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Comment by amtamt | Hacker News Reader

This seems a much more rational approach than pure political agenda driven fear mongering campaigns against immigrants.

This is about Swiss - EU relations. Everyone understands that a yes vote means the Swiss equivalent of „exiting the EU“.

All Swiss-EU contracts contain a „Guillotine clause“ where if one contract is broken, all are immediately gone. The initiative explicitly requires breaking the freedom of movement contract, which immediately severs all other links to the EU.

This _is_ pure political agenda driven campaign using immigrants.

This is not a vote for Switzerland to exit the EU...for obvious reasons. It is a vote to exit the Schengen.

Which immediately triggers the guillotine clause in all other bilateral treaties including movement of goods and services, Horizon, energy market etc.

„Exiting the EU“ is a perfectly adequate way to summarize it to a world audience that doesn’t care about the details.

I’m pretty sure you just pissed off a bunch of Swiss citizens claiming they are voting to exit the EU. It’s just insulting and insensitive.

Incidentally, when brexit was being voted, the only person I knew who thought it was a good thing was Swiss. They are just fiercely independent.

"the swiss equivalent"

As OP explains, freedom of movement can't be stopped in isolation from the rest of the bilaterals.

(btw funnily Schengen is just about the border control, we're talking about freedom of movement which is a different thing, e.g. UK wasn't in Schengen but the freedom of movement applied to UK as well before brexit, tho I guess people use Schengen interchangeably)

Even worse then - no more visa free travel, and no more international collaboration on crime. I must wonder, who would profit from these?

> All Swiss-EU contracts contain a „Guillotine clause“ where if one contract is broken, all are immediately gone. The initiative explicitly requires breaking the freedom of movement contract, which immediately severs all other links to the EU

Why does it need to be? Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today? Will the EU really hold hard on this line with Switzerland? (And does it make political sense to?)

Support for EU within EU is growing since the war in Ukraine and has gone to overdrive since Trump 2.0. No current political party except for fringe parties in any EU state advocates for exiting the EU or ending the four freedoms. It’s reasonable to say that yes, EU citizens do approve of freedom of movement in EU. They probably do want to limit freedom of non-EU citizens though…

… which is exactly why the EU would terminate agreements with Switzerland if we start first. And why it would make political sense. They made that quite clear with the UK.

> Support for EU within EU is growing since the war in Ukraine

I believe you. But hard numbers?

> No current political party except for fringe parties in any EU state advocates for exiting the EU or ending the four freedoms

Eh, there seems to be massive demand for modifying either freedom of movement or the context around it.

> They made that quite clear with the UK

The UK invoked Article 50. That wouldn’t happen here.

There is no demand for modifying freedom of movement within EU. It’s not even a topic in most EU countries.

What IS a topic, is preventing non-EU migration, and that has broad support and slowly all parties are moving in that direction.

And we are NOT EU. But for now, they basically go „yes yes, but we think of you as EU because we are so tightly connected“.

So what do you expect to happen if we push the point and make them treat us as non-EU?

> There is no demand for modifying freedom of movement within EU

Again, based on what polling?

> what do you expect to happen if we push the point and make them treat us as non-EU?

I frankly don't expect the EU to be unreasonably spiteful. (And for the record, I don’t think the EU was spiteful with the UK.)

> Again, based on what polling?

Do you have evidence/polling to suggest otherwise?

> Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today?

My guess is yes.

It's one of the best things that the EU brings.

> Why does it need to be? Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today?

Freedom of movement for labor is absolutely critical to counterbalance the freedom of movement that capital has, otherwise it leads to mass exploitation of labor and rising levels of inequality, which leads to, well, the French approach to the bourgeois problem.

Of course it is political agenda driven, but at least from surface it does not have _fear mongering_ vibe, comparing for example with Sweden which did not conclude citizenship applications and applied back dated refusal. Also politician openly attribting all immigrants as source of increasing crime and lowering education levels.

10m is larger than current resident counts, so people moving in can decide now if they want to move with uncertainty. It is not what everyone would like, but it is more understandable that recent Swedish changes, for example.

Hm. Are there any difference in the consequences for the immigrants, if they are kicked out because of arbitrary population cap, instead of anti-migration laws?

Why would you assume the population cap is arbitrary? There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)

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

Ok, so how to calculate it for switzerland in a non arbitrary way?

(Btw. I believe switzerland is not trying to be self sufficient anyway, but donimport lots of stuff, like most other countries do)

This is covered in the linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Mathematics

Other variables to factor in would include cultural/esthetic ones: how much would a population tolerate a reduction in the idyllic/scenic nature of their landscape, merely to accommodate crops for a rising population?

(This is what I referred to as "quality of life" in another post.)

That math is about animals in a fixed climate who don't do trading. Swiss people do.

And that "how much would a population tolerate a reduction in the idyllic/scenic nature of their landscape" is a very arbitary factor that will strongly depend on who you ask.

You're basically reluctant to accept the fact that such a calculation is possible. That says more about you than the competence of mathematicians and ecologists...

Can you bring one claim of "mathematicians and ecologists" that their calculation would not be arbitrary?

Those things ain't absolutes and human society is not made up of numbers and not calculable. So you can make approximations. And they can be useful or not. But you cannot calculate the perfect size of a human society. That is just arbitrary.

> There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)

Ah yes, folks fighting the good Malthusian fight since 1798, and yet to see a win. LoL. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Criticism

I counter you with soil degradation, which is gradual (over decades, even centuries), and extremely difficult to reverse (millennia).

We may yet discover that Malthus was right.

Then what??

https://eu.boell.org/en/SoilAtlas-soil-degradation

https://earth.org/95-of-the-earths-soil-on-course-to-be-degr...

https://www.fao.org/about/meetings/soil-erosion-symposium/ke...

> We may yet discover that Malthus was right.

We may also discover that einstein-rosen bridges exist [1] or that aliens exist or that magic is real or that astrology works. Hopefully none of these things are keeping you up at night.

Also, broken clocks, twice a day right, etc etc. Clocks still broken.

> Then what??

Plenty of dystopian sci-fi available for your reading/viewing pleasure. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature

And precisely how is that relevant to soil science?

You're ridiculing subjects you clearly don't understand.

As far as I understand, action begins when the population hits 9.5M, so likely no-one gets kicked out, but fewer new visas will be approved, etc.

This. As immigrant I don't feel threatened by this at all. I can't vote, and I wouldn't vote for SVP but as far as I can tell this makes kinda sense.

I am pretty sure there are many people living in swiss with temporary visa's and those will then be de facto kicked out, if they do not get their permissions extended.

Either these are already counted in the 9.5M, or they will continue not to be counted.

What is rational about this exactly? They share no borders with the countries most immigrants come from, they are moving the problem to Spain, Italy, Greece.

Vast majority of immigrants to Switzerland come from Spain, Italy, Greece and other EU countries…

Germany (16% of recent immigration), followed by France and Italy (12% and 11%).

https://cms.news.admin.ch/fileservice/sdweb-docs-prod-nsbcch...

(page 5)

I agree. Every country has a limit, unspoken or not, let the people decide. Anything less is undemocratic.

What's rational in the arbitrary number of 10 millions for no reason at allM

It is completely irrational. But the UDC knows it, pure manipulation of the masses.

It's not completely irrational. It's a fixed placative number yes.

But reality is also we don't produce more food than we already do. More people means more import and it's actually lowering the quality of the available food, making shopping more complicated, etc. And that's just the food quality aspect, what about pensions? Health care? ...

>what about pensions? Health care?

What about health care if there's no more 'room' for the immigrants who make up a substantial fraction of health workers in Switzerland?

Swiss people are perfectly capable of becoming health workers? What kind of argument is this?

That's an option, but it takes a long time to train and recruit locally, costs a lot of money, and you'll probably have to increase salaries to get the required numbers. If there were an easy and cheap way to recruit all the required staff locally, that would already be happening.

So the solution is to import uneducated and non-certified individuals from other countries at lower pay and hope you can pay them less and teach them? As if that is any easier? Sounds like the only reason is so health conglomerates can provide lower pay.

No, you can import educated and certified healthcare workers, as many European countries, including Switzerland, have been doing for a long time. It’s easier and cheaper, which is why everyone’s doing it.

Cuba has a reputation for producing highly skilled doctors, and they're not allowed to move to the US.

Fertility rates are low and people are ageing, like everywhere in Europe. There will be a moment that simply there won't be enough workers. The reality is that there is already a lack of healthcare professional even without a population cap that would only get worse given the case.

Sounds like modern slavery, import people from poorer countries to tend to the rich and elderly in countries that made short-term sacrifices to not build a future for themselves independently.

Import people from poorer countries with a salary of 100k CHF and wonderful life conditions. Anyway, what I mean is that it's nor worth it for Switzerland, in my opinion, to break the agreements with the EU to limit the population artificially to a random number.

Most of food is imported anyway, Switzerland is a very small country. This is a very silly argument, I'm sorry, it does not make any sense. "making shopping more complicated" what does that even mean.

What about pensions? We are talking about foreigners working and paying taxes in Switzerland, a lot of them in very specialized jobs. Health care? A lot of doctors and nurses are foreigners, too. But apart from all these cliches about how good immigrants are for the economy, the main issue is that all bilateral agreements with the EU depend on the free movement of people between Switzerland and the EU. Without that, Switzerland losses access to the EU market and becomes and isolated country. It is nonsense.

Honestly I don't know import statistics but the majority of food I eat is from Switzerland. A lot of imported products are complicated because they often contain more weird stuff like artificial colouring, sweeteners or thickening stuff.

Familien nachzug is a thing where people can get their elderly parents (or anyone family really) to move to Switzerland a lot more easily. This can indeed add additional costs to the pension and health care system.

The implications with the EU surely could be problematic.

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