than the size of a single chair. If you actually did get all of humanity in LA it would instantly break out in war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?)
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.
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.
For good reason, at the Congress of Vienna 1815 the largest powers in Europe signed a treaty that guarantees Switzerland's neutrality. As a result, Switzerland got spared in world war one and two. So far not entering into any alliances has been a very good strategy for Switzerland to ensure peace.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
> ... 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.
Thats exactly what that means. The UK did the thing you want to do and had a bad outcome because they didn't do it right. The true and best and correct way to get it done of course would have none of those bad outcomes.
The UK invoked Article 50. It didn’t have to, but it chose to because Britain. There is no world in which Switzerland is the party that tears up all of its EU agreements.
If someone says that’s a bad dog and I say no, that’s a cat, that’s not an example of No True Scotsman, it’s a category error.
Free movement is at the heart of the EU project. You start restricting that and the EU will tear up the agreements. We saw this already some 10 years ago when a similar vote passed, and EU stopped a lot of collaborations with the Swiss.
It's clear to everyone involved that the EU deeply regrets how they did the Swiss agreements. Switzerland basically ended up in a parallel carbon copy of the EFTA for all intents and purposes. It was clearly stated during the Brexit charade that the bureaucratic fatigue of having so many cherry picked agreements with Switzerland made the likelihood of doing the same with the UK basically zero.
The EU has always been clear that the single market comes alongside the four freedoms. If Switzerland approves this referendum that's a very high chance they will have to exit the single market too, which will hurt Switzerland immensely.
This is very ironic to me, because right now we live in a world where the irrelevance of small nations is getting clearer and clearer by the day. Political norms and international law are being trampled daily by the larger powers, and Switzerland was recently at the very end of it when Trump basically bullied them by imposing on them tariffs that were vastly higher than the EU and then ghosting them because he couldn't give a shit about them
> 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%.
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.
I wasn't precise enough, my bad.
I was referring to the comment about which says that by Switzerland restricting the moves from EU, loses the free movement to EU. My comment says that this is less of an issue -- the real issue comes from the market restrictions that EU will install against Switzerland.
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.
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?
1. Switzerland is a highly desirable location fo skilled workers to migrate to. Don't hate the player, hate the data.
2. Setting a population limit (especially in the manner proposed) would obviously have a negative effect on (1). I think most in this thread agree with that assessment, so not much to gain from yelling at us, no?
3. Credit Suisse being CH's most "reputable" bank would be news to... pretty much everyone? [0]
If you have a hate-boner for the country, that's yours to have, but maybe go somewhere else to deal with that.
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?)
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.)
Other variables to factor in would include cultural/esthetic ones: how much would a population tolerate a reduction in the idyllic/scenic nature of their landscape, merely to accommodate crops for a rising population?
(This is what I referred to as "quality of life" in another post.)
That math is about animals in a fixed climate who don't do trading. Swiss people do.
And that "how much would a population tolerate a reduction in the idyllic/scenic nature of their landscape" is a very arbitary factor that will strongly depend on who you ask.
> 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]
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.
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? ...
Most of food is imported anyway, Switzerland is a very small country. This is a very silly argument, I'm sorry, it does not make any sense. "making shopping more complicated" what does that even mean.
What about pensions? We are talking about foreigners working and paying taxes in Switzerland, a lot of them in very specialized jobs. Health care? A lot of doctors and nurses are foreigners, too. But apart from all these cliches about how good immigrants are for the economy, the main issue is that all bilateral agreements with the EU depend on the free movement of people between Switzerland and the EU. Without that, Switzerland losses access to the EU market and becomes and isolated country. It is nonsense.
Honestly I don't know import statistics but the majority of food I eat is from Switzerland. A lot of imported products are complicated because they often contain more weird stuff like artificial colouring, sweeteners or thickening stuff.
Familien nachzug is a thing where people can get their elderly parents (or anyone family really) to move to Switzerland a lot more easily. This can indeed add additional costs to the pension and health care system.
The implications with the EU surely could be problematic.
Fertility rates are low and people are ageing, like everywhere in Europe. There will be a moment that simply there won't be enough workers. The reality is that there is already a lack of healthcare professional even without a population cap that would only get worse given the case.
Sounds like modern slavery, import people from poorer countries to tend to the rich and elderly in countries that made short-term sacrifices to not build a future for themselves independently.
That's an option, but it takes a long time to train and recruit locally, costs a lot of money, and you'll probably have to increase salaries to get the required numbers. If there were an easy and cheap way to recruit all the required staff locally, that would already be happening.
So the solution is to import uneducated and non-certified individuals from other countries at lower pay and hope you can pay them less and teach them? As if that is any easier? Sounds like the only reason is so health conglomerates can provide lower pay.
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.
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?
The joke is that “cap the population at 10M” is already a dehumanizing spreadsheet fantasy.
I just skipped to the punchline.
Also, very Swiss of you to answer a joke about banning people from a country by asking to ban people from HN. Xenophobic much? Better focus your efforts on finding a job that the foreigners stole from you
Where is the joke? What is funny about hundreds of thousand of Swiss people being unemployed and housing costs increasing every year?
And clearly you still haven't bothered to read the initiative, which doesn't kick out anyone, but demands the government revises immigration laws if the population hits 9.5 million before 2050.
But you _have_ found time to dig through my comments to find dirt on me to ridicule me. Clearly you're a hateful and despicable person.
> Better focus your efforts on finding a job that the foreigners stole from you
I never said a foreigner stole anything from me; I merely objected to the idea that Switzerland needs _more_ foreigners to work jobs, while hundreds of thousands of residents are looking for work. I'm clearly a terrible human being for wanting to... checks notes work a job for a living.
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.
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.
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