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.
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 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).
The country is rich because it has a homogenous, hard-working, low-crime population, it only spends 0.75% of GDP on defence[0], only spends 16% of GDP on public welfare[1], it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world, it has an incredible tourist industry, and it has some key industries that higher-priced because they are Swiss and traditional - Swiss watches, Swiss chocolate, Swiss army knives, etc.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
If Swiss population growth were entirely attributable to the children of existing Swiss residents, then this initiative would be pointless because it wouldn't change anything, and we would not be having this conversation.
So yes, it absolutely is about immigration, regardless of the wording.
It 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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
>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.
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.
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)
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.
Banks, energy, telecom, defence, oil & gas companies 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.
Basically EU and NATO are two tier institutions. There's the whales, the big players who 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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 blocking renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan which increased the risk profile for renewables projects in Canada while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cruelty to immigrants, mostly. That's literally the only project the right is able to sell the population on anymore. Why a round 10M cap? Because this is just garbage slopulism, and 10M makes for a great slogan.
Will you find any serious economist defending this? Any sociologist? Of course not.
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 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.
So is everyone in Europe calling the Swiss a bunch of phobic racists for wanting to place restrictions on immigration; or is that judgement just reserved for Americans?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is an utterly meaningless statistic. Canada, with four times the population, ranks #233, because most of the country is uninhabited / uninhabitable.
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 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).
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.)
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'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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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?)
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.)
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? ...
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.
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.
Swiss here and able to vote.
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.
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...
> benefits from diverse cultures
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).
[delayed]
> more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that)
This is how freedom of movement works, yes, and it's a key reason why our country is so rich.
The country is rich because it has a homogenous, hard-working, low-crime population, it only spends 0.75% of GDP on defence[0], only spends 16% of GDP on public welfare[1], it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world, it has an incredible tourist industry, and it has some key industries that higher-priced because they are Swiss and traditional - Swiss watches, Swiss chocolate, Swiss army knives, etc.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
> only spends 16% of GDP on public welfare
It's easy to not have to spend much money on public welfare when there is a constant stream of foreign money floating in.
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?
> homogenous population
Not even gonna comment on this nonsense.
> Not even gonna comment on this nonsense.
Sadly this was a lie.
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.
> 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.
most of the immigrants are highly educated professionals, big tech, pharma and meds. it‘s not the „empty“.
They definitely aren't, but whomever they are they still requires houses, power and water.
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.
>France is mostly empty
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.
It's mostly a matter of when the demographic transition started: https://nitter.net/pic/media%2FGEDBLvOXUAANUlK.png%3Fname%3D...
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.
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).
Can you back up your claims? I don't have a horse in this fight, but do notice people ridiculing migrants as "doctors and engineers".
That’s to the US. I believe in Europe it’s Arab hoipolloi
> mass migrations
> pretty full ones
C'mon, why parrot this nonsense? There are no "mass migrations" and neither the European countries nor the US are "full". Yes the Europeans screwed up real integration across the board, but nobody is really working on fixing that. Easier to just claim to be full and the immigrants are causing higher crime rates so no more people in but oh demographics, please everybody make more babies!
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.
Calling it a population cap for something that seems to be about stricter border controls is a wild marketing choice.
That avoids accusations of bigotry which Europe has convinced itself doesn't exist within its domains.
Border control is not equivalent to racism. The people pushing for it loudly just tend to be doing it for blatantly racist reasons. Unsurprisingly, those people tend to abuse any ounce of power given to them. When they're granted extraordinary government powers, they make up official sounding reason to achieve their racist agenda. Hence the general consensus that any talk of border control is racism. The non-racist-driven border control agenda just controls the border, and shut the fuck up about it. They don't boast about arrests, they don't make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs, they don't send in the military to schools to grab kids out of class, they don't shoot people in the face when they look at them wrong.
It is a population cap, you can read this proposal its like 5 lines of text.
If Swiss population growth were entirely attributable to the children of existing Swiss residents, then this initiative would be pointless because it wouldn't change anything, and we would not be having this conversation.
So yes, it absolutely is about immigration, regardless of the wording.
No, it's an immigration restriction. There's no way it applies if the Swiss start having 5 kids each.
It's a migration cap. There's no provision on sterilizing Swiss women should the threshold be reached through birthrate…
> execute a Swexit
It wouldn’t be full Chexit. Just renegotiating and then rejecting the Schengen chapter. It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
> It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
These kinds of morally-superior, we'll show them, type of attitudes and suggestions are precisely why so many folks have come to be anti-EU. Nevermind the actual other real day-to-day issues with the organization.
I'm sure you're also staunchly against Scotland and any referendum to join the EU, and against Catalonia becoming independent as well? Why should Taiwan be an exception and not part of China? Seems many of the EU are of the opinion that "We support sovereignty when it conveniently aligns with my chosen organization".
The default and perhaps what is best for democracy is to have many smaller nation states, city states, and the other various confederations and the like. The super-organization of nations into these unwieldy states is in many respects anti-democratic and perhaps only temporary as these large nations and alliances were built precisely to fight other, large nation states.
Those "guillotine clauses" mostly exist because member states didn't want to cede their sovereignty to the EU. If a treaty covers areas where member states have shared or full responsibility, it must be ratified unanimously by every member state. (Which in some case requires ratification by regional parliaments.) Any changes to such treaties must also be ratified, which means there will be 30+ parties negotiating and trying to win new concessions.
> sure you're also staunchly against Scotland and any referendum to join the EU, and against Catalonia becoming independent as well?
Why? I think the first is a good idea and the second fine if that’s what they want.
Because those would be breaking up the unions of those countries. It's no different morally or philosophically from Switzerland leaving the EU.
Say what? Switzerland isn't in the EU, how can it leave?
It has treaties, but not membership. That doesn't make it "leaving" if they annul the treaties.
This was the OP:
> 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.
My terminology was matching what was used here.
Sorry, nobody in the know would interpreted "Chexit" to mean "leave the EU" for the obvious reason that Switzerland is not in the EU.
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.
>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.
>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.
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'm pro adding Greenland to the United States. How it affects our ally Denmark and their sovereignty isn't relevant.
I'm pro adding Scotland to the European Union. How it affects our ally the United Kingdom and their sovereignty isn't relevant.
This is not pointlessly argumentative, this is just downright trolling.
…if Greenland voted to join the U.S., the conversation would be quite different.
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 focusing on the actions of the territory (for lack of a better term) and ignoring the parent organization
That’s how self determination works.
> bit of a stretch to be upset at Switzerland who would be serving in a role similar to Scotland or Greenland*
You’re muddling wildly different situations with wildly different levels of sympathy.
> That’s how self determination works.
Right, like when the UK left the EU.
> 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?
> population of the UK would vote against Scotland leaving
The UK literally let Scotland vote on it [1]. On the other end of the spectrum, Greenland is a proposed military invasion and unilateral annexation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Independence_Referend...
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.
> UK government let Scotland vote, it didn't allow the entire nation of the United Kingdom to vote on it
The UK government represents the UK. Everything doesn’t need to be a referendum.
> they allowed it because they know it will fail
Irrelevant. They allowed it.
> don't think that is/was the only option on the table
But it was on the table. That makes it distinct from the other examples.
Again, I think you’re muddying very different situations in a way that undermines your own arguments.
Sure, and I didn't shoot you, I just sent a bullet in your direction.
Especially after we saw how happy the EU was to negotiate (they didn't budge) when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swiss_immigration_initiat... passed.
The new initiative is basically the same, but with no leeway to ignore it.
(that said I suspect if it passes, there will be something tied to the bilateral referendum in 2027/28 to try to supersede it)
> if it passes, there will be something tied to the bilateral referendum in 2027/28 to try to supersede it
This is my thinking, too. If it really comes down to Chexit-or-nothing, we’ll have another referendum.
That was the UK's thinking, too. "We won't have a hard Brexit! Of course they'll negotiate a plan!"
And then the UK delivered an Article 50 notice. That isn’t something this referendum would force.
The UK's referendum was also non-binding, in theory.
> UK's referendum was also non-binding, in theory
If SVP gets control of government they’ll probably try to Chexit irrespective of any referendum power. That’s orthogonal to this question.
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)
> interesting
The word I'd choose instead is "concerning" if not "scary".
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 :-)
>Hopefully they were wrong.
Over a thousand years of history has shown that they were right.
>would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns."
True words of wisdom.
> Hopefully they were wrong :-)
They weren't. EU membership and cooperation is built on favoritism and necessity. You get into the EU if you have something of value the other members need from you (capital, geopolitical, industrial, human or natural resources) done via treaties instead of via war and conquest.
So it ended up as a toxic relationship where members exploit each other to get as much as they can while contributing as little as they can.
@Ukraine, you'll experience this when you get your turn, just ask Romania.
But what did Romania experience?
Banks, energy, telecom, defence, oil & gas companies 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.
Basically EU and NATO are two tier institutions. There's the whales, the big players who 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.
Just wait til Canada joins the EU and we will have a rethinking of any such unions as not necessarily being related to geographic location.
damn, the word 'execute' reverberated interestingly
It veers too close to Logan’s Run when they cap things like that. I’m sure it’s just policy action at the various thresholds but it sure sounds odd.
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.
is the idea of economic destruction akin to what the UK has suffered abhorrent to you? In your excitement about the one you might consider the other.
> 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.
Meanwhile SVP head politicians employ quite a few foreign workers at all levels of employment hierarchy.
It's pathetic.
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.
>I must wonder though who could profit from Switzerland leaving Schengen.
Same types of people who profited from Brexit.
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.
Can you explain how adding frequency to the train network will not work to compensate higher ridership?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMbV1rIPhCg
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!"
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.
Yeah there's tons of work ongoing. Lots of line close to the big hubs have ongoing construction to eventually switch to 15min takt.
Improvements on various train station (new underground stations in Geneva and Luzern, extra platforms, etc.).
https://company.sbb.ch/en/railway-development/future-rail/na...
(for example, there's also lots of tram, etc. projects)
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.)
You can't add more trains if the schedule is full to the brink. You would need to add train tracks, and that requires big projects
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.
AFAICT they only get denied if they are not on time.
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.
Frequency is basically 15 minutes almost all over the country already
That's almost laughably infrequent - you can use single level trains with more doors to triple that without even going to automation.
Has any railway network managed to get less than 15 minute headways? Metros don't count, they're isolated and often enclosed.
At some point we had 10m intercity intervals between Rotterdam/utrecht and Utrecht/Amsterdam in NL.
Capping a population is a short term solution creating huge issues for the following generations. Examples: lots of places this happened.
Are they counting “frontalieri” towards that cap?
No? Funny how that works, isn’t?
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.
Here you go (if you understand French, German, Italian or Romansh, there is a video)
https://www.admin.ch/fr/initiative-durabilite
https://www.udc.ch/actualites/campagnes/pas-de-suisse-a-10-m...
This is a way to enable deportations and curb permit prolongations, to delay reaching the 10m cap (which will create really bad consequences).
As an immigrant in Switzerland, I am quite WORRIED.
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.
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.
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.
What happens, specifically? Not that I'm a fan of "population increase forever" but what's wrong with Canada?
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.
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 blocking renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan which increased the risk profile for renewables projects in Canada while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA
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.
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.
It's the abbreviation for Oil and Natural Gas sector.
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.
Population of most European countries is actually decreasing year on year:
https://www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe...
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.
Pensions are a bit harder to get out of, but healthcare is easy. You never deny, just delay.
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.
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.
Unlike UK, the impact to the EU is minimum and Switzerland doesn't have leverage (if the EU still stands).
Of course if you have EU dismantlers in power anyway in FR/DE, they'll just be happy to sabotage.
> unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant
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.)
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.
how did they ever survive in the pre-EU/schengen/EEC era?
Divorce is harder than a wedding.
Their neighbors were similarly restrictive back then, and the European economy was not as integrated.
> the European economy was not as integrated
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.
Imagine how crazy it is to call a population cap an act of "suicide."
Imagine how crazy it is to think "Switzerland out of Schengen" isn't.
It's a small, landlocked country, surrounded on all sides by Schengen nations, that until recently delegated air defense to the EU outside of their air force's office hours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/feb/19/swis...
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.
As with Brexit, leaving is likely to result in a much stricter regime than the status quo from before the establishment of the system.
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 the neighboring countries become a threat again, they will place high explosives back inside the bridges and mountain passes.
Not sure if they actually removed it in all the places, except that one bridge by Basel everyone know about.
I already pass through Swiss customs when driving in, so it makes virtually no difference to me besides slowing things down at the border potentially.
Schengen covers border controls (i.e. immigration/visits), not customs ones (the stuff you bring with).
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.
Most of the time I'm waved through.
Yes, I'm aware of the current state of things.
This is a proposal to change that state to something far stricter in this regard.
To be fair there is the same thing between Austria and Germany for example. Except it's more strict there even.
At the very least it’s an infringement of human rights.
Is being able to move to Switzerland really an universal human right?
Tell that to the EU.
Yes, because in the human rights bill it says that everyone in the world has the right to go live in Switzerland.
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.
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.
> unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant
I vote in Switzerland. I’m very much interested in the thoughts and opinions of others on this vote.
There’s never anything sane with population caps by fiat. If that’s a form of insanity they wish to indulge though, then democracy allows them 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.
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.
The entire world can’t demand to live near Europeans peoples.
Well I _am_ Swiss.
You missed the part where we _voluntarily_ chose to enter into a contract with the EU that does in fact beholden us to EU laws.
We can go back on that contract, but breaking your word is something that people remember for a reason.
Does the contract contain a section on breaking the agreement?
Yes.
And that clause famously includes the breaking of all other contracts.
If it doesn’t, a whole lot of European lawyers need to turn in their licenses.
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.
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.
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.
If you increased Switzerland’s population density by 50% they’d be in a crowded hellhole like (checks notes) Belgium
Yeah, but while Belgium is basically a huge plain, Switzerland is 60% Alps.
If you account for that, the effective density of Switzerland on the usable area is 600–700 people/km².
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Plateau
There are significant differences in terrain that make that comparison a bit tougher.
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.
Moved out last year after 10y in the Zurich area.
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.
Cruelty to immigrants, mostly. That's literally the only project the right is able to sell the population on anymore. Why a round 10M cap? Because this is just garbage slopulism, and 10M makes for a great slogan.
Will you find any serious economist defending this? Any sociologist? Of course not.
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.
Counterpoint: Switzerland is rich, peaceful and pretty multicultural. That baseline will keep it as an attractive place to expat or migrate.
Robots will take off in our life time. I will be taken care of by robots circa the 2060s and 2070s.
One interesting point for me is that, IMHO, the propaganda on the „no“ side wad _abysmal_.
The counter arguments are awful and they are presented awfully and not even in such high quantity as you would expect.
I think it has a good chance of passing just because of that.
And then political shitf***y will begin with „we don’t know how to turn this into law!“, which is not good for the basis of democracy…
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.
So is everyone in Europe calling the Swiss a bunch of phobic racists for wanting to place restrictions on immigration; or is that judgement just reserved for Americans?
this is a low effort bait comment. what are you hoping to get in the replies?
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.
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.
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.
Switzerland is ranked 67th in country population density. For reference, the United Kingdom is ranked 48th and the United States is ranked 183rd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
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.
America is soooo big and soooo sparsely populated
That is an utterly meaningless statistic. Canada, with four times the population, ranks #233, because most of the country is uninhabited / uninhabitable.
> That is an utterly meaningless statistic
It's very meaningful, when the main argument is population overcrowding.
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
Read the rest of the post.
Switzerland is much less desirable and attractive than they think they are.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_formula_(Swiss_politics)
> It's a tradition, not a rule
Amended, thanks!
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.)
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.
Don’t be so quick.
You know full well that the polls are 52% no. It will be a razor thin rejection and the SVP will try again until they find one that passes.
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.
Don't look at tiktok then. It seems pretty much won in there.
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.
No Population Growth in My Backyard -- NPGIMBY.
Absolute dogshit we are voting on this week. Hopefully both gets denied. We are working ourselves into the bleakest future.
But without population growth there will be no economic growth, the economy will stall it will be an unmitigated disaster.
Every country must grow as much as it possibly can and then keep growing much more than that.
> 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'm sure they are very proud of themselves for sneaking racist anti-immigrant policy in under the guide of left wing environmental rhetoric.
I propose we set it at 4Mio instead, deport all the German speakers and give their properties to the French-speaking ones.
Leaving the EU or ending free movement with EU countries leads to a significant increase in immigration from the third world, as Brexit showed.
It really doesn’t have to. Britain being incompetent is sort of its own chapter in governance.
no true scotsman
Not what that means.
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 Swiss ruling class don’t have as much disdain for their populace. It will only end up that way if the Swiss people will it.
A lot of the UK’s problems were a result of the EU being vindictive as well. The EU won’t act vindictively because they aren’t in the EU.
Vindictive how? That it refuses to let the Brits have their cake and eat it?
Vindictive in preventing trade agreements. Vindictive like France doing nothing to stop the immigrants going through the channel
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015345
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.
> It's not about free movement, but "free trade"/joint market
This is entirely about free movement and immigration.
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.
This seems a much more rational approach than pure political agenda driven fear mongering campaigns against immigrants.
This is about Swiss - EU relations. Everyone understands that a yes vote means the Swiss equivalent of „exiting the EU“.
All Swiss-EU contracts contain a „Guillotine clause“ where if one contract is broken, all are immediately gone. The initiative explicitly requires breaking the freedom of movement contract, which immediately severs all other links to the EU.
This _is_ pure political agenda driven campaign using immigrants.
> All Swiss-EU contracts contain a „Guillotine clause“ where if one contract is broken, all are immediately gone. The initiative explicitly requires breaking the freedom of movement contract, which immediately severs all other links to the EU
Why does it need to be? Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today? Will the EU really hold hard on this line with Switzerland? (And does it make political sense to?)
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.
> Support for EU within EU is growing since the war in Ukraine
I believe you. But hard numbers?
> No current political party except for fringe parties in any EU state advocates for exiting the EU or ending the four freedoms
Eh, there seems to be massive demand for modifying either freedom of movement or the context around it.
> They made that quite clear with the UK
The UK invoked Article 50. That wouldn’t happen here.
There is no demand for modifying freedom of movement within EU. It’s not even a topic in most EU countries.
What IS a topic, is preventing non-EU migration, and that has broad support and slowly all parties are moving in that direction.
And we are NOT EU. But for now, they basically go „yes yes, but we think of you as EU because we are so tightly connected“.
So what do you expect to happen if we push the point and make them treat us as non-EU?
> what do you expect to happen if we push the point and make them treat us as non-EU?
I frankly don't expect the EU to be unreasonably spiteful. (And for the record, I don’t think the EU was spiteful 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.
This is not a vote for Switzerland to exit the EU...for obvious reasons. It is a vote to exit the Schengen.
"the swiss equivalent"
As OP explains, freedom of movement can't be stopped in isolation from the rest of the bilaterals.
(btw funnily Schengen is just about the border control, we're talking about freedom of movement which is a different thing, e.g. UK wasn't in Schengen but the freedom of movement applied to UK as well before brexit, tho I guess people use Schengen interchangeably)
Which immediately triggers the guillotine clause in all other bilateral treaties including movement of goods and services, Horizon, energy market etc.
„Exiting the EU“ is a perfectly adequate way to summarize it to a world audience that doesn’t care about the details.
Even worse then - no more visa free travel, and no more international collaboration on crime. I must wonder, who would profit from these?
Hm. Are there any difference in the consequences for the immigrants, if they are kicked out because of arbitrary population cap, instead of anti-migration laws?
As far as I understand, action begins when the population hits 9.5M, so likely no-one gets kicked out, but fewer new visas will be approved, etc.
I am pretty sure there are many people living in swiss with temporary visa's and those will then be de facto kicked out, if they do not get their permissions extended.
This. As immigrant I don't feel threatened by this at all. I can't vote, and I wouldn't vote for SVP but as far as I can tell this makes kinda sense.
Why would you assume the population cap is arbitrary? There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
What is rational about this exactly? They share no borders with the countries most immigrants come from, they are moving the problem to Spain, Italy, Greece.
Vast majority of immigrants to Switzerland come from Spain, Italy, Greece and other EU countries…
Germany (16% of recent immigration), followed by France and Italy (12% and 11%).
https://cms.news.admin.ch/fileservice/sdweb-docs-prod-nsbcch...
(page 5)
I agree. Every country has a limit, unspoken or not, let the people decide. Anything less is undemocratic.
What's rational in the arbitrary number of 10 millions for no reason at allM
It is completely irrational. But the UDC knows it, pure manipulation of the masses.
It's not completely irrational. It's a fixed placative number yes.
But reality is also we don't produce more food than we already do. More people means more import and it's actually lowering the quality of the available food, making shopping more complicated, etc. And that's just the food quality aspect, what about pensions? Health care? ...
>what about pensions? Health care?
What about health care if there's no more 'room' for the immigrants who make up a substantial fraction of health workers in Switzerland?
Swiss people are perfectly capable of becoming health workers? What kind of argument is this?
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.
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.
It is in fact based on stuff like this but hyperboled into a placative number. The "9.142 million initiative" would sell just as good.