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Comment by bapo | Hacker News Reader

Swiss here and able to vote.

In fact, just posted my voting letter today, before taking a 1h bike ride through the biggest city in Switzerland, having lots of space and freedom biking around in our beautiful city.

When taking the train to my parents house, I pass several farms and landly smaller cities. Alot of free space in between those, train mostly has spare seats, depending on rush hour timings. There usually are several big commercials on private farmer land stating “NO to 10 Million Population”, prompting people to vote YES on the SVP/UDC initiative.

The initiative’s lancers seem to play a lot on people’s fear of overcrowding, which even in the most population-dense city in Switzerland seems like a joke. There’s a lot of space and quality of living is still amazing here.

Yes, during rush hours, you might have to stand for 15-30min in public transport. Yes, finding an appartment is getting harder and more difficult.

But is this a problem of more people coming here or the failures of the state preparing for future population growth? We have so much space, benefits from diverse cultures and love for human beings.

My letter was specifically voting AGAINST this initiative.

View on HN

Also swiss here. So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans. They are educated and highly skilled and for some swiss, that's a problem. They blame them for not finding a job or an appartement. Just read the comments on inside paradeplatz, you can translate with any llm, on a post about the referendum. A subset of the swiss Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem, the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".

Also voted no of course.

seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"

Yes, we have a really well recognized Spanish team lead here, yet he’s mostly hiring Spanish people (in Switzerland), oh yes and one Italian is the exception.

Also we had a German team lead hiring Germans, well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.

Diversity back in the day meant Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering working together…

I’m an American and I just had the thought - if I was working in Japan at a Japanese company and I had the opportunity to hire, would I have a bias to hire other Americans?

Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.

And that seems suboptimal for a Japanese company?

I’d disagree. I’m not American or British but and in my experience Americans or British are the least ethnically biased people on the planet. Any other group, I could believe that they are biased but not Americans, or British. Something in their particular culture right now.

It isn’t just a lack of ethnic bias, it’s a belief in capitalism or professionalism or “enlightened self-interest”: hire the best person for the job, and everyone will be better off.

You’re responding to an American who says he’d be biased towards Americans and telling him he’s wrong.

Maybe Americans are the least biased (though being an American I am not so sure) but that doesn’t mean we aren’t biased (even if sometimes for legitimate reasons like ease of communication).

Or perhaps said American genuinely is unaware of how much more biased other ethnic groups are in their own homelands.

Yes exactly, the American bias level right now is probably as low as it can get humanly.

Now this I disagree with. I expect that you are interacting with a specific subset of Americans. A lot of Americans are deeply racist and xenophobic and I believe that the average could definitely get lower.

I guess I work in tech. Maybe it’s different elsewhere but even there I think it’s probably lower than most of the world among similar classes of society.

So I actually agree with you here. America has a deep, ugly pit of unconstrained racism, and a less deep pit of quiet racism that permeates a lot of society. But so do many (and very possibly most) other nations, where the level of racism is often even worse, just with different targets than Americans. I think in a way America is much more aware of our tendencies than other nations.

Okay, but the conversation was:

Meken: “I would be biased”

Sashank: “I disagree”

Others being more biased doesn’t make Americans unbiased.

Yes that's why country clubs and the Greek system never caught on...

I've actually been in such a situation and I didn't. Or if I did have such a bias it must've been rather small as none of the applicants benefited from it.

And this is why it's in the interest of Japanese people in Japan not to make it easy for you to have an opportunity to hire people for jobs in Japan.

Yes, and that's normal (except for maybe eastern European cultures who better hire an American/west European).

> well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.

It's not easier dealing with people from your own country but it is biased. From someone who has hired hundred+ remote developers in europe for 10 years to lead them and out of those hired a total of 2 people from my country. Wouldn't have been hard either.

At the same time I see some managers doing this, currently in another fully remote company have a manager colleague that has hired 3 brazillians back to back. Go figure. Just shows you that it's a biased person in other respects (we all are) and that they make zero efforts to keep it in check (this is a decision you make).

> that has hired 3 brazillians back to back

I've seen this kind of thing happen not through bias but because good people know good people, where by "good" I mean highly competent. They knew each other through university and other regional connections, so they happened to have the same ethnicity as one might expect from such a regional commonality. One got hired, referred another, and it cascaded. They were great to work with and highly competent, so I don't think there was bias even though it might appear that they're was.

May be each foreigner in mgmt position should pass some exam on diversification and swiss history?

Actually each foreigner to raise or get some state benefits should pass some exam?

Because it's an unfalsifiable claim. If you need to bring in highly skilled people and most of them come from X Y or Z, it will be near impossible to distinguish in-group preference from a continuation of skilled immigration which for most countries that practice it, is beneficial for the economy.

Also hiring is often based on trust and networks. People refer others to their company and jobs. That trust tends to work out pretty well for companies. If people get laid off they tell their friends and their friends pass on opportunities to them or try to help them find new jobs. And people tend to make friends with others they share a culture and language with.

If you add a bunch of barriers to make companies have to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity or culture, that slows down hiring and can be an extra regulatory burden for what reason?

There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.

When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives.

Then those white men feel spurned. They imagine they weren't hired because they're white. It's an easier pill to swallow and then the next thing you know DEI is the great Satan of low IQ white men.

Can you show me where the “mediocre white men” are on this chart?: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med-1.png?x97...

Are the “mediocre white men” the ones with a 27-29 MCAT/3.4-3.59 GPA, who have a 21% chance of admission to medical school whereas a hispanic student in that same range has a 61% chance? Are those the “mediocre white men” you’re talking about?

> The companies get … more diverse perspectives

That makes no sense. The premise of non-discrimination laws is that someone’s ethnic background doesn’t affect their “perspectives” in ways that are material to employment.

That isn't the premise. The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong.

Also when did we change the subject to college admissions?

> The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong

Yes. And the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college and medical school admissions.

So why is it unreasonable for the people you call “mediocre white men” to conclude they’re being discriminated against? If Harvard and other elite universities are willing to go to the Supreme Court to defend such discrimination, doesn’t it stand to reason—absent data to the contrary—that the myriad companies and institutions run by graduates of those universities are doing the same thing?

[1] Those numbers are medical school admissions, but the numbers for college admissions is similar: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

>the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college

Congratulations you found the one place where a black person might have an advantage. Meanwhile virtually every other aspect of American society disadvantages black people and the supreme court ruled against those colleges.

http://www.racialdisadvantages.com

College admissions and the job market are apples and oranges. It isn't actually safe to assume the same thing must be happening in both. It isn't. There's an unofficial affirmative action favoring white people across much of the job market.

> Can you show me where the “mediocre white men” are on this chart?

I think you will find that they tend to be at home, according to this graph https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/2023-demograp....

From the report 'Specifically, Black males received sentences 13.4 percent longer, and Hispanic males received sentences 11.2 percent longer, than White males'

So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites? It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.

> So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites?

Yes. Your report shows that white men are more often given probation, which explains much of the difference. That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.

Your report also shows that black women received 6% shorter sentences than white women. So there seems to be more at work here than black versus white. We need less discretion in sentencing across the board.

> It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.

That describes people who point to sentencing disparities to justify affirmative discrimination in school admissions and employment.

> That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.

And yet, if I look at your comment history, you seem hyper focused on discrimination in admissions. I don't see a single instance where you even attempted to advocate for broader elimination of discrimination. It has always been a few narrow instances where whites were on the receiving end.

You’ve got it backwards. There’s 19 million people in college and graduate school, compared to under 2 million people in prison. And my contention is that the discrimination in admissions carries through to the workforce, at least to white collar jobs. There’s 70 million people in white collar jobs.

Agreed, but wouldn't you also say that being in prison has an arguably greater impact in later life?

> There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.

How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?

> When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives.

I just don't agree with this idea of "giving a more fair shot" if it's enforced because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments. I don't like it to bolster diversity and I don't like it to cut diversity (what many white nationalists in the US wish would happen in industries that hire from abroad like tech).

It's also not even defined what a fair shot means - once you discard merit and start trying to counter for all kinds of past or inherent disadvantages there is really no end to it.

A fair shot would be hiring based on qualifications and not race, relion, etc. There seems to be no end to people wanting to perpetuate a status quo that advantages themselves. You might feel differently if you were part of a group that faces discrimination at every turn.

How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?

Usually someone who feels discriminated against will get legal representation, file a lawsuit, and use the discovery process to strengthen their case. They can compare their treatment to that of people who don't share their minority status. They can show internal communications. Call witnesses. compare the companies workforce to other similarly positioned companies.

> because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments

1. So what?

2. People's judgement should be second guessed if they're racist.

3. One of the easiest ways to reduce discrimination in hiring is to replace names on resumes with numbers before letting hiring managers access them. Which barely slows down anything and eliminates a variable that isn't relevant to the candidates qualifications.

Wow that’s racist

How?

If you’re part of the majority group, you really don’t see how cliquish people in minority groups are. Every time I get into a cab with another “brown” person, there is a Q&A. When they find out I’m from a muslim country, it’s all “my brother,” etc. I’ve always found it distasteful.

The people who fixate on this stuff are projecting.

People in general tend to be very tribal -- it's in our DNA. When it's about "yay community!" its kinda nice but most the time it's "other tribe bad". I think this is a core to a lot of legislation.

Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.

I still can't believe we have hundreds of years of documented history to learn from, yet human intelligence is still blinded by bigotry.

The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.

That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.

Did I even write anything about political contents of your signalling? I believe I didn't. I also didn't "reveal" anything particularly bad about you. I said that your urge to ring it is of the same social nature (aka tribal), we (humanity) have been exhibiting for all written and unwritten history, while the message itself expressing that you're above it makes it contradictory in ironic way. No matter what your signal proclaims, the process of tribal-building around it is most certainly divisive[1], with obligatory bit of outwards directed derision. So... then you reacted with suggesting I'm some sort of morally inferior outgroup voice. Which I think, proves the point you have missed.

[1] Which is not always bad. This is core mechanics of our competitive adaptiveness probably. It's just that being more aware of this gives us a chance to be better in more universal terms with other humans. Including in politics, of course.

P.S. If you felt offended, sorry! I can't say I care too much ngl, it's the internet after all, but it wasn't my intention either. I also didn't downvote you.

That others have learned a different lesson from history compared to your beliefs does not mean that they are ignorant of it.

You're projecting. I wrote a factual statement, that bigotry still exists in today's world, and you somehow took that as an assault on your values.

So what exactly is the different lesson you're referring to? Given that bigotry still exists, I can only take that lesson to mean "bigotry good."

I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.

You've got it backwards. That's a defeatist take that results in the exact kind of misery and cruelty documented in detail throughout history. Society prospers when people look past their differences and work together to improve things. It suffers when demagogues successfully divide the public and exploit the chaos to loot the resources required to improve the lives of everyone. Making punching bags out of a group of people is sure way to create instability.

> When it's about "yay community! its kinda nice

I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.

For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.

I hear you, I'm trying to find the bright side in "community" where people who don't know each other at least treat them as "brothers". The insular part is fucked and we need need to evolve past that.

> For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.

Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.

tribalism, Us vs. Them, racism, patriotism/nationalism, etc all seem closely related.

In terms of social life, and romantic life, it's interesting how heavily we rely on shared/common background, which tends to cause this clustering effect.

Is it cliquishness, or is it genuine joy at an unexpected connection?

I think it's pretty logical, though perhaps it is correlation rather than causation.

Say I am hiring as a native English speaker in a Chinese company (while of course still knowing enough Mandarin to survive) and I have 3 candidates, one of whom also speaks English fluently. I would definitely be biased towards the English speaker, because I would work better with them.

Now, it doesn't really matter what their ethnicity was, but there is a higher likelihood of them being of the same ethnicity. Especially if my first language is niche, the chances of hiring the same ethnicity would be higher.

I've been on the receiving end of this before, being hired in part because I spoke English due to my manager while the rest of the company was primarily Mandarin

The broader concern seems to be “outsiders taking our jobs/raising house prices/voting in elections” etc etc. Anything perceived to be done by “outsiders” is an issue.

Americans/British saying this about non-white immigrants. Switzerland about Europeans. India saying it about Bangladeshi migrants.

It’s like people dislike others who are worse off them.

No it's people disliking importing the cultures and problems that made those people worse off in the first place.

Because it is real, and there _is_ in fact a large difference in the propensity to do this across cultures.

This post is about Switzerland, and as said by parent a lot of this is about Germans in Switzerland.

Are Germans in Switzerland more prone to hiring another German rather than a French person, or Swiss person? I'm sure that such bias exists. But that bias is nothing compared to e.g. tendency for Indians to hire other Indians. Now of course some of this can be explained by economic opportunity. The extra benefit Germans can provide to other Germans by giving them Swiss job is smaller than for Indians.

However that only explains part of it. If that was all, then Chinese people should bias much more to hiring fellow countrymen than Japanese and Korean people, while the latter two should be similar to each other. This is definitely not the case (note that we're talking about immigrants here, not 2nd+ generation).

I'm sure there's been research on this subject, and there will be some cultural trait that proxies for how much immigrants from country X bias towards hiring others from X.

I can even give you a proxy for funsies: embassies. Look at the employees at the embassy of country X in country Y. How many of them are from country X and how many are from Y? Now compare that across embassies. You'll see a lot of similarities with what I've sketched. Sometimes you'll see that both the embassy of country X in country Y, as well as that of country Y in country X (the other direction), are both primarily staffed by people from country X! In those cases it's common that country X has a much stronger bias than Y towards hiring people from their own nationality rather than based on aptitude.

The text of the proposal disagrees with your claim. Or - are there lots of Europeans seeking asylum in Switzerland?

Maybe its a bit like Brexit, i.e. not rational immigration being one of the major issues when it did nothing to reduce the immigration of (non-white) people from third countries and EU migration was rapidly decreasing anyway.

Funny enough, the voting of this weekend mentions as argument also "the lax asylum politics in the EU" while exactly THIS weekend the EU is strengthening a lot, and I mean quite a lot, the asylum procedures and including border controls. I guess they had to push it quickly before the Swiss voter notices...

Swiss as racists. Amazing. People know Americans harbor racist feelings because they are surrounded by people of many races. But it's trivial to demonstrate racism among any population as soon as you introduce an "other" of virtually any type.

No it isn’t racism as Germans had the same skin color. Keep in mind that Germans aren’t stereotypical anymore.

In Switzerland live over 41% migrants and children of migrants (just 8.4%). So the native Swiss are not just “surrounded” but greatly diminished.

Yeah, sure, it's nationalism instead of racism.

Born on the wrong side of the Rhine? F right off.

No better at all. Worse, arguably.

Yes, that's how nations work. Otherwise you end up paying for the world's social security while not collecting everyone's taxes.

Who's paying for what social services is an entirely different question, that is in fact being currently renegotiated:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-warn-eu-jo...

This thread is about migration and residence, not benefits.

Yeah it's much better to make your money by enabling the worlds worst dictators to steal money from their populations. In fact it's all the other countries taxes that are paying for the swiss social security, because of all the aid money being funneled into swiss bank accounts.

It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years.

Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”

Maybe we should just keep expanding it. Declare everyone white. Black people are just white people with more melanin.

Then we can be racist about aliens from outer space.

There is a distinction between racism and xenophobia, no need to assign the same label to everything. i.e. the thing about Italians was cultural an educated immigrant from Northern Italy would have been considered as white as a French (not that there a significant number of those in the US) at least.

Technically yes, but usually I think there’s a racist undercurrent to xenophobia.

The US stopped accepting refugees recently… except white South Africans. I’d say these people share no more culture or values with the average American than a Central American refugee. Maybe less. I’d much rather party with a bunch of Central or South Americans than a bunch of Apartheid lost causers.

If ethnically white people were pouring across the US border I don’t think many of our immigration hawks would care much, even if some were committing crimes.

There's certainly a racist undercurrent to generalizing Afrikaner emigrants as "Apartheid lost causers."

Certainly there is no reason other than Apartheid concerns to leave South Africa for the USA... none at all...

> It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years. Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”

This idea is mostly a modern fabrication. Various more granular ethnic biases were of course present throughout American history, but those were never conflated with racial categories: in times and places where the white vs. black racial division was relevant, the ethnic groups you're referencing were always considered "white".

And the types of discrimination that people in white ethnic groups sometimes experienced was of of a type and of a degree vastly different from that experienced by black people. They're really two very distinct phenomena, and weren't evenly distributed throughout the US -- black people in the South had the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other horrifying things to deal with, whereas white immigrant communities in the Northeast or Midwest never experienced anything remotely similar.

Racists havent heard of Ashbys Law of Requisite Variety.

Its also why they get left behind by everyone who has.

Its an ever growing complex and unpredictable world. Sameness is not a strength in complexity theory.

>Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem

Yeah, screw the middle class. What do they know anyway?

I mean there is a tendency for people in the middle class to go all NIMBY and not want additional housing to be built which drives up the cost of housing. It's good that there's a middle class but there are also things that people in the middle class do that aren't good. Like drive f350s on their 40-minute commute to the office.

The middle class can’t afford F350s today.

Don't worry. They'll blame immigrants and elect even more radical right wing politicians.

"So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans.".

It can be about both though.

> the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".

Good to see (in a sad way) that some biases are constant across humans.

I am German and live near the Swiss border. My wife is Swiss. I always tell Germans: if you want to get a feeling for the life of an immigrant in Germany, go to a non-touristic region in Switzerland. It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.

My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.

That's interesting (and a really fun stunt to pull). I always had the impression that the situation is slightly better for other minority-dialect foreigners (Vorarlberg/Südtirol) compared to "vanilla" german speakers, but that might wrong...

Yes a “grützi” at the right moment is often priceless, especially when abroad.

> It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat.

Literally what most expats go through in Europe. I live abroad for 6 years and here, a Central EU country, this also happens. I am trying to learn the language and even then I got told implicitly several times that I will still be treated as a foreigner, no matter how much culture and language I learn from the local country.

We can swap anecdata back and forth, but that doesn’t reflect my experience at all, now in my 4th European ‘expat’ (migrant, really) experience.

Aside from a few somewhat racist remarks outside Berlin, I’ve always been treated fairly. Speaking the local language definitely helps, and living in 50k+ pop. cities.

And then… you visit Switzerland. Very quickly you realise what GP is talking about. Switzerland is the only place where I’d love to live, but hate the feeling of being there.

It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.

Sounds like Seattle in the 2000's.

As soon as one of the locals found out you're not from there, you get the "Seattle Freeze."

Fortunately, I read about it in a book before I moved there, so I knew it when I recognized it. But that didn't make it any less uncomfortable.

I guess with SEA filled with expat tech people these days, it's either gotten much better or much worse.

Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is very different from blaming immigration for not finding a job. Jobs appear almost automatically (if some basic economic conditions are met), apartments have to be built and permitted.

Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is also different from blaming immigrants. Blame has a moral connotation, and certainly no individual deserves blame because he lives in an apartment that you'd like to live in, whether he moved from another country, another place in the same country or another district of the same city, or whether he was born in that apartment. But that doesn't mean that immigration can't make it more difficult to find an apartment if not enough apartments are built.

Eeh, not really. German's think because some Swiss resent them a little, it is all about them.

EU countries, especially Italy, Germany and Portugal are the biggest immigration source in Switzerland (EU/EFTA immigration ~60%), Germany is ~13% of the total.

Non EU, especially outside of Eurepean immigration is a smaller part, but if you looked at SVP pamphlets you see a very different picture.

https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...

It's not just the state - it's your neighbors pushing the same building restrictions as the rest of the developed world, where people say "I don't want another neighbor next to me", which results in too few apartments for even the existing people's children...

You should check Geneva then - they are building apartment buildings like crazy in past 5 years. Too much if you ask me - in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building. Only the biggest protected parks are untouched. City is visibly and permanently degrading into concrete field. Weirdly schizophrenic move - they try to keep pushing bike lanes everywhere, even where not safe to share the road, yet they also remove greenery and trees. I guess the money is too juicy. But not to just bash - they build on outskirts too.

Switzerland as a country usually strikes good balance between various extremes, much better than US or EU countries do. I have no doubt they will work it out, not ideally, but better than most. Immigration they tackled much better than rest of Europe for example.

And for the vote - its 1:1 Brexit. Vote for capping, damage your long term prosperity, and those unpopular jobs still will need to be staffed, or country will work worse, be dirtier etc. And if one can earn cleaning streets or putting stuff in shop shelves as much as cca doctor in France (with higher costs of life, but it doesn't have to be extreme), the amount of people willing to try coming and working is basically endless.

The idea one can freeze time and keep the country as some idealized image from their childhood (without the nasty stuff that happened ie in 70s to orphaned kids en masse, aka Verdingkinder), one would have to become second North Korea. Everything changes these days, massively and quickly. Dictators won't be sending their kids to study here under false names anymore, would they.

I agree about bike lanes in Geneva, they should take the space away from cars. Their success is so phenomenal, that they are carrying more passengers/h in some sections than the much wider street they flank.

These jobs are unpopular because the pay is shit, not because people don't want to do them, the government could simply have grants/bonus program for people employed in these positions so that the taxpayer money directly funds the bettering of the society and environment around them. Besides, Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.

Yeah... but aren't there many more poor people in Japan, too?

> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"

Japan heavily utilizes foreign workers via a Gulf style guestworker program, and even that has led to the far-right Sanseito becoming Japan's highest rated opposition party and the far-right wing of the LDP winning internal party politics.

> via a Gulf style guestworker program

They get to keep their passports and can return any time, calling it Gulf-style is a bit much. There are abuses - so are there in Europe - but it's not like they sacrificed a thousand or so immigrant worker lives on the Tokyo Olympics in Qatar 2022 style.

I think they mean gulf style as seen by westerners. You can get a visa but you'll never be seen as a "local" nor granted citizenship. In places like Dubai multiple generations live without ever getting citizenship or a path to it and always with the notion you can be booted at any minute if you inconvenient the wrong person or run out of money.

Though I don't think this is fully true of Japan -- it's one of the easiest countries to naturalize in if you give up your other citizenships but does have the quality of always being seen as a foreigner. It's just that few people naturalize as Japanese because their immigration is most open to people from developed countries who aren't interested in giving up their birth passport to acquire Japanese nationality. If you just want a Japanese passport though no matter the downsides, I think it's one of the easier citizenship to get for an American to obtain.

    > it's one of the easiest countries to naturalize

This is no longer true. With recent legislation, you need to live in Japan for 10 years before applying for citizenship. In the old days, it was only 5 years, which is pretty short for a highly developed nation. UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are now much easier to obtain.

> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.

It's also one of the worst developed nation economies and has a massive old, shrinking population problem and is well associated with people having no kids, having no prospects for a better life, and having huge amounts of its population live alone shuttered from the outside world.

A good economy has many benefits and skilled immigration can significantly improve developed nation economies.

You would think that such a terrible, untenable, broken economy as I hear the Japanese economy described (oh no, it’s not growing fast! The horrors of checks notes equilibrium) would precipitate a very dirty landscape, vast swathes of nature torn down, civility breakdowns, mass homelessness, and a high murder rate, bridges collapsing out of nowhere, etc.

I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.

Instead of those things, Japan has extremely high suicide rates, extremely low rates of coupling, extremely low rates of family formation, extremely high rates of loneliness, etc.

It's a place with no economic growth prospects, where you have to work far longer than people in other developed nations, and where your chance of companionship and having your own family is the lowest it can possibly be in the world.

But at least it's clean

    > extremely high suicide rates

This is no longer true. Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Sort by "All" and you will see Japan is #30, far below many other highly developed nations.

Okay, fair enough. The rest is still true.

They're also very unhappy on average: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250410/p2a/00m/0na/01...

To be clear, the economic performance of Japan is pretty similar to Italy. They have incredibly low population growth (or shrinking), but their GDP per capita continues to increase year-over-year. Surprisingly, quality of life is pretty good in Japan and Italy (the second will be a bit controversial here). As long as you have a middle class job, your life will be pretty good.

People are incredibly unhappy with their lives in Japan. Why do people continue to believe otherwise?

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250410/p2a/00m/0na/01...

I am going to make a wild claim: "Happiness" is a stupid metric for quality of life. So many of the answers are tainted by local culture. Most Japanese people would feel like they are bragging to say they are somewhat or very happy. The very question is flawed. And I guarantee the survey was created by people with mostly Western European culture. To be clear: I said "quality of life" not happiness. There is a big difference. Let me tell you what "works" in Japan: health care, education (primary, secondary, and tertiary), home buying/building (wildly cheap by world standards), labor protections, national pension, mass transit, personal safety, taxation... I could go on and on. Quality of life is objectively extremely highly in Japan when compared to other nations.

I wish you had actually read the article.

> Among Japanese respondents who said they were not happy, the most common reason was their "economic situation," cited by 64%

> Only 15% of Japanese respondents said "overall quality of life will be much better in five years," the lowest among all nations surveyed. In contrast, the highest optimism for the future was seen in Colombia at 79%, followed by India at 78% and 76% each in Argentina, Indonesia and Mexico.

> Only 13% of Japanese pollees answered that their current quality of life is "good" -- the lowest among all 30 countries. This was less than half the average of 42% and notably lower than Hungary (22%), the second lowest, and South Korea (24%), the third lowest.

    > Besides, Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"

This was true before about 10 years ago. In last 10 years, there has been a dramatic rise (I mean millions of "technical interns") in low-skill foreigners living and working in Japan. (To be clear: I harbor no resent towards these people.) They work in any industry that needs cheap low-skill workers: agriculture, hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, manufacturing, construction, civil/civic maintenance etc. That said, the friction has been pretty low. The difference between the original late 1990s wave of highly-skilled foreigners (mostly bankers and lawyers) and the most recent wave for low-skill foreigners: The most recent wave arrives to Japan with some Japanese language. (They study in their home country and need to pass a test to demonstrate basic Japanese language skills.) In my experience, their "median" Japanese is much better than most highly-skilled migrants, which helps to reduce the integration friction. Also, the low-skilled migrants have a maximum number of years they can work in Japan. They either need to skill-up and get a better visa (I guess about 5-10% can do it), or they need to return home after their "technical internship" is complete.

Geneva is the 2nd most expensive city to live in (behind Zurich). I commend any attempt at moderating prices by building more housing.

> in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building

I struggle to see this. Central Geneva is full of beautiful, well-maintained green spaces and children's play areas with plenty of larger parks scattered around.

> Too much if you ask me

Good thing no one asked you. Why should you have a say in how someone else uses their land if all they are doing is building more housing units?

Geneva had an extreme shortage of housing while there were plots of land perfectly suitable for construction but older people willing to sacrifice their kids' future for the sake of today's comfort and for one more year of ignoring the world around them. This problem is no unique to Geneva though.

Reducing parcel sizes and similar development decreases not only your own comfort but also those of people living there in the future.

It doesn't.

I know that sounds weird, but bear with me.

Compare the no build scenario to the scenario where you build one more apartment, but that one new apartment is smaller than you want.

In the no build scenario, the person who wants to move to Geneva doesn't get to, or they have to rent a room in an existing apartment.

In the scenario where you build that one additional apartment, a person moves into it instead. So they make a choice that that was better than their existing situation.

That choice is someone increasing their comfort level. There are lots of housing situations that are worse than a new apartment, even a very small one.

The mistake is not realizing that everyone who moves into a new unit is increasing their comfort.

It seems like a good idea to start worrying about population long before it feels overcrowded and there's no room left on the trains. The issue isn't about how much open space there is to stuff people into, but about how many people an area can sustainably support. I'm not sure that 10 million is a good target to aim for, but you sure don't want to wait until your quality of life declines before you start making plans.

If people are already starting to have trouble finding work and housing that seems like the conversation is long overdue.

This seems like xenophobia masked as sustainability. The article indicates the referendum specifically would block immigrants but not, say, require free birth control for citizens. Interesting how narrow the target is if sustainability is the real goal.

Because the Swiss already have below replacement fertility, like everywhere else.

The economy is strong because of immigration, particularly white collar immigration from EU countries. Without them businesses cannot grow in the same rate. Immigration leads to net job creation, meaning also more jobs to fill for locals. It's not zero sum. Public finances would be in a much more dire state without immigration and the locals will have to bear the public debt burden, maybe not immediately but eventually. Granted, housing and infrastructure do have to be built to keep up with population growth indeed, but it's a better problem to have than a depressed economy with decaying infrastructure and housing stock.

Or you can rather prepare housing and infrastructure for the increase of population instead of blaming foreigners and risk all bilateral agreements with EU in which Switzerland's economy depend on.

"We have so much space".

No, you don't have that much space. The entire Switzerland is half the size of Czechia and half of it is taken up by high mountains.

Your cities are already pretty dense. Maybe your threshold for "too many people" is very high, but in general Switzerland doesn't have much free real estate left in/around its urban centers and most people would probably prefer to keep the rural places rural. You could turn your cities into a highrise maze - does the majority of the population want to?

I can fully see where this initiative is coming from. If Czechia was pushing 20 million people, I would consider it on the edge of being overcrowded.

Considering the other EU ramifications, this is basically Swixit, is it not?

Yes. We can cap non-EU/EFTA immigration to zero but that's relatively small anyway. Getting out of Schengen-Dublin and more importantly the Freedom of Movement of workers would basically unravel all bilateral agreements.

Switzerland is not a member of the EU.

Switzerland is, however, a member of the Schengen Area, which is very relevant to this discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

EU citizens can freely live and work in Switzerland and vice-versa. It would be difficult to reliably cap immigration from other EU countries and stay in the Schengen Area.

When I was at CERN, it was before Schengen became a thing, so as Portuguese I had the same VISA issues as someone else coming out of the other side of the planet.

Worse, being at CERN wasn't a plus for the hiring process, I would need to apply to the position as if still living in Portugal, as my VISA was tied to CERN directly with a three month deadline to leave Switzerland after the contract duration.

It also did not help, that my fellow country folks do not have a positive image across the country, for various kind of reasons, which is another issue I experienced while living there, like being refused entry in clubs when showing a Portuguese ID card.

Eventually I moved back to another EU country, still I do visit Switzerland, from time to time.

Pity that right wing movements are taking off all over the place.

Schengen is not FoM. Visa isn't an acronym. And CERN workers are on diplomatic permits anyway.

Lost me on the reply.

You're throwing a lot of words that you don't understand nor have much relevance to the topic.

Before bilateral agreements and the freedom of movement, not Schengen which was ratified much later and is completely irrelevant here, you needed a work permit, not a visa (lowercase), which anyway at CERN is the equivalent of a diplomatic permit given to all international and tax-exempt NGOs in Geneva/Switzerland. And of course you lose your CDL permit quickly after your contract expires.

Getting a B permit before FoM would specifically not have been as hard for you as for someone from another continent.

Getting a B permit in 2003 - 2004 was indeed hard enough experience that I ended up not staying there and refuse any job offer from Swiss companies to this day, regardless of the Swiss friendships I managed to make there.

My stay at CERN was temporary, and every single company where I had an interview clearly communicated to me that the paperwork to get a B permit instead of a Swiss national, or a foreigner with existing permit.

The need to switch permit status from the CERN diplomatic one into a B one, killed all conversations.

But lets be pedantic in the meaning of words instead, which I used for folks that never lived in Switzerland, that is what is relevant for the whole discussion about foreigners how experience Switzerland.

Bilateral agreements were signed in 1999 and freedom of movement enacted in 2002 so you must not have looked very hard. Also claiming that immigration from a country like Portugal was hard before FoM is extremely funny given the number of Portuguese immigrants in Romandie.

Words have a meaning and bringing diplomatic permits to the topic when they follow their own rules and are specifically outside any immigration quota is not particularly helpful.

It wasn't me that wasn't looking very hard, because apparently those bilateral agreements didn't cut it.

Yes, there are plenty of us in Suisse Romande, yet not everyone is welcomed, and plenty don't have it easy.

There are plenty of ways of folks land there, and true not everyone behaves the way they should.

But lets leave at this, because the discussion won't lead to any constructive place.

FoM doesn't require to stay in Schengen-Dublin though.

Yeah, but Schengen Area !== EU.

As a Indian I envy you.

My whole life has been a struggle for living in places where there could be fewer humans.

There are plenty of such places and as the population in many countries gets older there will be more even with available housing etc; the only issue is relatively lower pay.

In one of the religious texts, the supreme god Indra says "man acquires sin by living amongst humans, and ward it off by wandering in faraway places (void of humans)". Not far off to think that Indians have always had this trauma due to population.

Really? I live in Lausanne and it’s getting a bit crowded. The buses and trains are completely packed to the point of over flowing, the city as well. Sure there’s a lot of land but that doesn’t mean we need to maximize its use at the expense of the environment and the nature it supports.

Sounds like a lovely place. Why wouldn't you want to pass a law to keep it that way?

Why would you want less people to live in a lovely place?

Maybe some (or many) people believe that more people will make it less "lovely". I think this is a popular stance and I think many people are more than satisfied with the current population density of their area.

To keep it lovely.

Australian/Brit here. A Sudanese man tried to decapitate someone in the middle of the street in Belfast this morning. I suspect if the UK had better immigration controls this wouldn't have happened.

In Belfast? Was that a Protestant Somali man or a Catholic Somali man?

Could just stop state financing farmers and raise import taxes on non bio products which will raise food praises hence less people will be able to survive is better option?

Well, first UK had to vote for their own anti immigration nonsense, then US tried out their MAGA winning and now it's time for Switzerland to follow in their footsteps and make their country great again with SVP at the helm.

After all, this time it HAS to go better right?

It didn't work out that well for UK the first time. So now they are trying a second time. By voting for the guy that promised he would solve it the first time. This time he really means it.

Sounds familiar.

Yes, my point exactly. This is a proposal of Swiss MAGA wannabes with the same disregard for consequences as Brexit and MAGA parties showed elsewhere.

> benefits from diverse cultures

You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).

> more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that)

This is how freedom of movement works, yes, and it's a key reason why our country is so rich.

Nobody in Switzerland is worried about the population growing due to birthrate. This referendum is about stopping immigration (even though in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth).

> (even though in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth).

Is that true? Switzerland's foreign-born population was under 5% around WWII. Wasn't Switzerland already a rich country by then?

It saw a fair bit of immigration before the war to get there. The war itself obviously helped enrich them by not being in it and also practically zeroed immigration. Immigration continued after the war. There’s other factors, obviously, like early industrialisation.

In 1910 the foreign-born population was 14.7% and the drop around WWII was caused by other factors.

Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants. Arguably the wealth of today is the product of managing to avoid the worst of WWII and profiting from Switzerland's "neutrality" but that's an entire conversation by itself.

Well they were neutral, its just most folks, even otherwise smart ones, don't like true neutral behavior if it doesn't actually favor their side, hence such 'smart' snarky remarks I can see all the time, by people feeling they know history. Swiss accepted everybody, hundreds of thousands of refugees too, some parts even when it became obvious they will all face starvation since they were completely encircled by axis. Private banks accepted everybody's money, just like every global bank did before and after the war.

They secretly helped allies - check Campione d'Italia story for example. Thats very far from neutral behavior. And so on. But most people don't want to know facts, they want simple black & white stories.

It continues till today - they are officially neutral but look at their moves ie against russia during Ukraine war. Completely aligned with west (well apart from US which has top brass collaborating with their sworn mortal enemy). Look how their army looks like - 100% compatibility with NATO, 0% with russia or anybody else. They picked their side, they just don't boast around it, actions speak more than 1000 words.

> Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants.

This. In particular the chemical/pharmaceutical industry (which is still a major Swiss industry today) got bootstrapped in great part by French and German chemists moving to Switzerland where they could make chemicals that was patented elsewhere but not in Switzerland due to looser industrial property laws at the time.

> Wasn't Switzerland already a rich country by then?

In 1940, Switzerland’s GDP/capita was 2.9x [EDIT: the world average]; it peaked at 4.4x in 2000 and is now 3.8x [1]. (It increases linearly, long term, from the mid 20s until 2000.)

Relative to Western Europe, Switzerland was 1.6x in 1950, about the same as today.

[1] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...

I feel like I have to read this backwards to perhaps understand it. Is 2.9x the multiplier of Swiss GDP/capita vs the Western Europe average in 1940?

Sorry, edited for clarity.

If the referendum passes and the population crosses the threshold, Switzerland may need to remove itself from e.g. the Schengen area. All the remediations mentioned in the referendum are about suspending immigration.

>in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth

Such a claim would need terms to be defined, even before justification. Switzerland's mercenary attitude to immigration is well known, yes. I would argue that endogenous factors (history and culture) are far more important in explaining Switzerland's success. Neither natural resources nor immigration are determinative of a country's wealth. See: Japan, which historically has had neither.

    > Switzerland's mercenary attitude to immigration is well known

What is meant by "mercenary attitude" here?

Historically, Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states: immigration is strictly contingent on labor needs, and citizenship is almost completely out of reach.

    > Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states

I need to say: Have you watched any YouTube videos about the way that low-skill migrants live and work in Gulf Arab states? It is horrifying. I will not downvote your comment if you reply in good faith. My point: Italian migrants who worked on big Swiss infra projects may not qualify for citizenship, but they did not have their passports confiscated by employers, nor lived in housing anywhere near the appalling conditions of Gulf Arab states.

All the butthurt people are going to come in here with screeds trying to upend a basic economic tenet that a growing population translates to economic growth if you can employ that growing population gainfully

> Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people.

That's a very dumb theory. People cannot just be exchanged: you cannot take say, 60 million people out of Bangladesh, put them in Japan, and expect Japan to stay the same. Just as you cannot take 60 million Japanese, put them in Bangladesh, and expect Bangladesh to stay the name.

That's a fact. But I could give a shitload of historical examples too... Here's one: when white and black people arrived in the americas, there was still cannibalism taking place in both northern and southern america. The americas had neither white nor black people. Today there's no cannibalism anymore and there are not many kids sacrifices happening in the US to please Inca/Maya gods anymore either.

A slightly more reasonable theory is that if you import people through immigration at a reasonable rate, you can assimilate those people. For example for a long time in Europe female genital mutilation wasn't a thing anymore. Now sadly due to mass migration, ask any ob-gyn doctor in western Europe what he sees and what kind of act he has to do: like re-stitching hymens to pretend the women-to-be-married are virgins (because, yes, there are patriarchal cultures where men are going to inspect a woman's hymen to make sure she's a virgin).

People just live in a fantasy land in their heads: there are 300 million women alive, today, who've been genitally mutilated (that's a very sizeable percentage of all the women out there). What's actually ongoing is weirder and shittier than most people realize.

I say good for Switzerland to curb immigration a bit.

People may be not dissimilar but cultures certainly are.

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