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Comment by ZirconCode | Hacker News Reader

Even the voting booklets were pretty biased against passing (IMO of course), although I'm not surprised at this result. The type of xenophobia often attributed to hillbillies in american culture is a lot more common in Switzerland than I expected. The sad thing is most people I've meet which hold this belief, could themselves be considered foreigners.

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When I first arrived in Switzerland I was very surprised by the open racism and generally far-right-wing platform of the SVP. The black sheep poster[1] is pretty infamous of course, and then there's the small fact that the SVP was strongly against women's suffrage, within my lifetime! I think of universal suffrage as belonging to the American Reconstruction era but for Switzerland it's contemporaneous with men landing on the moon.

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...

I would say a controversial thing:

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.

Yes as I've sometimes said to my friends back home about Swiss, it's amazing how polite and well-behaved people are when they are all rich and sharing the same ancestors.

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.

> it's amazing how polite and well-behaved people are when they are all rich and sharing the same ancestors

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?

There are all kinds of diversity and most of them do not involve bringing poor and agressive people in. You can just call educated foreigners in. I frankly don't understand why countries can choose #1 route once that became apparent.

Why should foreigners want to bring more foreigners into the country?

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.

It's a similar reason to trade unions traditionally opposing minimum wage laws.

It's slightly different:

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.

I don't think it's fair to attribute this to xenophobia. You need to have some soft quota because immigration involves people; and people issues are complex to manage. Absorbing 80,000 new immigrants into population of 8 million is a huge deal.

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.

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