Switzerland had a referendum yesterday on whether to place a limit of 10 million on the total population of the country by 2050, and the result was no, with 54% voting against the measure.
The referendum was closely watched in Brussels. A “yes” vote would have set Switzerland on a collision course with the EU, jeopardizing the country’s free-movement agreement with the bloc. Sixty percent of Swiss goods are sold to the EU, but that trade depends on their mutual pact.
…The referendum was proposed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which argued it would help relieve pressures on the country’s environment and public services. The party has a long history of campaigning against immigration.
The “no” campaign focused on how restricting immigration might impact sectors like health care, where foreign-born workers are overrepresented. It also highlighted the risks for Switzerland’s relations with the EU, and the hazards of isolation more broadly in an unstable geopolitical environment.
Switzerland currently has a population of 9.1 million, which is set to rise above 10 million in the early 2040s. Some 28 percent of the current Swiss population was born abroad.
The details of how the plan would have worked are a bit complicated and would require the introduction of two main measures.
The first, triggered as soon as Switzerland exceeds 9.5 million inhabitants, would lead to restrictions in the areas of asylum and family reunification. If the population surpasses ten million for two consecutive years, the second measure would kick in, requiring the termination of the Free Movement of Persons agreement, which allows citizens of the European Union to work, study, and live in Switzerland (and vice versa). This move would rupture Switzerland’s relations with the E.U., its closest partner in trade and security. “The whole package of bilateral agreements would be at stake,” Michael Siegenthaler, a labor economist at the public university E.T.H. Zurich, said. “It’s quite likely that the European Union would cancel all of them.” A population ceiling is more or less unprecedented; the closest comparison might be conservation laws that limit human settlement in ecologically fragile places like the Galápagos Islands.
…The government’s highest estimates for population growth put Switzerland on track to reach ten million people by 2033. The cap would then impose an effective net-zero immigration flow—one person out (or deceased), one person in. “Imagine a society in which a Swiss citizen is permitted to live with their foreign partner in Switzerland only when another person leaves the country,” Economiesuisse, an influential business federation, has said, calling the cap the “Chaos Initiative.”
…A multilingual, politically idiosyncratic country bordering five other nations, Switzerland can feel at once culturally hermetic and geographically porous. “The percentage of foreigners in Switzerland is very high,” Raedler acknowledged. But, he argued, “there’s also huge assimilation with Swiss values like politeness, or our calm politics.” Raedler, whose mother is British, is a dual citizen, making him among the one in five Swiss who hold two passports. “That’s what in a way makes me sad about this initiative,” he said. “It attacks something that works well.”
It is not clear what the problem is that the measure seeks to address, other than a vague feeling that immigrants were somehow changing the nature of the country.
Switzerland is among the most cosmopolitan nations in Europe. More than thirty per cent of its permanent residents were born abroad. The working-age population is increasing, owing to consistent employment growth and a steady flow of migrants who are often highly skilled and actively recruited, and tend to come from bordering countries that have significant cultural and linguistic overlaps with Switzerland. In 2002, these people gained the right to work and study in the country without a visa, and since then the nation’s population has swelled by nearly two million. Globally, Switzerland now has the sixth-highest G.D.P. per capita, according to the World Bank. (The United States ranks twelfth.) “Most countries in Europe are concerned about the other issue—depopulation,” Emilio Zagheni, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, told me.
Most developed countries are struggling with an aging and decreasing depopulation and needing to find ways to increase the number of people in the workforce. The most obvious sources are immigrants from the developing world but they tend to be people of color and this can arouse nativist sentiments.
If the population surpasses ten million for two consecutive years…
And if the population stays over 10M for three years, would they mandate abortions or sterilizations?
That’s what I thought first too, @Pierce Butler. And, that nightmare would surely start coming about, don’t you think? With people who were not born in Switzerland first.
Very silly and unworkable plan.
And, as Mano says, why is total population growth, immigrants though they be, a problem? Again, Mano says it has benefits in increasing the workforce and being able to support social welfare nets for the elderly, etc.
9.1 million is mighty close already to 10 million, what’s the problem? And, Switzerland is going to kick 60% of its trade, with the EU, to the curb, for *this*?
Shouldn’t the right-wingers be focusing on more important and urgent issues, like when the sun will explode?
I have Swiss ancestry, about 4 generations back. Causes me to pay casual attention to the country. Friend who lived there told me that you are required to register at the local police station of your new area if you move. When he moved and went to register the next day, the local police said all was well, they already knew all about him.
So this one time, everything went well (even if 54% is hardly a stellar result).
Meanwhile the idiotic ideas of these not-so-crypto fascists become mainstream and banalized. Such a proposal shouldn’t even be considered as worthy of discussion, let alone posed as a referendum question, and yet here we are.
What’s next, a proposal for executions by lottery if the rate of unemployement passes a certain limit?
It’s ike that comedian routine, someone says hey let’s put that cat in a blender. Everyone’s horrifed, so a reasonable compromise is reached: let’s put only HALF of the cat in the blender, that’s surely going to satisfy everyone!
The funny thing is that the immigrants that bother these guys aren’t from Africa, the Middle East, ot southern Asia, but Germans, who are supposedly threatening Swiss-German with their High German. (And indeed the majority of immigrants to Switzerland are from other European countries.)
anat @5 If you are of a mind to be prejudist you will find someone to be prejudist against. As a young man who lived in a relatively poor, rough area, that I also lived in one year as a student, once told me during a discussion on the subject “Look we like fighting, they like fighting* if it wasn’t the P**** it ud be the Irish”. In that case as for so many today this was a young man from a poor family with few saleable skills, who above all needed work that paid a decent wage.
* How true that part of the statement was I don’t know. I never got into a conversation about the subject with a suitably young first generation British Pakistani.