Would be curious to learn more about why this is being proposed.
Edit: but the CHexit will work just fine, because of the Swiss exceptionalism.
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...
Most of the time I'm waved through.
This is a proposal to change that state to something far stricter in this regard.
Everything else is negotiated under separate treaties. This would revert Switzerland to pre-Schengen, which is sad, but it wouldn't be suicidal.
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).
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.
Of course if you have EU dismantlers in power anyway in FR/DE, they'll just be happy to sabotage.
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.)
And do the same with every other renegade, including reciprocal mirror tariffs and stuff. Want to play games? Let's play them together.
I say! That's news to most.
March 26, 1995 (The Implementation): The Schengen Area officially became effective on this date. Internal border controls were finally lifted among seven member states.
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 halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech
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. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.
Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.
[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...
[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...
[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...
[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/484/export-complexit...
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.
Yeah immigrants are really the problem.
Also its acceptable to have some immigrants who are not 'worth it', because it is something that is literally good to do, you are improving peoples lives.
> who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat
Mostly because of far right misinformation.
> And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
Its a falls believe that removing immigrants is somehow easy. Its not, its politically as hard as building new transit.
The difference is that building new transit is going to be great for everybody, specially Canadians who already own property or just live in the region, while focusing on removing immigrants will hurt everybody on net.
So the right solution is to focus on solving the fundamental problems you have no matter if immigrants or not.
Unlikely with Canadian exploding diploma mill immigration patterns post covid i.e. the 100k increase in Indians. That's not some, i.e. a few 1000 refugee/asylum charity to make feel good headlines. That's structurally unsustainable. Hence new cap reduction and strict field of study rules. Reality is Canada was importing fuckload of low skill hoping to juice economy short term with international tuition injections, but having students fill service and gig jobs driving up rent / suppressing wages / straining infra / services is bad short term politics and bad long term ROI. These generally aren't turnkey high skilled immigrants that boost economy long term. These aren't even wealthy economic immigrants dump $$$ into economy, these are bluntly marginal immigrants from poor households that goes into debt/leverage and have to take low end jobs with high remittance culture to payback - the give/take ratio is not great. They are no where nearly as "worth it" as a rich PRC international students dropping $$$ into economy and trying to capital flight $$$ into Canadian economy. And removing them is easy... a few signatures to cap study permits, change crs and pgwp requirements, already down ~70% from peak, much easier to building. Of course building is great for everybody, but Canada ain't building.
The right solution is move back to sustainable high-value immigration patterns. 60k to 160k Indians is unprecedented. Like 2nd/3rd largest cohort is PRC and PH at ~40k. 160k per year from any country is stupid policy, only justifiable if the plan is basically to steal their tuition and kick them out of the country after making PR/citizenship harder, i.e. Canada bait-switch (scammed) a bunch of Indian villagers pooling their limited resources together, and it's looking likely that's how this saga will end. Again, it's not Indian immigrants fault, but they don't vote so they're the one's whose going to get screwed because bad policy screwed Canadians who vote.
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.
1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own
2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it
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.
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.
You haven't given a single reason why that would be beneficial.
I agree more bilateral agreements are good but having even more fragmented markets is not and was not a long term model of sucess.
It was simply easier back then, less competition.
https://www.admin.ch/fr/initiative-durabilite
https://www.udc.ch/actualites/campagnes/pas-de-suisse-a-10-m...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saying that you’re going to cap your population necessarily implies you’re going to take policy measures to grow no further than the capped amount, which are by their nature, repressive.
That said I did see in some other comments earlier after I posted this that this is a back door way to axe the Swiss-EU bilateral agreements all at once. I don’t know how true that is, but if that’s the goal, Switzerland doesn’t need to take such a back door approach. Just put it on the ballot like everything else.
If you account for that, the effective density of Switzerland on the usable area is 600–700 people/km².
But a Switzerland that just collapses surely but surely? That’s gonna send a message.
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.
And that clause famously includes the breaking of all other contracts.
Freedom of movement for EU citizens. Migrants and asylum seekers don’t have the right to live and work in Switzerland because of our EU agreements.
A migrant or asylum seeker living in Germany has 0 right to move to CH.
We do have some asylum obligations from the Dublin accords and from global human rights laws, but those we can regulate ourselves separately anyway. EU doesn’t care. Countries within EU do it already.
I vote in Switzerland. I’m very much interested in the thoughts and opinions of others on this vote.
Lol. Dude, sure the Swiss can vote however they want. But we all see you and can pass judgement on this thinly veiled anti-immigrant nonsense all day long. Respect it I will never.
As an immigrant in Switzerland, I am quite WORRIED.
If it helps : Assuming that the initiative pass and nothing is done to reduce the immigration rate, the 10M threshold would be reached by 2040 according to the Federal Statistics Office. The current regime should apply to you till 2042 which should give you 16 years to make your way to citizenship (Among many other path that would let you stay).
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.
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.
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.
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.
A large part of this is due to bilateral agreements and free flow migration. This referendum directly affects that.