Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-voters-reject-proposal-to-cap-population-at-ten-million/91548146

by FabCH • 1 month ago

205 227 1 month ago

swissinfo.ch

FabCH10• 1 month ago

In case people were wondering about the result of that thread which made the front page a few days ago…

nairboon• 1 month ago

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059

alephnerd2• 1 month ago

Swiss citizens have rejected by a 55% majority...

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.

FabCH10• 1 month ago

Only 58% of the voters voted.

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.

alephnerd2• 1 month ago

The issue is this means in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen - which is very doable over two election cycles.

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.

whazor• 1 month ago

maybe next time it will be 11M

Arodex5• 1 month ago

55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes?

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.

tonfa3• 1 month ago

More surprising it didn't pass the "majority of cantons" either (both are required for initiatives like this), I would have expected it to pass (there are a lot of smaller/rural/alpine cantons which tends to vote more conservative).

brainwad16• 1 month ago

The Masseneinwanderungsinitiative passed in 2014... and fuck all happened (despite the no campaign heavily leaning on the argument that it would kill the bilaterals, e.g. https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full). When push comes to shove, there is a solid bloc in parliament and the executive for saving the EU bilaterals, even if it means ignoring constitutional initiatives.

epolanski• 1 month ago

Swiss are too educated to fall for this.

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.

BoingBoomTschak2• 1 month ago

So don't worry, only one or two terrorist attacks/Rotherham situations that the medias can't completely memory-hole and you'll be able to scream "It's like the bad guys from my Netflix series won, my duderinos!" on Reddit to your heart's content.

#NotSorryForFlaming

jeffbee• 1 month ago

Cities once again save rural voters from civic suicide.

abc032• 1 month ago

Maybe a personal analysis: It's a trend that is growing all over Europe. It's the equivalent of overtourism and a problem for the ruling parties (except the SVP that proposed it). Expect it to continue quite soon in Switzerland and other European countries (France, Germany etc.). Of course it doesn't make sense to curb immigration at 10 Mio and many know it. It was also for many a vote against the ruling parties. Although Switzerland is an immigration country, Swiss don't think this way. It's more farmer/alpine style: Welcome guests but expect them to leave again. Many Swiss also don't interact with foreigners a lot, including myself (besides at work). Many of my friends don't want to give up their prosperity. They are fairly advanced in their career and it's more about enjoying life. So for many of them it's more a rational decision than really a belief we should have more immigration. As long as I can benefit, it's good. For younger people it may be different. My wife, who is not native Swiss, was in favor. And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low.

JumpCrisscross12• 1 month ago

It's a trend that is growing all over Europe

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.

stephbook3• 1 month ago

Is this Berlin that decides anything and rolls it out contintent-wide with us in the room right now?

FabCH10• 1 month ago

Immigration is not devolved. The whole point of Schengen is the opposite of devolution of immigration.

You are confusing immigration with naturalization. Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly.

tonfa3• 1 month ago

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.

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)

geremiiah• 1 month ago

To me it seems like EU countries are independently embarking on the Canada-policy of importing a whole bunch of South East Asians and Latin Americans. From Hungary to Ireland, you see the same trend.

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.

ProllyInfamous4• 1 month ago

I think this somewhat federation causes problems similar (by design!) to those that the Federal System within the United States encourages. The "finger pointing" allows for status quo to carry on as usual, while the overlapping & glacial judicial systems legislate glacially from their antiquated benches...

----

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.

Avicebron3• 1 month ago

How are the job prospects and housing prices? Switzerland is beautiful and I would gladly move there for six or so equivalent figures..

FabCH10• 1 month ago

If you are non-EU, you will not get a work permit.

If you are EU or do get a work permit, you will not get housing.

The vote was for a reason…

stephbook3• 1 month ago

They pay incredibly well, but their work culture (vacation, protections for parents etc) is atrocious. They're on par with Japan/South Korea.

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!

plufz• 1 month ago

Can you explain why you think xenophobia is low? My experience as a swed is that xenophobia and trying to avoid immigration often go hand in hand. You do not have a large Swiss right populist semi racist party like most other European countries have?

abc032• 1 month ago

In my experience, Swiss don't like criminals, unemployed people and people showing openly their religion. They negatively associate certain nationalities with stereotypes (e.g. Albanians, Maroccans etc.). If you are a representative of these groups, yes, it will be a problem. Violence towards foreigners is, compared to other countries, does not exist. Also with other nationalities, it is very different. Some people don't like Germans (that's also historically of course). However, with Germans near the boder it is often not a problem because they are more similar (and know how Swiss behave). With people from Berlin, many Swiss have not much in common. My wife is visible not Swiss and she never encountered raciscm (quite the contrary, she gets more free products at local stores than me because people recognize her). She also likes to buy tomatoes only from Switzerland. It is all how you behave in my experience. To the SVP, it is quite a different between the party and representative that are in the government. They are considered moderate due to the political system in Switzerland.

LaurensBER• 1 month ago

And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low

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.

seydor• 1 month ago

We ve been hearing that the trend is growing for decades now but it's failed to achieve anything via popular support. If anything there is anti-immigrant fatigue and indifference. It did provide, however a convenient scarecrow that helped to hide under the rug the mountain of bad policies that are rendering european countries irrelevant economic backwaters.

ourmandave• 1 month ago

Never heard of a hard limit on population. What happens if you go over?

It was terrible for girls born in China when they had their one child limit.

Biganon• 1 month ago

Nothing. It was an initiative to limit immigration, by a xenophobic party.

They don't give a damn if you have 13 children, they don't want brown people in Switzerland.

blockmarker2• 1 month ago

27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?

rsynnott4• 1 month ago

See the documentary Logan's Run.

fsh• 1 month ago

The SVP campaign in favor of the initiative was something else. Half the country is plastered with their posters, and social media is full of astroturfing. It didn't pay off this times, but the propaganda dominance of this party is concerning.

phendrenad2• 1 month ago

I don't get why they would want to do this, when runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world. We're at a point where (I think, controversially) we need to sanction (or more) nations that aren't increasing their population annually. This is an existential threat facing the human race.

Caracas288• 1 month ago

Most people have a local view of their world through their immediate surroundings, not a panoptic or holistic perspective on the earth or their nation.

The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.

Lanolderen2• 1 month ago

It's aimed at immigration. Babies are OK. Not all that incentivized but OK.

vladms4• 1 month ago

30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues".

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).

Thraway1982• 1 month ago

What???? Why would we have to do that? Runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world? We have billions of people on the planet. GPD not going up is NOT an existential threat.

brainwad16• 1 month ago

The complexity of society has got to be somewhat proportional to its population. If we halve the population, we won't just half the GWP. It will be lower still due to less specialisation.

Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.

poisonborz• 1 month ago

Misleading to call this "cap population", no one can cap population. The vote was about capping immigrant benefits, mostly aiming germans (reaching 9.5m) and then Swiss EU isolation/"Swexit" (at 10m). Basically the right wing SVP's long term goals packaged in a format that was more palatable to the masses.

brightbeige• 1 month ago

Recent, related New Yorker article that goes into the background leading up to the vote

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl...

    Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”

viking1232• 1 month ago

Then do like UAE? No permanent residency or naturalization

FabCH10• 1 month ago

We do. Swiss naturalization is famously difficult.

But EU citizens can basically live forever in CH even though technically they don’t have permanent residency.

throwawaycan• 1 month ago

When people have no hope of not making it as a permanent resident or citizen, their incentives to perform well are not as high. Also immigration is a global market, you compete with other countries that might offer better conditions so you lose on the best workforce.

lostlogin• 1 month ago

Amnesty International report that things are fairly bad in the UAE for foreign workers.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...

mrtksn9• 1 month ago

Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.

It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.

It’s first “I don’t want illegal immigrants”, when the immigration is legal they start doing things like take back control(UK) or sustainability (Swiss).

What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago or robots now.

I find it annoying that they screw other stuff just because they don’t want to face the truth about their character.

vladms4• 1 month ago

Probably the solutions mentioned (sex/robots) are not the only ones. Many complain loudly about what might be a minority of the workers, so just knowing more people would have improved their opinion. Others do not have anything better to do, and they pick up this type of "crusades" with low impact on them, but big impact on others.

But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.

lotsofpulp• 1 month ago

What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago

Unprotected heterosexual sex and births were decoupled 55 years ago. Almost as tenuous is the link between births and well raised children who can and will provide the labor that is wanted.

Saline951515• 1 month ago

They don't want their son to do it because immigrants prevent the salaries of those jobs to rise naturally. Mass immigration is capitalism's answer to the Baumol law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the bourgeois left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.

Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.

Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?

dyauspitr7• 1 month ago

More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.

They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.

FireBeyond• 1 month ago

Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.
It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.

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.

627467• 1 month ago

Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries.

Yeah, it's also not unusual system: just look at gulf countries, singapore, HK,... the problem is europeans themselves talked themselves into some kind of system that prevents them from following the same model. They still would love to though

collinmcnulty• 1 month ago

As Terry Pratchett put it in Carpe Jugulum:

And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

mfuzzey• 1 month ago

Interesting that those supporting the motion claimed it was because there was no space left for new arrivals and that it put too much pressure on infrastructure like trains and yet the largest support came from the countryside which proably has less overcrowding and the cities were greatly against it.

Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...

s1artibartfast4• 1 month ago

Probably a pretty big selection bias there. People who don't like crowding and want space are more likely to live in the country. People already living in a dense City are less sensitive to more of the same.

I have a friend who voted yes and he lives outside of Basel because he thinks the city is too crowded. If you've been there you might find that amusing. His most vocal complaint is about too many people on Swiss hiking trails and difficulty in Booking huts.

More recently, he was laid off by a multinational pharma company where most of the Swiss office is now German immigrants.

That's not to say culture isn't a factor, but it would be a mistake to apply American ideas of racism to it

therealdrag0• 1 month ago

Yep. 0 to 1 is much more noticeable than 99 to 100.

thrance• 1 month ago

The less exposure to different people the more xenophobia there is... That's true everywhere.

hintymad• 1 month ago

Just curious, how can a state cap the country's population (I assume not like the Chinese government)? This appears that they assume their birth rate will be so low that they will need to absorb immigrates?

kgwgk9• 1 month ago

I don't know about "need" but the 1% population growth of Switzerland is already coming mostly from immigration. (It's also the case in the US, and in the EU it's even worse: without immigration population is declining.)

clcaev• 1 month ago

This is interesting — it put immigration limits directly up for a popular vote.

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?

addendum: thank you kgwgk

kgwgk9• 1 month ago

The vote was not about limiting citizenship. It was about limiting the number of residents - if anything the effect would have been to _reduce_ that permanent underclass with fewer rights.

comrade1234• 1 month ago

Things were fine during Covid. Now that the tourists are back the trains and trams are packed. The marketing for this campaign specifically talked about trains being packed but it should have focused more on how Swiss natives have to move out of Zurich to find an affordable place to jive, but the SVP would never focus on Zurich because theyre unpopular here.

Hammershaft• 1 month ago

Isn't that a consequence of Zurich housing & zoning policy?

danielspace23• 1 month ago

What do tourists in trains have to do with population caps? Tourists are not registered citizens, they exist regardless of population caps.

rsynnott4• 1 month ago

The train thing is particularly weird. The trains and trams and buses in Dublin are overloaded. I have never heard _anyone_, not even the fringe racist parties who'd happily blame bad weather on immigration, blame immigrants for this. People generally blame the _government_ for it. As you'd expect.

sharts• 1 month ago

Why cultures that depend on immigrant labor complain about the immigrants but never do the work themselves?

maverick451• 1 month ago

Duh-muh, that evil, evil right-wing proposals.

R.I.P. Switzerland

huntoa• 1 month ago

Is it good to have an immigration policy roughly half the country detests?

Who benefits from immigration the most? The capitalist gains cheap and weak labor, consumers to sell products and services to, and rent apartments to. It doesn't matter to him if the money comes from benefits. The negative effects are externalized to ordinary citizens. The capitalists own the media, which they use to shape public opinion on immigration in their favor or divert attention elsewhere. It also gives them a target to deflect from themselves and their obscene enrichment at the expense of the taxpayer.

The problem with a population cap is that it conflates immigration that is net negative (people from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey and their children) and net positive immigration (Western immigrants) [1].

Here's a transcript of Studs Terkel in 1980 interviewing a couple of German publishers (from 03m22s to 06m10s) highlighting the citizens aversion to incompatible people, economic asylum-seekers, and who put those rules in place [2]:

Terkel: Is there a German attitude towards the Turkish minority here? There are quite a few Turks here.

Publishers: Yes. There is an attitude, especially against immigrants who are not coming from Europe, because now the Italians and so on, they are accepted. They are Christians. But those Turkish people build a kind of reserve army of the labor market and are very often detested, viscerally, by Germans. [...] I think the big problem that you have in Germany is the "Asylantenproblem" [asylum seeker problem] [...] This is part of the normalizing of German national consciousness, this question of the asylum possibilities. As you know, as a result of the liberation of Germany by the allies, in our constitution there is a fundamental right because many founding fathers of the Western republic had been immigrants, [...] so they stated that every man or woman, persecuted for political reasons, or racial reasons, and so on, had to have asylum in Germany. Now, when the economic crisis in Germany and the technological changes have brought about also more than 2 million unemployed people, there are tendencies within the right parties to restrict, to amend the right of asylum, with the argument that those "Asylanten", those asylum seekers, are not really politically persecuted; they are so-called economic asylants.

[1] https://archive.is/mx1ni

[2] https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bende...

brainwad16• 1 month ago

I don't know if it's good, but it's not possible to have it any other way since the population is roughly split on whether freedom of movement is great or terrible, and has been for decades.

Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

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