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Comment by initramfs | Hacker News Reader

The fact that some in Switzerland wanted to cap population at 10 million says a lot about their free market. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/14/switzerland-re...

Fortunately, the referendum failed. I mean, sure it's nice to have a small population, but I think it's also important to try to improve economic migration everywhere.

I actually live in a rural area in the U.S, and was surprised to see that I now have a 2-3 fiber offerings. A few years ago there was just one fiber company, but a utility company helped roll it out and I currently use it on a 100Mbps symmetrical plan (for what I use, it's more than enough).

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It was a referendum. Anyone can trigger a referendum if they have 100k signatures. This was not the government position.

Switzerland is a democracy, another concept foreign to Americans. People vote on all sorts of things all the time.

I'm not sure what economic migration is. Economic for whom? I'm not taking a side by asking, merely wondering.

"Economic migration" is a (usually derogatory) term for moving into a country to earn more money, with no desire to adapt to the culture of your new home.

Often times the children of such migrants adapt pretty well. I think the term is more euphemistic and neutral than derogatory. It's more like a category that's existed for centuries (but gets more stigma now) because some the older generations who have been in the U.S. for a few decades now look down on those "fresh off the boat," the same way those before them did to them. Irish fled the Potato Famine in the 1850s- they were economic migrants too.

I never really thought of it as a subset of immigrants who move to get rich but not adapt. Lisa Su, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are also economic migrants. Just because they adapted/assimilated more than others doesn't make them _not_ economic migrants.

see my response to danielheath.

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