FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
54% Positive
Analyzed from 3592 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#don#swiss#immigration#more#countries#around#those#country#vote#jobs
Discussion (171 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl...
It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
It’s first “I don’t want illegal immigrants”, when the immigration is legal they start doing things like take back control(UK) or sustainability (Swiss).
What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago or robots now.
I find it annoying that they screw other stuff just because they don’t want to face the truth about their character.
But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.
They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.
I wont call this xenophobia. Its just rich people annoyed by the poor hanging around outside the working hours. They often even like their poor people that do their things, they are actually annoyed by the other rich peoples employees or the kids of those employees who are seen as not as well behaved as theirs.
PS. I am German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.
Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.
Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?
Turn the brain on from time to time!
Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.
Just ridiculous.
apologies, but those of us in the Left agree more with the second part of your sentence than the Left. Are you mixing Leftists and Liberals, perchance?
If you want to go back to your ethnostate fantasy, people are going to have to go back to consuming what you can produce in your own country. So Switzerland is going back to a diet of essentially bread and cheese and frankly I don’t think they grow enough grain for the bread.
> It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
And it can happen implicitly or explicitly. Witness Jackson Hole. None of the workers can afford to live there and the nearest towns are not close. So the residents arranged a coach service to bus the workers in. And at the end of the day, and out. Yes, to their homes, but best believe there is a very limited window of return coaches which leads to a feeling of almost a sundown town.
Another irony is, the kids of these people who climb the ladder are often the people who create the culture of the country eventually.
Unprotected heterosexual sex and births were decoupled 55 years ago. Almost as tenuous is the link between births and well raised children who can and will provide the labor that is wanted.
> And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...
But EU citizens can basically live forever in CH even though technically they don’t have permanent residency.
The current system permitting freedom of movement across the continent while devolving immigration policy entirely to members creates a fundamental tension the EU needs to resolve. Because otherwise, Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly, which is bound to generate backlash even if they run a perfect programme.
Part of it is by economic necessity. For example finding nursing staff is very challenging and you have to compete with the US and Australia and other rich countries.
But part of it doesn't make much sense. We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside of Europe when we have about 2,500 EU universities pumping out graduates each year.
I was involved in a startup in the Netherlands. We tried to recruit Dutch people, all wanted safe 9-5 jobs where they would know what they would do in 1-2 years. A startup can not guarantee that.
We ended up with most engineers foreigners, many (but not all) that have studied there.
So I would say that it is also risk and opportunity related. Someone "from outside" will be willing to do more, will have to prove himself, will take more risk. A "local" will have family support, wealth, a network, might want and value stability.
I don't have an opinion about how things "should be", I am just sharing how I saw them (myself an immigrant, multiple times)
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
No. Finding staff that'll work for very low wages is very challenging. It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages.
You do realize German nationals (followed by French) are the top contingent in term of immigration to Swizerland.
(Only EU citizens benefit from freedom of movement to settle in Switzerland)
Yes. I’m also conceding to the SVP the observation that a good fraction of said nationals are recently naturalized.
----
Hopefully we can all take inspiration from the living memories of balkanization – smaller groups, hopefully with shared interests and common backgrounds, ought to be in charge of themselves; and themselves, only.
Massive internal trade barriers and security so fragmented you’re at the whim of your larger neighbors?
You are confusing immigration with naturalization. Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly.
Fair enough and great point.
It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany. (Though still much harder than in America, at least based on my American friends who naturalized there and this Swiss of Indian and Germanic origin who naturalized in America.) It’s fair for those countries to want to maintain those differences.
Tbh I cannot see anything else but Swiss people at some point voting themselves out of this somehow.
I would agree and also suggest that initiatives like this play a large role in doing so. While there's a lot of bullshit arguments coming from the "yes" camp they do make some reasonable points and it's important that we discuss them to show what the trade-offs are.
I cannot speak for all Swiss but knowing that it was a democratic decision to continue with some, high skilled, immigration makes it far easier to accept than if some government employee in Bern would've made that decision single handed.
Source: am Swiss
If you are EU or do get a work permit, you will not get housing.
The vote was for a reason…
Non-EU means it's harder to get a permit, especially without working experience, but it's not impossible either.
Housing is difficult in cities like Zurich but calling it impossible is stretching it, especially if one is fine with a longer commute.
Meanwhile the parlement and the anti+immigration far-right vote all the time to increase landlord rights and margins. Most of them are landlords, of course...
You get bonus points for commuting across the German border and utilizing our cheap prices. Don't forget to get the value-added tax refunded!
For those voting to strictly limit citizenship, I wonder if they are supporting: a permanent underclass without full rights? or that basic needs to be more expensive? or that widespread automation will soon meet basic labor needs?
Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...
It was terrible for girls born in China when they had their one child limit.
They don't give a damn if you have 13 children, they don't want brown people in Switzerland.
Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.
That's the part they currently don't say out loud. They are getting bolder and bolder though.
It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.
This is still very close for comfort, and SVP will re-propose it again and again and again as it and it's predecessors have done for decades.
55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes?
But of course, the SVP have been launching the same initiative since the 70s, they are unlikely to stop now.
Very typical, and even higher than usual.
The Swiss have votations all the time. They also can vote by mail. Those who didn't vote had no opinion, or no strong opinion, on the matter.
Also, cities who should suffer the most of overcrowding by immigrants voted against, as well as cantons situated at the border, while the backcountry who never see any immigrant voted in favor.
A 55% win with 58% turnout despite how this vote was front and center of media discourse is very worrisome as this shows how disengaged the other 42% are.
If the marketing were less xenophobic and the cap were derived from some scientific basis, I think I could be persuaded to vote for it. Particularly since it is not a vote for Chexit, but a democratic vote to confront the EU. (Britain triggered Article 50. Nothing in this referendum directs Berne to do that.)
#NotSorryForFlaming
They have among the lowest fertility rates on the planet and a huge over 50 population.
There's no way they can keep being wealthy and comfortable without younger immigrants.