Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And I'm sure ours isn't a unique situation. A sane immigration policy has been one of the main things Switzerland has going for it. For example Google Zurich can't be at all happy about this.
(As is normal in these kinds of things, the vote to restrict immigation was concentrated in the rural areas where no immigrants would move to. Meanwhile the places where immigrants actually have an impact voted against the proposal).
However, I'm not afraid about Google - they have all the legal processes in place to get non-EU citizens into Switzerland that face quotas already today. And in the worst case, they can still offer them a job in another office.
1. Immigrants are disproportionally responsible for criminality.
2. Switzerland is a rich country and the Swiss want to keep the wealth for themselves. But of course, many immigrants have a net positive effect on the country's wealth.
3. Many immigrants come from a very different culture and don't want to adjust to the mainstream culture.
4. Immigrants may form groups isolated from the rest of the society.
5. The Swiss culture is different than the American one. They're not that welcoming to immigrants. They want to keep their culture. I personally understand why they voted not to allow mosques in their towns.
1) most probably if you take into account other factors (social economics ones), the nationality it's not a major one
2) as you said, the wealth created by migrants can be a net positive effect
3) many immigrants (85%) come from EU
4) almost none "ethnic ghettos" in CH
5) agree it's different. CH has about a 1/3 of its population that are migrants and they are generally welcomed and integrated (the regions that got most migrants rejected the initiative).
Beside, there isn't a unified "swiss culture". If you simply look at the languages, they are 3 different ones.
Also leaving them to their own devices.
I don't know if that is the case with Switzerland but there is just so much immigrants you can integrate and so much discount work you can get from them before you begin to rip the social fabric of the country; And this is happening in some countries, they push too hard.
So, limiting immigration to some realistic amount seems to be the right thing. Of course this applies less to educated professionals from similar cultures and more to cheap labor.
2) That's why it's important who can immigrate. An uneducated family escaping from a poor country?
3) 4) 5) Ok, good points, these were mostly general arguments against immigration.
As for the unified culture - I would say that their culture is more unified than in the rest of europe. Languages are not that important.
2) CH immigration has always been selective, like most countries. The difference was that a few years ago citizen from "rich" eu countries could come without extra barrier. That's what has been voted to be changed.
As for the unified culture,I'm swiss and I lived both in CH and other countries in Europe. We have a lot in common within the country, but at least as much that is different. And language is one huge part of a culture, because it frames how you think and defines what books or movies you can access too.
X+
As wikipedians would say, citation needed.
Besides, the majority of immigration within Switzerland are Europeans (because this law is for quotas about EU immigrants), the majority of which are French and Germans with a good level of qualifications, a frankly not so different culture, and the same language as the Swiss. So it has nothing to do with mosques.
> Besides, the majority of immigration within Switzerland are Europeans (because this law is for quotas about EU immigrants), the majority of which are French and Germans with a good level of qualifications, a frankly not so different culture, and the same language as the Swiss.
Ok, that's a good point.
Citation needed?
The current Swiss population breaks down as:
77% - Swiss citizens
15% - Citizens of EU/EFTA countries
5% - Citizens of European countries not in the EU/EFTA
1% - Citizens of Asian countries
1% - Citizens of American countries
1% - Citizens of African countries
By specific nationality, the top sources of immigration are (% of immigrant population in parentheses):
1. Italy (16%)
2. Germany (15%)
3. Portugal (13%)
4. France (6%)
6. Serbia (5%)
7. Turkey (4%)
8. Spain (4%)But mind you, I wasn't the one who downvoted him.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un...
Though I expect a reaction that is both more level-headed and apathetic, especially from the Danish, since they have lately also been keen on the xenophobia front (re-instated border controls a few years back).
The problem with this is that the Eurocrats see Europe's political integration as a one-way street: once you are in, there is no way back. They hate and threaten anyone who wants to go a step back - even if it is just a small one. The root cause is their fear of others imitating the Swiss and Brussels losing power. This has become very apparent during the euro crisis: while there are lots of rules for joining the euro-zone, none of the treaties ever even mentioned how one could leave it again. Leaving is just not an option in the minds of European politicians. This leaves no room for experiments and makes the EU very inflexible.
And, in this specific case, we can not trash a part of a treat hoping the rest will be still accepted without problems, that is not the way contracts work.
Democracy means that the Swiss are free to make their choices, and bear the consequences, like every other democracy.
In reality, you always have to make compromises. Pure democracy, in which the vox populi is total imperative must lead to isolationism in todays multi-faceted, complicated world. The best IMO best way to deal with todays world is the parlamentary democracy, where the citizens decide on the big questions and choices of direction while the technocrats try to work things out as close as possible to the stated choice of the electorate.
Picking out a tiny fragment of a big international treaty with many interested parties and rejecting that after the fact is childish.
With most countries with high amounts of immigrants being either quite poor or quite rich (especially those in Europe) and Switzerland obviously belonging to the rich European ones... it's not obvious what good could come from trying to leave this list of the richest, highest-immigration countries.
Wealth is not the measure of all things and it's definitely not something that gets spread around evenly. There are winners and losers to mass immigration. Mass immigration also reduces the notion of there being a common culture and destiny which reduces the social capital and civic mindedness required for public programs to work.
According to those who oppose caps, instituting caps will cause a bunch of pain anyway. If the EU want to punish the swiss, the best thing to do would be to allow that pain, which the swiss have indisputably brought upon themselves.
The whole EFTA agreement only works because Swizerland etc. are relatively small compared to the rest of the EU. If everybody had the EFTA deal and there was no EU, the whole thing would go to shambles within a few decades.
Removing freedom of movement of labour is highly retrogressive, and vast parts of the world would benefit from enabling it further, but we need to be better at getting to the bottom of this alienation at home question and how to resolve it because otherwise the fear of outsiders is just going to become more common and more acceptable.
In SV, poor(er) people complain about too many rich(er) people coming in.
When it comes to immigration, rich(er) people are afraid of too many poor(er) people coming in.
Also they are not removing freedom of movement, they put a limit on rate.
Which is something U.S. has been doing for decades and nothing bad really happened because of that.
In addition, the math for Switzerland is much different.
It's hard to change demographics of 300 million country by letting in a few hundred thousand immigrants.
According to the article, already 25% of 8 million Swiss are foreigners. That would be a pretty alarming number if you were native Swiss. If the current trend continues (80 thousand immigrants per year), that would be 50% in ~25 years.
Let's also not ignore the real danger of ethnic-based or religious-based conflict, like Bosnian War.
These two components typically summarize most Swiss votes pretty well.
(most visible on a map, see http://www.24heures.ch/suisse/tendance-initiative-udc-limmig...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_European_Constitution_re...
Hell they've even gone against democracy itself.
Btw : letting member states pick and chose is alive and well. It's called confederalism and you can see it in action in (amongst others) Belgium and Switzerland.
Even an American can easily see that a large chunk of Switzerland is quite reactionary. It seems weird. For some reason I expected a wealthy European country to have liberal social values.
http://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/svp_0...
As Switz people are historically all from one race and they didn't have a habit of importing slaves of other races, they don't have to like other races as a group.
Of course they should still treat individual people equally because not doing so is a human rights violation and is just plain rude.
I had been in Zurich for almost a month before I saw the first black man there. Moments after I first saw him, he was arrested by four Kantonspolizie who jumped out of a van. True story.
I guess the big question is: Should they try to maintain their happy albeit somewhat isolated way of life? Or should they import diversity with all the social problems that come along with it?
It will drive their wages down and decrease living conditions (both short term).
You might argue it would be "a fair thing" for migrants to support migration, but it's not a rational one.
Trade unions have to be nice to the rest of society (being its part), but Swiss citizens (both born and new) don't have to be nice to all the rest of the world. They have even greater priority of minding their own business.
Ordinary Swiss workers will ask themselves, "who benefits from this immigration?" The 50/50 referendum result is indicative of people's uncertainty about the answer to that question; and not necessarily that of their xenophobic attitude.
This is par for the course in historical terms. The U.K. has always been against the formation of a strong, unified, mainland Europe.
The collapse of the Berlin wall certainly played into the British vision for a while, then the Euro initially did well causing the federal contingent to be excited, but the structural weaknesses from the Eurozone members not having gone all in on unification, especially for budgetary policy, have swung it temporarily back to the large but loose collective. The split between the French and German experience of the Euro problem is going to prevent any real progress on this point at all since increasingly those two parties are going to disagree on their visions of the future.
Try it sometime.
I would say it makes sense given that previous policies gave rise to some suboptimal dynamics.
I wonder if they manage to still make holes for qualified specialists.
If you think about it you'll wonder how they managed to pay newly immigrated poor people unemployement benefits in the first place.
EU migrants entering the UK cannot claim unemployment benefit for the first three months of their stay (but they can after that time). The debate is around "benefit tourism" - people travelling to other countries to claim welfare benefits. Whether this is an actual problem or something whipped up by our toxic British press is hard to say (facts rarely come into the discussion as far as the press are concerned).
The debate about "benefit tourism" isn't unique to Britain (perhaps the hysterical tone is though). It's a political issue in other European countries too.
No it's not. It's about North African immigrants creating completely exclusive communities using violence. Or at least, it is in Brussels. It is about the creation of oppressive communities fraught with crime, sexual inequality, enormous hatred of anyone not entirely like them in the middle of nearly all European countries.
Visit Brussels. Make sure to arrive through the "gare du nord", and walk around the building (warning: quite a walk, don't take too much money with you). You will understand in 30 minutes what's going on.
Some sources, like you, claim insane crime in immigrant ghettoes, when other sources act like there is no problem.
If immigrants have high crime rate and they make a sizable portion of citizens, how come it doesn't reflect in crime statistics? Because those are still low for the EU as far as I know.
What's the mechanics behind all that, in short?
On the other hand, there are also people who actually live there. They wouldn't mind the population dropping and the violence, exclusion and crime matters a whole lot more if you can't escape it. Walking around the north station in Brussels with an iPad, for example, is impossible. Walking around alone if you're female, just don't risk it.
And of course, the racism charge is used against anyone who isn't happy. Note that racism, by itself, is a crime in Western Europe (this started out as a law against holocaust denial and now includes a hell of a lot more[1]). It's considered part of criminal law, which means that if you're suspected of racism you can be charged without any damages. This tends to happen to people who get in the way of the status-quo politics. In reality 35-45% of the population is extremely against immigration (including nearly all non-recent immigrants), but they're kept out of the political process through charges of racism or accusations of being nazis.
[1] Except of course, where convenient. Denying the Armenian genocide is sort-of OK by the socialist parties in Europe, because they want their power over Turkey too.
And if you research it rather than just think about it you'll know that the UK doesn't just dole out benefits to newly arrived EU migrants.
The grand-parent said 27, but Shengen area (with free movement) is not the same as EU: The UK and Ireland are not part of it, but Iceland, Norway and Switzerland are (well, not anymore it seems).
"Those in favour of mass migration says the policy will benefit the Swiss economy"
It is kind of interesting that mass migration opponents have a list of reasons while proponents usually wave this one only.
That'll be a first.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitut...
These are the people that have not even mentioned the situation in Turkey. Hell, they haven't even stopped treaty negotiations about Turkey joining the EU.
Can't have your lunch and eat it.
That's an interesting twist to our discourse.
The price you have to pay is that you get the Euro, you pay into the EU budget, you have your banking and industry regulated by the EU and you get the (admittedly questionable) supervision of the national budget.
There is a bigger question about cherry-picking the EU treaties here. Too many nationalists wanting to opt out of too many things.
EDIT: I must admit that my original comment can be read the way you did, but it was definitely not meant that way. I can assure you that I personally have made extensive use of the freedom to roam, work and study wherever I please within the EU.