Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million
swissinfo.ch
swissinfo.ch
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl...
Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”But EU citizens can basically live forever in CH even though technically they don’t have permanent residency.
How many people born in CH never become Swiss? Because for the US, that number is ~0%.
And before you say: "well the US have different rules", well, ok, but then don't compare us to the US on the other number either, compare us to other EU countries with similar types of rules but different implementations.
CH has stricter naturalization laws than many EU countries and CH has mandatory military service which discourages many males from naturalizing, even those born in the country.
About one third. That would bring the fraction of naturalised foreign-born citizens in line with the US (which is also a kind-of-hard place to get citizenship, that's true).
> CH has mandatory military service which discourages many males from naturalizing
That doesn't make it difficult, it makes it undesirable and suggests that many people could get it but choose not to.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...
It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
It’s first “I don’t want illegal immigrants”, when the immigration is legal they start doing things like take back control(UK) or sustainability (Swiss).
What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago or robots now.
I find it annoying that they screw other stuff just because they don’t want to face the truth about their character.
But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.
Unprotected heterosexual sex and births were decoupled 55 years ago. Almost as tenuous is the link between births and well raised children who can and will provide the labor that is wanted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the bourgeois left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.
Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.
Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?
The solution there is the same solution as the US. If the US introduced a (for example) 4x median salary fine for every year an employer employed someone not legally eligible to work the problem would fix itself. If they did not keep records assume 5 years or whenever the person's visa expired, since that is the most common case of illegal immigration.
But the businesses WANT a class of people they can underpay who can't gain access easily to legal services when the employer screws them over.
If the people are employed legally and are being paid the minimum wage, then your complaint is with the government and you should elect people that will raise the minimum wage.
Of course business owners suppress wages. By using immigrants as leverage to tilt the supply/demand of labor in their favor. Duh.
Why are you putting words in my month? I never said they did, but they do lobby the government to set an immigration policy that favors business and assets over labor, d'uh!
>They just try to get value for money like everyone else.
No, they're not like "everybody else". If corporations want cheaper tabor, they just tell the government and they open the immigration taps. But if workers want higher wages they can't have the government deport excess labor. It's a power asymmetry.
Not an anecdotal fact: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-...
Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.
Just ridiculous.
Instead of supply/demand, capital availability and information disparity the price is determined by voting on it. A way to overcome the tragedy of the commons.
Voting on prices is not a free market. It's something entirely different.
Meaning that if you are able to get a job yes you’ll get paid more, but because there are now more people competing for the same number of jobs you’re also less likely to get a job.
You just have contempt for your fellow citizens, people are happy to do hard jobs if they are getting rewarded for it. This is also why you often find locals in equivalent jobs that can't be done by migrants (such as historical monuments restauration), but are equally hard (and better paid).
And I'm ok with restaurants being much more expensive. Anyway in France it's mostly pensioners that go there anymore.
apologies, but those of us in the Left agree more with the second part of your sentence than the Left. Are you mixing Leftists and Liberals, perchance?
If you want to go back to your ethnostate fantasy, people are going to have to go back to consuming what you can produce in your own country. So Switzerland is going back to a diet of essentially bread and cheese and frankly I don’t think they grow enough grain for the bread.
Besides, what you say is plainly false. Hairdressers are for instance in majority locals, command rather high rates, and are in demand. Maybe we also don't need 6 malls per medium-sized town either.
Also, I don’t believe very many Dalits actually end up leaving India. Indian affirmative action means they essentially get a lot of the best college spots and governments jobs and it’s too cushy to leave.
And yes, the principle of public policy should be to care for one's own people first. Maybe India should have not been so nationalistic and allowed the English rulers to stay, so that financiers in London could continue to make fortunes out of the empire? How petty and egoistical of the Indians, right?
Absolutely incorrect. There is not one case of this happening, infact it’s the exact opposite. It’s a common fallacy.
The only correlation for birth rate is that it is inversely correlated with women’s education.
Meanwhile every Indian flees their awesome home country, and no one complains about the emigration and indian population reduction. Maybe because it's also a way for them to fix the selective abortions and widely biased sex ratio that came as a consequence?
Indians will directly tell you it’s not awesome but it’s definitely on the path to being so. If it can pull off its performance from the last 15 years for the next 15, it will be developed.
India’s birth rate is far below replacement rate already. So much so that the government is starting to encourage people to have more kids again.
[1] https://www.wlrn.org/business/2026-03-23/florida-oranges-cit...
Given that Latvian truck drivers are already the cheapest of the EU, you can figure out that legal is not the problem.
Which is made easier by immigration. In addition to the simple law of supply & demand, it also impedes unionization:
Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks - https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...
Immigrants Reduce Unionization in the United States - https://www.cato.org/blog/immigrants-reduce-unionization-uni...
Racial Diversity and Union Organizing in the United States, 1999–2008 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253
Amusingly, the ComputerWeekly article (citing the Business Insider article) omits the direction in which diversity affects unionization risk [1], while the two wikipedia articles (again citing the same Business Insider article) [2,3] strongly imply that diversity increases unionization, so the opposite of what their source is saying!
[1] These “risk scores” are calculated from over two dozen metrics – including employee “loyalty”, turnover, racial diversity, “tipline” calls to human resources and proximity to a union office – and shows the likelihood of employees in that location forming or joining a union. - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
[2] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community, and calls to the NLRB were named as contributors to "unionization risk." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon#Opposition...
[3] Factors including racial diversity, proximity to other unions, poverty levels in the surrounding community and calls to the National Labor Relations Board were named as contributors to "unionization risk". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_and_trade_unions
Turn the brain on from time to time!
But even without considering that, the business-owning "bourgeois" class not caring about their nation has no reason to be left unchecked by those whose job is to run a country.
Everytime I get into the weeds with anti immigration people I feel like I run through the IQ meme with “it’s just racism” on the low and high ends and {insert whatever alternative argument they have} in the middle.
Governmental policy is the appropriate place to focus attention - not Twitter outrage campaigns about random companies following the laws that were democratically put in place
When I see ICE raid a farm or factory and take a bunch of illegal immigrants to praise, but the company has no consequences other than losing their employees and the anti immigration crowd is silent about that, then I feel like it’s just racism.
Also I would expect a push for limiting legal immigration from the camp that would be legitimate in arguing for less immigration to keep domestic wages higher, not necessarily pushing against the hiring of people who got past the rule system.
How wouldn't it be just as racist to attack companies for hiring immigrants?
They did this already back when Reagan granted amnesty in exchange for stronger border protections [1], it just hardly ever got enforced because employers are good at lobbying. This is slowly starting to change [2].
Despite this, yes, it is xenophobia. As much as they hate to admit it, opposition to immigration usually stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of a country, not an economic zone. Though the economic case for immigration has also been debunked [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/11/28/employ...
[3] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/02/fiscal-impact-of-immigr...
They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.
PS. I am German.
I wont call this xenophobia. Its just rich people annoyed by the poor hanging around outside the working hours. They often even like their poor people that do their things, they are actually annoyed by the other rich peoples employees or the kids of those employees who are seen as not as well behaved as theirs.
Germans are kind of disliked in the rest of DACH.
> It’s a special kind of NIMBY, not necessarily xenophobia. More like a class thing, they want other rich people’s kids do the shitty jobs so they don’t have to have these poor people doing the jobs and hanging around.
And it can happen implicitly or explicitly. Witness Jackson Hole. None of the workers can afford to live there and the nearest towns are not close. So the residents arranged a coach service to bus the workers in. And at the end of the day, and out. Yes, to their homes, but best believe there is a very limited window of return coaches which leads to a feeling of almost a sundown town.
Yeah, it's also not unusual system: just look at gulf countries, singapore, HK,... the problem is europeans themselves talked themselves into some kind of system that prevents them from following the same model. They still would love to though
> And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
The current system permitting freedom of movement across the continent while devolving immigration policy entirely to members creates a fundamental tension the EU needs to resolve. Because otherwise, Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly, which is bound to generate backlash even if they run a perfect programme.
> Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly
That's what I was responding to.
Note the UK left the EU and accepted more immigrants than before. We didn't force them. Hungary and Poland never accepted Syrian immigrants either and they weren't forced to accept them iirc.
Not quite Berlin, but same effect: nearly indiscriminate influx of poorly vetted immigrants that can soon travel all around Europe.
So yes, it's with us in the room, just not right now, but very soon.
You are confusing immigration with naturalization. Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly.
Fair enough and great point.
It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany. (Though still much harder than in America, at least based on my American friends who naturalized there and this Swiss of Indian and Germanic origin who naturalized in America.) It’s fair for those countries to want to maintain those differences.
Is it? Asking out of curiosity, from a cursory look both countries require self-sufficiency, language (in fact Switzerland looks a little easier on this), no criminal background, an integration test to be taken (and both seem easy) and time in the country.
Only major difference seems to me is Germany takes 5 years in paper (more like 6-7 in reality with bureaucracy) and Switzerland takes 10 years in paper.
You can still be voted on by the city council though, but they are required to provide a reason and „wrong hair color“ will not pass legal challenge.
Some decisions still make headlines though because the reasons are rather weird sometimes.
Tbh I cannot see anything else but Swiss people at some point voting themselves out of this somehow.
You do realize German nationals (followed by French) are the top contingent in term of immigration to Swizerland.
(Only EU citizens benefit from freedom of movement to settle in Switzerland)
Yes. I’m also conceding to the SVP the observation that a good fraction of said nationals are recently naturalized.
Don’t know, don’t care. Mine are conversations in Zürich.
Part of it is by economic necessity. For example finding nursing staff is very challenging and you have to compete with the US and Australia and other rich countries.
But part of it doesn't make much sense. We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside of Europe when we have about 2,500 EU universities pumping out graduates each year.
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
Therefore it isn't really a good metric at the scale required to alleviate the problems people are facing.
"Eventually it will work out." Isn't proffering a solution.
No. Finding staff that'll work for very low wages is very challenging. It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages.
Sort of. You’re simply not going to have an agricultural sector with at Canadian and American wages without significantly higher food prices and protectionism. One day we may automate that. But that will still be more expensive for the foreseeable future.
Voters seem to be picking domestic production and low prices, with low wages being a side effect. (Business interests of course love those.)
I was involved in a startup in the Netherlands. We tried to recruit Dutch people, all wanted safe 9-5 jobs where they would know what they would do in 1-2 years. A startup can not guarantee that.
We ended up with most engineers foreigners, many (but not all) that have studied there.
So I would say that it is also risk and opportunity related. Someone "from outside" will be willing to do more, will have to prove himself, will take more risk. A "local" will have family support, wealth, a network, might want and value stability.
I don't have an opinion about how things "should be", I am just sharing how I saw them (myself an immigrant, multiple times)
To society a startup with a 99%% chance of failing to IPO is no different from a sweatshop which also wants skilled but cheap labor.
----
Hopefully we can all take inspiration from the living memories of balkanization – smaller groups, hopefully with shared interests and common backgrounds, ought to be in charge of themselves; and themselves, only.
Massive internal trade barriers and security so fragmented you’re at the whim of your larger neighbors?
Every jurisdiction needs to limit immigration more (which EU's dispersed jurisdictions make impossible, by statute) before any one country can tackle any of their other lacks/disputes. The current EU setup is the inverse of USA's, where the feds technically regulate most immigration issues (instead of EU's individual memberstates having most power), but not all.
Balkanisation refers to fences within one’s borders. It’s fragmentation that leads to less wealth, less security and eventually a loss of sovereignty to a powerful neighbor who notices.
Looking at it from the Slovene POV (which ultimately benefited from the dissolution of Yogoslavia, occurring within my/most lifetime), local industries/GDP benefitted greatly.
Currently, the rest of ex-Yugoslavia countries don't seem to do as well as Slovenia, and the main difference is date of joining the EU...
If you are EU or do get a work permit, you will not get housing.
The vote was for a reason…
Meanwhile the parlement and the anti+immigration far-right vote all the time to increase landlord rights and margins. Most of them are landlords, of course...
Let’s be realistic and admit that landlords already prioritize someone with history of renting in the country and it’s pretty fair to say that new immigrants will struggle to get housing. Even if you come on a FAANG salary, you will not be able to buy your way in that easily.
Americans at Google Zürich do it all the time.
Non-EU means it's harder to get a permit, especially without working experience, but it's not impossible either.
Housing is difficult in cities like Zurich but calling it impossible is stretching it, especially if one is fine with a longer commute.
You get bonus points for commuting across the German border and utilizing our cheap prices. Don't forget to get the value-added tax refunded!
Source: am Swiss
I would agree and also suggest that initiatives like this play a large role in doing so. While there's a lot of bullshit arguments coming from the "yes" camp they do make some reasonable points and it's important that we discuss them to show what the trade-offs are.
I cannot speak for all Swiss but knowing that it was a democratic decision to continue with some, high skilled, immigration makes it far easier to accept than if some government employee in Bern would've made that decision single handed.
Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...
I have a friend who voted yes and he lives outside of Basel because he thinks the city is too crowded. If you've been there you might find that amusing. His most vocal complaint is about too many people on Swiss hiking trails and difficulty in Booking huts.
More recently, he was laid off by a multinational pharma company where most of the Swiss office is now German immigrants.
That's not to say culture isn't a factor, but it would be a mistake to apply American ideas of racism to it
It was terrible for girls born in China when they had their one child limit.
They don't give a damn if you have 13 children, they don't want brown people in Switzerland.
Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.
I was addressing the implication in the "fact", which is incorrect anyway. One in five of that 27% were born in Switzerland: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...
I had only heard about rebirth in a figurative spiritual sense.
* 41% of the permanent resident population aged 15 and over has a migration background
* 27% of the permanent resident population is not Swiss
* 22% of the permanent resident population was born outside of Switzerland
Here's some more countries by immigrant background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im... # Switzerland is on a par with Austria, Australia, and New Zealand, and way below many other countries that have > 50%.
That's the part they currently don't say out loud. They are getting bolder and bolder though.
For those voting to strictly limit citizenship, I wonder if they are supporting: a permanent underclass without full rights? or that basic needs to be more expensive? or that widespread automation will soon meet basic labor needs?
addendum: thank you kgwgk
This is still very close for comfort, and SVP will re-propose it again and again and again as it and it's predecessors have done for decades.
55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes?
But of course, the SVP have been launching the same initiative since the 70s, they are unlikely to stop now.
A 55% win with 58% turnout despite how this vote was front and center of media discourse is very worrisome as this shows how disengaged the other 42% are.
If the marketing were less xenophobic and the cap were derived from some scientific basis, I think I could be persuaded to vote for it. Particularly since it is not a vote for Chexit, but a democratic vote to confront the EU. (Britain triggered Article 50. Nothing in this referendum directs Berne to do that.)
In what way? It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations. Unilaterally breaching your obligations is not a grounds for discussion or compromise, it is simply an exit from them, benefits included.
Suppose you're not getting on with your roommate. You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord. You are opting for the latter. That is not "confronting" anything, it is a done deal. It is a choice you are allowed to make, to be clear, just as the Brits did, but let's not pretend it's something it isn't.
It was a vote to renegotiate them under threat of disavowing them. That’s fine.
> You could talk to them and try to resolve the problems, or you could default on your lease and receive an eviction notice from the landlord
It’s totally fair, during those talks, to make clear that if you can’t reach an agreement on the roommate not doing their dishes, you’re prepared to move out. (That doesn’t commit you to moving out if they refuse to budge.)
The vote did commit you to amending your federal constitution with a population cap, period.
> If the 10-million threshold is exceeded, Switzerland would have to terminate these agreements, including the one with the EU on the free movement of persons after two years. This would also render the other agreements under Bilateral Agreements I null and void. Switzerland’s participation in the EU’s Schengen and Dublin agreements would also be called into question, thereby jeopardising close cooperation in the areas of security and asylum.
There is no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences.
But I suppose that's how these votes have to be marketed, isn't it? The Brits were under the delusion that they'd get to have their cake and eat it too, that they could keep any benefits of being in the EU even as they exited it. I wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves. Which, again, is valid if that's the intention, but I suspect a lot of voters like yourself rather believed they were only voting to end freedom of movement for brown foreigners, or voting to negotiate special privileges, when in actuality it was literally a vote to exit treaties.
There is always room for negotiation. Bilaterals is a treaty, not a diktat. And again, 2 years provides time for another referendum.
> wonder how many Swiss were aware they were voting to end their own freedom of movement, that blocking EU immigration would mean they would no longer be able to move elsewhere in the EU themselves
Everyone did. The question was how the Guillotine clauses would be executed. Which, truly, nobody knows.
The "diktat" is the thing you just voted on which says "we will not negotiate". There is always room for negotiation until you vote for a law that says "no negotiations, we are now legally mandated to do X".
> 2 years provides time for another referendum.
Voting for a no-negotiations amendment to your constitution as a negotiation tactic with the idea that you will later pass another constitutional amendment in a small window of time to revoke it is some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp.
Which isn’t a thing for a sovereign. Past sovereigns can’t bind future ones. Laws can always be repealed.
> some kind of 4D checkers strategising that I suppose I am not enlightened enough to grasp
Neither was I. Hence my vote against. Doesn’t mean the core concept is flawed, or that we have to accept EU treaties as perpetual because my ancestors voted for it to be that way.
The initiative text literally directed the Bundesrat to withdraw from the bilaterals 2 years after exceeding 10m if they couldn't be renegotiated.
Sure. This is two years down the road. And it is not Article 50. It would cause a shitshow. But that shitshow could be averted and is less comprehensive than directing an EU exit.
Of course, those negotiations didn't go anywhere, because the EU has a limited ability to make concessions. Any comprehensive deal must be approved unanimously by all member states and some subnational entities. And that just doesn't happen, unless the proposed deal is clearly better than the status quo.
To confront the EU on an absolute red line, yes.
The EC is already not thrilled with the Switzerland situation and was fairly clear that it would not allow the UK to negotiate something similar; it is unlikely that it would allow Switzerland to make the deal _worse_. At a certain point it'd just cast off Switzerland entirely.
If the UK (70 million people) was unable to get the EC to move on this, it seems implausible that Switzerland (9 million) would be able to.
Very typical, and even higher than usual.
The Swiss have votations all the time. They also can vote by mail. Those who didn't vote had no opinion, or no strong opinion, on the matter.
Also, cities who should suffer the most of overcrowding by immigrants voted against, as well as cantons situated at the border, while the backcountry who never see any immigrant voted in favor.
Citizens with immigration background have been in the country for 10+ years, because 10 is the minimum for getting citizenship, at which point their voting patterns are more likely to be influenced by other factors and not their immigrant background.
Plus, it’s a bit of a phenomenon that many citizens with immigrant background’s tend to vote for stricter immigration policies.
And it takes more than a decade to have a chance at trying to get naturalized in Switzerland - a process that takes more than a year and thousands of CHF.
And naturalized immigrants have been shown to be ready to "pull the ladder behind them", even in countries where it is easier to get it (see the many interviews of Turks voting AfD in Germany or Indians voting Conservative in the UK).
Edit: FabCH concurs.
can!
If you think people who waited more than a decade and paid a hefty sum to affirm their will to be citizens are second-class (or maybe even traitors!) compared to people who became citizen by making no effort and were just born that way...
Never?
> If you think people who waited more than a decade and paid a hefty sum to affirm their will to be citizens are second-class (or maybe even traitors!)
I don't think so. Do you?
(Edit: I don't object to using 'immigrant' in a different way. But when someone said that in the places with more immigration there will also be more immigrant voters it was pretty clear in what sense the word was being used. Dumbass.)
I did not "wait" for it. I came here, worked a bunch, made more money than I would've in my home country, and got the passport mostly so that I can have a refuge in case of severe war, and to have better travel opportunities.
Blame me all you want, I'm giving you the honest view many (most?) of us have, that you won't hear in society for obvious reasons. Lifelong culture, values, family, and friends do not change because a person worked in a given country for N years and filled some paperwork to get a passport, and to think otherwise is NONSENSE.
> to think otherwise is NONSENSE.
Is it, or are you just scared shitless to have had the wrong outlook on life all your life, and don't want to even entertain the idea lest your whole psyche be revealed as a hollow valueless shell?
They have among the lowest fertility rates on the planet and a huge over 50 population.
There's no way they can keep being wealthy and comfortable without younger immigrants.
#NotSorryForFlaming
Who benefits from immigration the most? The capitalist gains cheap and weak labor, consumers to sell products and services to, and rent apartments to. It doesn't matter to him if the money comes from benefits. The negative effects are externalized to ordinary citizens. The capitalists own the media, which they use to shape public opinion on immigration in their favor or divert attention elsewhere. It also gives them a target to deflect from themselves and their obscene enrichment at the expense of the taxpayer.
The problem with a population cap is that it conflates immigration that is net negative (people from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey and their children) and net positive immigration (Western immigrants) [1].
Here's a transcript of Studs Terkel in 1980 interviewing a couple of German publishers (from 03m22s to 06m10s) highlighting the citizens aversion to incompatible people, economic asylum-seekers, and who put those rules in place [2]:
Terkel: Is there a German attitude towards the Turkish minority here? There are quite a few Turks here.
Publishers: Yes. There is an attitude, especially against immigrants who are not coming from Europe, because now the Italians and so on, they are accepted. They are Christians. But those Turkish people build a kind of reserve army of the labor market and are very often detested, viscerally, by Germans. [...] I think the big problem that you have in Germany is the "Asylantenproblem" [asylum seeker problem] [...] This is part of the normalizing of German national consciousness, this question of the asylum possibilities. As you know, as a result of the liberation of Germany by the allies, in our constitution there is a fundamental right because many founding fathers of the Western republic had been immigrants, [...] so they stated that every man or woman, persecuted for political reasons, or racial reasons, and so on, had to have asylum in Germany. Now, when the economic crisis in Germany and the technological changes have brought about also more than 2 million unemployed people, there are tendencies within the right parties to restrict, to amend the right of asylum, with the argument that those "Asylanten", those asylum seekers, are not really politically persecuted; they are so-called economic asylants.
[2] https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bende...
R.I.P. Switzerland
The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.
It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.
Not to mention automation is only increasing. Japan will have a booming robot export business going in a few decades.
A lot of these arguments about "needing" immigration to support aging populations are just thinly-veled neoliberal excuses.