
Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show - mojuba
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26108597
======
jsnell
This is of course potentially disastrous. Our startup is based in Switzerland,
with about half us working in Zurich and the other half in the EU. The goal
has always been to do most new hiring in Switzerland rather than continue
building a distributed organization. If the immigration situation changes
drastically, we'll probably need to instead grow in other countries. And after
that happens, there really is very little point in keeping the company
registered and paying taxes in Switzerland at all. Even in the current
situation being outside of the EU is already rather inconvenient.

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).

~~~
Hermel
Yes, such quotas are a pain in the ass for a startup. The company I worked for
lost a foreign employee because his residence-permit was not renewed after two
years.

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.

~~~
jsnell
Oh, Google as a whole will of course be fine. But it'd be insane to have a
huge engineering office in a small country and a bad immigration policy. So
they'll grow elsewhere, and Switzerland loses out. (I worked in Google's
Zurich office the last time there was a big immigration quota scare, IIRC 2008
or 2009 when they cut various quotas in half with no warning. It definitely
wasn't treated internally as casually as you imply.)

------
RivieraKid
There is nothing inherently wrong about tightening immigration policy. I don't
know the details but there are couple of perfectly understandable reasons why
people oppose immigration (note that they overlap a bit):

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.

~~~
tttp
I'm not sure you have enough facts to support your arguments

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.

~~~
RivieraKid
1) Perhaps it's just the poor and unemployed immigrants that cause
criminality. But still, you can say that immigration increases unemployment
and therefore criminality.

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.

~~~
tttp
1) No you can't gerneralise. Immigrants from France and Germany in CH are less
criminal (well, technically less arrested ;) than swiss citizen.

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+

------
yulaow
Imho it is not a good choice at all. As the EU commission said, if the
Switzerland want to put some immigration block they have to drop also all
other rights of the treaty EU-Sw [1]. Considering how much Swiss companies
depend on the EU to make profit, I think this can be a large catastrophe on
the mid-long term.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Un...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_Union_relations)

~~~
Hermel
The dependency goes two ways. For example, there is no German car without
parts coming from Switzerland. I hope that Brussels does not act offended and
stays reasonable. Any action that hurts both parties would just be childish.
However, they Swiss already struggled in the past to explain their democracy
to the EU bureaucrats. Being used to decide for themselves, European
politicians often fail to fully comprehend a system in which the people have
the last word.

~~~
aristidb
I suppose you consider not upholding one side of the treaty when the other
side has been dropped "childish"?

~~~
Hermel
The Swiss do not want to drop the treaty - which is about much more than just
immigration. They only want to keep immigration limited - as it was already
the case until 2010. Going back to that level would be the simplest and most
pragmatic solution.

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.

~~~
yulaow
Well but... we all know that. With that I mean that we know what EU treat are
before we sign it. Once signed, obviously, we must not trash it expecting that
nothing will happen.

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.

------
seszett
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-
bo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-
born_population)

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.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Some people hope that the EU will cut Switzerland's access to the common
market which will force it to officially accede to the European Union and have
a saying in the rules and regulations it has to adopt anyway.

~~~
michaelt
From the perspective of the EU, taking punitive action would make them look
like Russia, eager to push their 'allies' about. It would be a gift to people
who say the EU wants to take away countries' individual sovereignty.

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.

~~~
sentenza
I think you are right, letting them run into that knife is probably the best
way. However, the counterargument also holds some sway: Switzerland is free-
riding already, having many of the common market benefits of the EU without
giving he loss of sovereignty that EU membership entails.

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.

------
fidotron
These kind of moves are Europe's equivalent to the bus nonsense in Silicon
Valley. It's the misplaced anger of a bunch of people that feel economically
impotent and threatened by outsiders that seemingly operate in places they
consider to be their homes more effectively than they do.

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.

~~~
kkowalczyk
It's actually the opposite of the "bus nonsense" and actually the concerns are
valid.

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.

------
henridf
This vote has a classic "urban vs rural" component. Urban areas (where high
population growth has the most direct impact) said "no" to the restriction of
immigration. Rural areas said yes. The other component is linguistic/regional.

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...](http://www.24heures.ch/suisse/tendance-initiative-
udc-limmigration/story/13798297))

------
spindritf
And EU officials are unhappy about it. I guess if it was one of the EU
countries, people would get to vote until a pre-approved decision in a
referendum is reached.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_European_Constitution_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_European_Constitution_referendum)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
No. If it was an EU country, same thing would happen. EU would crack down on
treaty violation.

~~~
waps
By which you mean Europe would claim that the international treaties they make
superseed the will of the local voters by virtue of them being in Europe ?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_(European_Union_law)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_\(European_Union_law\))

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Yes. Member states can't just pick and choose. They're in or they're out, with
few exceptions.

~~~
waps
Except of course that in every test ever European politicians have chosen to
safeguard their power and jobs as opposed to the principles of the European
state.

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.

------
ZirconCode
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.

~~~
thrownaway2424
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...](http://www.hurryupharry.org/wp-
content/uploads/2009/11/svp_01a.jpg)

~~~
guard-of-terra
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.

~~~
thrownaway2424
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.

~~~
sampo
> _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?

~~~
guard-of-terra
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.

------
Hermel
This is potentially good news for immigrants from the rest of the world.
Currently, there are very strict quotas in place to make up for the large
inflow of Europeans. In future, both categories will have quotas, which could
result in more generous quotas for countries like the US. In an ironic twist,
this could result in a more globally oriented Switzerland.

------
Hermel
I wonder wether this is part of a larger backlash against centralization in
general. The British have become very skeptical of the EU. And in September,
the Scots will even vote on becoming independent from the UK. Catalonia feels
less and less comfortable as part of Spain. Is this only a temporary
phenomenon or an ongoing trend?

~~~
skylan_q
_The British have become very skeptical of the EU._

This is par for the course in historical terms. The U.K. has always been
against the formation of a strong, unified, mainland Europe.

~~~
gaius
Indeed we fought two wars in the last century to prevent it.

~~~
aristidb
I believe preventing the need for such wars was one of the reasons why the UK
joined the EU, or am I mistaken?

~~~
seszett
Preventing it by disorganising the EU from the inside, maybe.

------
guard-of-terra
It seems that Europe is tightening its immigration policies.

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.

~~~
rmc
Half a billion people in the EU have the right to live and work in any of the
27 member states. People from some very poor countries can live and work in
very rich countries. That's actually a massive amount of freedom of movement,
and dismantling of immigration barriers.

~~~
guard-of-terra
How come UK wants to stop paying immigrants from poor countries unemployement
benefits?

If you think about it you'll wonder how they managed to pay newly immigrated
poor people unemployement benefits in the first place.

~~~
seszett
The UK is not part of this, though.

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).

~~~
aristidb
Schengen area is about border control. There definitely is free movement
between the UK and other EU states, with exception only for criminals and such
IIRC.

------
Hermel
Actually, the EU should be grateful - that decision will result in fewer
engineers, doctors, professors, and other highly qualified talents migrating
to Switzerland.

~~~
rmc
The EU/Swiss deal is (I think) an all-or-nothing deal about
immigration/customs/etc where either side can pull out completely. Switzerland
might have just pulled out completely.

~~~
mistakoala
IIRC, Switzerland reserves certain rights on immigration.

------
sentenza
The swiss enjoy the many benefits of the European Free Trade Association and
want to be as integrated into the EU economy as possible without actually
having to pay the price that comes with full membership. Not everybody is
happy about this and I expect the EU to retaliate by putting more pressure on
the freedoms of Swiss banks.

Can't have your lunch and eat it.

~~~
guard-of-terra
So you're arguing that inflood of immigrants is not a benefit, but rather a
"price" you have to "pay"?

That's an interesting twist to our discourse.

~~~
sentenza
What? NO! That's not what I meant. The immigrants are a benefit.

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.

------
return0
I wonder if EU countries would ever pull a referendum on whether they should
impose quotas on their nationals who keep their savings in swiss banks.

