Why Switzerland is weighing a 10M population limit | Hacker News Reader

Why Switzerland is weighing a 10M population limit

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24 pointspseudolus22 comments

If they ban immigration, will we hear a repeat of Japan’s “aging population, declining tax income” stories? If you need young or specialized workers, get cracking on birthing as that’ll provide candidates in 18-30 years.

We will probably have robots by then, so a declining population won't be a problem.

But import problematic immigrants that are a tax + criminal burden and you make everything worse.

Are you going to make your robots pay taxes? The idea that immigrants are a tax or crime burden is a stupid myth.

Which immigrants from where? Some nationalities do represent a tax burden and an increase in crime rates.

The overwhelming majority of swiss immigrants are either highly skilled individuals that the swiss population cannot produce in numbers or they do jobs locals won't do (cleaning, etc).

Good luck telling Swiss pharma or any other of their specialized industries to live without immigrants, they can close tomorrow. Immigrants are an insane boost to Swiss economy.

Also, I lived and been in Switzerland few times after, there's virtually no problematic immigrants. I've never ever felt the slightest danger, even walking at night with nobody but the kind of immigrants you don't like, you just don't.

Even though foreigners are overrepresented compared to locals (as in any other country in the world with immigrants they are the poorest and thus more inclined) the absolute numbers are very very low.

So no, higher or lower number of immigrants don't have linear correlations. Switzerland has an insane number of expats and immigrants as % of the population, insanely higher than the US or other countries like Poland or Italy, yet their crime numbers are fractional.

Find the market clearing price for unwanted jobs with domestic labor. Any job will be done at the right compensation. This is what UBI would do. I prefer this versus continuing to require an imported underclass. With my apologies to the conservative mental model, “starve the beast” but of cheap labor.

i'm okay w importing workers if they're treated the same as domestic workers. its the system we have now that incentivizes importing and abusing workers by somehow pretending that employers have no role at all in illegal immigration and only punishing the immigrants that fails miserably at everything immigration policy says it's supposed to do.

Ahh, but the purpose of the system is what it does. Would employers and countries import immigrants if they had to treat them the same as domestic workers?

and thus the solution to illegal immigration and "immigrants taking our jobs" is to treat immigrants fairly. sounds like a win/win, no?

How's Swiss immigration policy failing Switzerland?

Of course land and real estate is limited, they can't keep growing at these numbers.

But stating that it's failed till now, is just a statement of "I've never lived in Switzerland and I have no clue what I'm talking about".

You know that 30%+ of Swiss population is foreign born?

36% of the workforce is foreign born.

In Zurich, Geneve, Lausanne, 44%+ of the residents are foreigners, and more than half the workforce is foreigners. And that's even ignoring how many people work there but reside in neighbouring countries (France border is close to Geneve and Lausanne is close and even has a boat between the two sides mostly carrying workers).

If you think that a Swiss national (which has several advantages from a hiring perspective) is going to be cleaning your toilet, no matter the money, without having higher paying options you're absolutely out of your mind.

Well, 48% of voters support this. We’re almost at a majority. Do you want to bet on it?

Switzerland is a tiny country, it cannot grow endlessly in population.

Albeit it's density is lower than comparable Belgium, Switzerland is crossed by the alps so the real available land is much smaller, virtually all of the residents live in 30% of the space.

In any case, that's the beauty of Switzerland: Swiss citizens can decide for themselves. I've seen many referendums in Switzerland and I've rarely seen Swiss citizens vote against their interest. Proposals have often an initial support, which fades as people discuss it and investigate it more.

Populism has really low grip there, politicians riding emotions have little legislative power.

Switzerland doesn't really have jobs locals wont do like other countries. e.g. cleaning pays enough that it's as respectable a profession as any other.

And yet all of the cleaners are foreigners.

I've never ever met a single cleaning staff that wasn't foreigner, and I lived both in Lausanne and Zurich.

Low paying jobs are predominantly staffed by foreigners. Swiss youth has a huge array of opportunities even without education, let alone many interesting tricks to not work a lot and still make money.

> "many interesting tricks to not work a lot and still make money."

As someone not very familiar with Switzerland I'm curious what you mean by this, as I assume from your wording you don't simply mean generous benefits available to unemployed and low wage people?

Swiss government covers between 100 and 80% of your salary for two years if you lose your job.

So many swiss play the "get hired and try to get fired asap to go on a two years sabbatical".

Thanks

It's markedly more difficult and expensive for even highly skilled individuals to obtain Swiss residency, speaking from personal experience. Unlike the rest of Western Europe where you can claim to be a Dr. Engineer on asylum and become a citizen a few years down the line so that you can threaten Christmas markets and take shits in churches without repercussion in future. Maintaining a low target population helps in the vetting process and ensures companies prioritize skill needs over lowering costs. The drawback here being it becomes more appealing for companies to export jobs abroad, at the citizens' expense.

Another country which has a similar strict immigration regime - Singapore. And for a direct opposite, there's the Gulf countries, which let everyone and their dog in, so that they can be part of the slaving class for the locals.

This is simply not possible as they depend on the EU for everything, and the EU requires having free movement of people. Just populist nonsense.

Notice how there is no law proposed for the situation when the population hit below a certain number, like from war, pandemic or natural disasters. Im convinced this is just another mask for “we don’t want outsiders”. If economy and environmental stability was the priority they would have also introduced some policies for increasing the population (including by means of immigration) in those cases. Not to mention aging population is a real global risk

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