Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26108597

by mojuba • 12 years ago

52 92 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

spindritf• 12 years ago

And EU officials are unhappy about it. I guess if it was one of the EU countries, people would get to vote until a pre-approved decision in a referendum is reached.

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

TazeTSchnitzel2• 12 years ago

No. If it was an EU country, same thing would happen. EU would crack down on treaty violation.

waps7• 12 years ago

By which you mean Europe would claim that the international treaties they make superseed the will of the local voters by virtue of them being in Europe ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_(European_Union_law)

yulaow2• 12 years ago

Imho it is not a good choice at all. As the EU commission said, if the Switzerland want to put some immigration block they have to drop also all other rights of the treaty EU-Sw [1]. Considering how much Swiss companies depend on the EU to make profit, I think this can be a large catastrophe on the mid-long term.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un...

Hermel7• 12 years ago

The dependency goes two ways. For example, there is no German car without parts coming from Switzerland. I hope that Brussels does not act offended and stays reasonable. Any action that hurts both parties would just be childish. However, they Swiss already struggled in the past to explain their democracy to the EU bureaucrats. Being used to decide for themselves, European politicians often fail to fully comprehend a system in which the people have the last word.

aristidb3• 12 years ago

I suppose you consider not upholding one side of the treaty when the other side has been dropped "childish"?

danmaz74• 12 years ago

Yes, that's the right spirit. You make a deal, then you don't keep up your part of the deal, and then if the other part reacts they are "childish".

Democracy means that the Swiss are free to make their choices, and bear the consequences, like every other democracy.

_delirium3• 12 years ago

It may impact Swiss nationals in other countries as well. One of my Swiss colleagues is pretty worried about what this means for his Danish job. My understanding is that it's possible he could be deported, though that probably won't happen. The freedom-to-reside treaty is reciprocal: Danish nationals can work and live in Switzerland under equal conditions that Swiss nationals can work and live in Denmark. Now it appears that Switzerland has abrogated parts of its treaty obligations, and is imposing new restrictions on Danish nationals living in Switzerland. It's not clear what this means for the treaty rights of Swiss nationals living in Denmark. They may no longer have any treaty rights if Switzerland is deemed to have withdrawn from the treaty. Though Denmark might voluntarily choose to grandfather in existing residents, or give them an easy path to apply for a new visa (probably the business community will strongly push for this).

sentenza5• 12 years ago

If the Danish wanted to give Switzerland the finger they could just offer all Swiss there a deal: Become a Danish citizen if you renounce your Swiss citizenship.

Though I expect a reaction that is both more level-headed and apathetic, especially from the Danish, since they have lately also been keen on the xenophobia front (re-instated border controls a few years back).

Hermel7• 12 years ago

Actually, the EU should be grateful - that decision will result in fewer engineers, doctors, professors, and other highly qualified talents migrating to Switzerland.

rmc4• 12 years ago

The EU/Swiss deal is (I think) an all-or-nothing deal about immigration/customs/etc where either side can pull out completely. Switzerland might have just pulled out completely.

mistakoala• 12 years ago

IIRC, Switzerland reserves certain rights on immigration.

waps7• 12 years ago

So what you mean to say is that the EU politicians will show backbone, respect their principles and reject a potential of new power over a new state in order to safeguard European law ?

That'll be a first.

e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitut...

These are the people that have not even mentioned the situation in Turkey. Hell, they haven't even stopped treaty negotiations about Turkey joining the EU.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

It seems that Europe is tightening its immigration policies.

I would say it makes sense given that previous policies gave rise to some suboptimal dynamics.

I wonder if they manage to still make holes for qualified specialists.

rmc4• 12 years ago

Half a billion people in the EU have the right to live and work in any of the 27 member states. People from some very poor countries can live and work in very rich countries. That's actually a massive amount of freedom of movement, and dismantling of immigration barriers.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

How come UK wants to stop paying immigrants from poor countries unemployement benefits?

If you think about it you'll wonder how they managed to pay newly immigrated poor people unemployement benefits in the first place.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

To quote the article:

"Those in favour of mass migration says the policy will benefit the Swiss economy"

It is kind of interesting that mass migration opponents have a list of reasons while proponents usually wave this one only.

dageshi• 12 years ago

The people who voted against such immigration probably suspect that benefits to the Swiss economy probably doesn't necessarily mean benefits to them, it might mean increased competition, which in effect nullifies that one argument commonly put forward.

ZirconCode2• 12 years ago

Even the voting booklets were pretty biased against passing (IMO of course), although I'm not surprised at this result. The type of xenophobia often attributed to hillbillies in american culture is a lot more common in Switzerland than I expected. The sad thing is most people I've meet which hold this belief, could themselves be considered foreigners.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

Why should foreigners want to bring more foreigners into the country?

It will drive their wages down and decrease living conditions (both short term).

You might argue it would be "a fair thing" for migrants to support migration, but it's not a rational one.

gaius2• 12 years ago

It's a similar reason to trade unions traditionally opposing minimum wage laws.

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

When I first arrived in Switzerland I was very surprised by the open racism and generally far-right-wing platform of the SVP. The black sheep poster[1] is pretty infamous of course, and then there's the small fact that the SVP was strongly against women's suffrage, within my lifetime! I think of universal suffrage as belonging to the American Reconstruction era but for Switzerland it's contemporaneous with men landing on the moon.

Even an American can easily see that a large chunk of Switzerland is quite reactionary. It seems weird. For some reason I expected a wealthy European country to have liberal social values.

http://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/svp_0...

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

I would say a controversial thing:

As Switz people are historically all from one race and they didn't have a habit of importing slaves of other races, they don't have to like other races as a group.

Of course they should still treat individual people equally because not doing so is a human rights violation and is just plain rude.

pcurve• 12 years ago

I don't think it's fair to attribute this to xenophobia. You need to have some soft quota because immigration involves people; and people issues are complex to manage. Absorbing 80,000 new immigrants into population of 8 million is a huge deal.

Ordinary Swiss workers will ask themselves, "who benefits from this immigration?" The 50/50 referendum result is indicative of people's uncertainty about the answer to that question; and not necessarily that of their xenophobic attitude.

Hermel7• 12 years ago

This is potentially good news for immigrants from the rest of the world. Currently, there are very strict quotas in place to make up for the large inflow of Europeans. In future, both categories will have quotas, which could result in more generous quotas for countries like the US. In an ironic twist, this could result in a more globally oriented Switzerland.

seszett3• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...

With most countries with high amounts of immigrants being either quite poor or quite rich (especially those in Europe) and Switzerland obviously belonging to the rich European ones... it's not obvious what good could come from trying to leave this list of the richest, highest-immigration countries.

Hermel7• 12 years ago

According to that list, 28.9% of the Swiss population are immigrants. Even if the proposed quota cuts immigration in half, it will still stay one of the top countries in that regard.

stefantalpalaru• 12 years ago

Some people hope that the EU will cut Switzerland's access to the common market which will force it to officially accede to the European Union and have a saying in the rules and regulations it has to adopt anyway.

ZirconCode2• 12 years ago

Actually Switzerland will most likely have to take this action itself, as the Swiss law now contradicts itself in this aspect.

michaelt• 12 years ago

From the perspective of the EU, taking punitive action would make them look like Russia, eager to push their 'allies' about. It would be a gift to people who say the EU wants to take away countries' individual sovereignty.

According to those who oppose caps, instituting caps will cause a bunch of pain anyway. If the EU want to punish the swiss, the best thing to do would be to allow that pain, which the swiss have indisputably brought upon themselves.

hugh4life• 12 years ago

Why should "Switzerland" care about how rich it is if it's not Swiss?

Wealth is not the measure of all things and it's definitely not something that gets spread around evenly. There are winners and losers to mass immigration. Mass immigration also reduces the notion of there being a common culture and destiny which reduces the social capital and civic mindedness required for public programs to work.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

I would take this table with a grain of salt. It claims that Belarus is the most "immigrated to" country of all CIS (bar Kazakhstan) when really it's the most monocultural country out here. They probably failed to calculate USSR dissolution correctly and maybe have other problems.

Hermel7• 12 years ago

I wonder wether this is part of a larger backlash against centralization in general. The British have become very skeptical of the EU. And in September, the Scots will even vote on becoming independent from the UK. Catalonia feels less and less comfortable as part of Spain. Is this only a temporary phenomenon or an ongoing trend?

skylan_q• 12 years ago

The British have become very skeptical of the EU.

This is par for the course in historical terms. The U.K. has always been against the formation of a strong, unified, mainland Europe.

gaius2• 12 years ago

Indeed we fought two wars in the last century to prevent it.

fidotron2• 12 years ago

Not quite. The prevailing view among pro-European Brits, which has been the dominant political force in the UK of the last 40 years or so, was to create a very large trade bloc across a wider Europe, including freedom of movement of labour, but without things like the single currency. This differs from especially the classic French view, which was to create a Franco-German superstate which would be structurally incapable of having a war with itself through almost complete unification of a relatively small group of countries.

The collapse of the Berlin wall certainly played into the British vision for a while, then the Euro initially did well causing the federal contingent to be excited, but the structural weaknesses from the Eurozone members not having gone all in on unification, especially for budgetary policy, have swung it temporarily back to the large but loose collective. The split between the French and German experience of the Euro problem is going to prevent any real progress on this point at all since increasingly those two parties are going to disagree on their visions of the future.

RivieraKid7• 12 years ago

I would say that thay rather don't want the EU tell them what to do. Which is completely understandable.

jsnell2• 12 years ago

This is of course potentially disastrous. Our startup is based in Switzerland, with about half us working in Zurich and the other half in the EU. The goal has always been to do most new hiring in Switzerland rather than continue building a distributed organization. If the immigration situation changes drastically, we'll probably need to instead grow in other countries. And after that happens, there really is very little point in keeping the company registered and paying taxes in Switzerland at all. Even in the current situation being outside of the EU is already rather inconvenient.

And I'm sure ours isn't a unique situation. A sane immigration policy has been one of the main things Switzerland has going for it. For example Google Zurich can't be at all happy about this.

(As is normal in these kinds of things, the vote to restrict immigation was concentrated in the rural areas where no immigrants would move to. Meanwhile the places where immigrants actually have an impact voted against the proposal).

Hermel7• 12 years ago

Yes, such quotas are a pain in the ass for a startup. The company I worked for lost a foreign employee because his residence-permit was not renewed after two years.

However, I'm not afraid about Google - they have all the legal processes in place to get non-EU citizens into Switzerland that face quotas already today. And in the worst case, they can still offer them a job in another office.

jsnell2• 12 years ago

Oh, Google as a whole will of course be fine. But it'd be insane to have a huge engineering office in a small country and a bad immigration policy. So they'll grow elsewhere, and Switzerland loses out. (I worked in Google's Zurich office the last time there was a big immigration quota scare, IIRC 2008 or 2009 when they cut various quotas in half with no warning. It definitely wasn't treated internally as casually as you imply.)

return0• 12 years ago

I wonder if EU countries would ever pull a referendum on whether they should impose quotas on their nationals who keep their savings in swiss banks.

RivieraKid7• 12 years ago

There is nothing inherently wrong about tightening immigration policy. I don't know the details but there are couple of perfectly understandable reasons why people oppose immigration (note that they overlap a bit):

1. Immigrants are disproportionally responsible for criminality.

2. Switzerland is a rich country and the Swiss want to keep the wealth for themselves. But of course, many immigrants have a net positive effect on the country's wealth.

3. Many immigrants come from a very different culture and don't want to adjust to the mainstream culture.

4. Immigrants may form groups isolated from the rest of the society.

5. The Swiss culture is different than the American one. They're not that welcoming to immigrants. They want to keep their culture. I personally understand why they voted not to allow mosques in their towns.

RivieraKid7• 12 years ago

There's also a nice analogy to the startup world. Heard of a culture fit? Immigration policy is similar.

kkowalczyk2• 12 years ago

Given that (in aggregate) startups are phenomenally successful, looks like the Swiss made the right decision.

RivieraKid7• 12 years ago

Why the downvote?

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

I guess it's caused by Compulsive Libertarian Downvote Disorder which is triggered by seeing non-politically-correct claims while not being able to mount compelling arguments against those.

eps• 12 years ago

Armchair analytics.

tttp2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure you have enough facts to support your arguments

1) most probably if you take into account other factors (social economics ones), the nationality it's not a major one

2) as you said, the wealth created by migrants can be a net positive effect

3) many immigrants (85%) come from EU

4) almost none "ethnic ghettos" in CH

5) agree it's different. CH has about a 1/3 of its population that are migrants and they are generally welcomed and integrated (the regions that got most migrants rejected the initiative).

Beside, there isn't a unified "swiss culture". If you simply look at the languages, they are 3 different ones.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

1) Bad social economic factors arise from bringing in a lot of immigrants and paying them "below water level".

Also leaving them to their own devices.

I don't know if that is the case with Switzerland but there is just so much immigrants you can integrate and so much discount work you can get from them before you begin to rip the social fabric of the country; And this is happening in some countries, they push too hard.

So, limiting immigration to some realistic amount seems to be the right thing. Of course this applies less to educated professionals from similar cultures and more to cheap labor.

RivieraKid7• 12 years ago

1) Perhaps it's just the poor and unemployed immigrants that cause criminality. But still, you can say that immigration increases unemployment and therefore criminality.

2) That's why it's important who can immigrate. An uneducated family escaping from a poor country?

3) 4) 5) Ok, good points, these were mostly general arguments against immigration.

As for the unified culture - I would say that their culture is more unified than in the rest of europe. Languages are not that important.

Gmo2• 12 years ago

1. Immigrants are disproportionally responsible for criminality.

As wikipedians would say, citation needed.

Besides, the majority of immigration within Switzerland are Europeans (because this law is for quotas about EU immigrants), the majority of which are French and Germans with a good level of qualifications, a frankly not so different culture, and the same language as the Swiss. So it has nothing to do with mosques.

RivieraKid7• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime

Besides, the majority of immigration within Switzerland are Europeans (because this law is for quotas about EU immigrants), the majority of which are French and Germans with a good level of qualifications, a frankly not so different culture, and the same language as the Swiss.

Ok, that's a good point.

sampo3• 12 years ago

the majority of immigration within Switzerland are Europeans (because this law is for quotas about EU immigrants), the majority of which are French and Germans with a good level of qualifications

Citation needed?

henridf• 12 years ago

This vote has a classic "urban vs rural" component. Urban areas (where high population growth has the most direct impact) said "no" to the restriction of immigration. Rural areas said yes. The other component is linguistic/regional.

These two components typically summarize most Swiss votes pretty well.

(most visible on a map, see http://www.24heures.ch/suisse/tendance-initiative-udc-limmig...)

fidotron2• 12 years ago

These kind of moves are Europe's equivalent to the bus nonsense in Silicon Valley. It's the misplaced anger of a bunch of people that feel economically impotent and threatened by outsiders that seemingly operate in places they consider to be their homes more effectively than they do.

Removing freedom of movement of labour is highly retrogressive, and vast parts of the world would benefit from enabling it further, but we need to be better at getting to the bottom of this alienation at home question and how to resolve it because otherwise the fear of outsiders is just going to become more common and more acceptable.

kkowalczyk2• 12 years ago

It's actually the opposite of the "bus nonsense" and actually the concerns are valid.

In SV, poor(er) people complain about too many rich(er) people coming in.

When it comes to immigration, rich(er) people are afraid of too many poor(er) people coming in.

Also they are not removing freedom of movement, they put a limit on rate.

Which is something U.S. has been doing for decades and nothing bad really happened because of that.

In addition, the math for Switzerland is much different.

It's hard to change demographics of 300 million country by letting in a few hundred thousand immigrants.

According to the article, already 25% of 8 million Swiss are foreigners. That would be a pretty alarming number if you were native Swiss. If the current trend continues (80 thousand immigrants per year), that would be 50% in ~25 years.

Let's also not ignore the real danger of ethnic-based or religious-based conflict, like Bosnian War.

sentenza5• 12 years ago

The swiss enjoy the many benefits of the European Free Trade Association and want to be as integrated into the EU economy as possible without actually having to pay the price that comes with full membership. Not everybody is happy about this and I expect the EU to retaliate by putting more pressure on the freedoms of Swiss banks.

Can't have your lunch and eat it.

guard-of-terra13• 12 years ago

So you're arguing that inflood of immigrants is not a benefit, but rather a "price" you have to "pay"?

That's an interesting twist to our discourse.

sentenza5• 12 years ago

What? NO! That's not what I meant. The immigrants are a benefit.

The price you have to pay is that you get the Euro, you pay into the EU budget, you have your banking and industry regulated by the EU and you get the (admittedly questionable) supervision of the national budget.

There is a bigger question about cherry-picking the EU treaties here. Too many nationalists wanting to opt out of too many things.

EDIT: I must admit that my original comment can be read the way you did, but it was definitely not meant that way. I can assure you that I personally have made extensive use of the freedom to roam, work and study wherever I please within the EU.

Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show

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