Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries. They want their life be taken care by the people they don’t want around and if they have to have them around they want them be the kids from people from their kind but not theirs.

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.

30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues".

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).

Most people have a local view of their world through their immediate surroundings, not a panoptic or holistic perspective on the earth or their nation.

The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.

It's aimed at immigration. Babies are OK. Not all that incentivized but OK.

As Terry Pratchett put it in Carpe Jugulum:

> And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

considering how many foreigners in Switzerland work in tech, it somewhat is

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
  
  Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Posting guides explicitly state "That includes more than hacking and startups".

I would say that this post definitly falls squarely into the "interesting new phenomenon" category since it's the first time a country has proposed a population cap (as far as i am aware).

Probably the solutions mentioned (sex/robots) are not the only ones. Many complain loudly about what might be a minority of the workers, so just knowing more people would have improved their opinion. Others do not have anything better to do, and they pick up this type of "crusades" with low impact on them, but big impact on others.

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.

Then do like UAE? No permanent residency or naturalization

Even more ironic is that “the indigenous people didn’t want foreign workers for the vile and parasitic foreign ruling class and no one asked them if they wanted to be forced to share their home with alien and foreign people against their will that destroy their culture; in this case one that is probably tens of thousands of years old.

It seems more the indigenous people of Europe and their cultures are being eradicated all over Europe after the vile and demonic, parasitic ruling class of the planet turns on Europeans once again after having previously destroyed and plundered the rest of the planet.

Can you explain why you think xenophobia is low? My experience as a swed is that xenophobia and trying to avoid immigration often go hand in hand. You do not have a large Swiss right populist semi racist party like most other European countries have?

How are the job prospects and housing prices? Switzerland is beautiful and I would gladly move there for six or so equivalent figures..

> And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low

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.

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059

Swiss are too educated to fall for this.

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.

> It's a trend that is growing all over Europe

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.

Nothing. It was an initiative to limit immigration, by a xenophobic party.

They don't give a damn if you have 13 children, they don't want brown people in Switzerland.

When people have no hope of not making it as a permanent resident or citizen, their incentives to perform well are not as high. Also immigration is a global market, you compete with other countries that might offer better conditions so you lose on the best workforce.

We do. Swiss naturalization is famously difficult.

But EU citizens can basically live forever in CH even though technically they don’t have permanent residency.

Amnesty International report that things are fairly bad in the UAE for foreign workers.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...

Mate I live in Switzerland (Zürich) and it’s not exactly hell on earth.

And Switzerland just voted no to a hard population cap, in a direct democratic vote.

What did I just read!? Looks like an AI trained exclusively on 4chan

>What they should have done was unprotected heterosexual sex 20 years ago

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.

More surprising it didn't pass the "majority of cantons" either (both are required for initiatives like this), I would have expected it to pass (there are a lot of smaller/rural/alpine cantons which tends to vote more conservative).

So don't worry, only one or two terrorist attacks/Rotherham situations that the medias can't completely memory-hole and you'll be able to scream "It's like the bad guys from my Netflix series won, my duderinos!" on Reddit to your heart's content.

#NotSorryForFlaming

The Masseneinwanderungsinitiative passed in 2014... and fuck all happened (despite the no campaign heavily leaning on the argument that it would kill the bilaterals, e.g. https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full). When push comes to shove, there is a solid bloc in parliament and the executive for saving the EU bilaterals, even if it means ignoring constitutional initiatives.

If you are non-EU, you will not get a work permit.

If you are EU or do get a work permit, you will not get housing.

The vote was for a reason…

In my experience, Swiss don't like criminals, unemployed people and people showing openly their religion. They negatively associate certain nationalities with stereotypes (e.g. Albanians, Maroccans etc.). If you are a representative of these groups, yes, it will be a problem. Violence towards foreigners is, compared to other countries, does not exist. Also with other nationalities, it is very different. Some people don't like Germans (that's also historically of course). However, with Germans near the boder it is often not a problem because they are more similar (and know how Swiss behave). With people from Berlin, many Swiss have not much in common. My wife is visible not Swiss and she never encountered raciscm (quite the contrary, she gets more free products at local stores than me because people recognize her). She also likes to buy tomatoes only from Switzerland. It is all how you behave in my experience. To the SVP, it is quite a different between the party and representative that are in the government. They are considered moderate due to the political system in Switzerland.

They pay incredibly well, but their work culture (vacation, protections for parents etc) is atrocious. They're on par with Japan/South Korea.

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!

>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.

They don’t want the southern Europeans around. That’s textbook xenophobia.

They don't want their son to do it because immigrants prevent the salaries of those jobs to rise naturally. Mass immigration is capitalism's answer to the Baumol law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the 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 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.

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)

Only 58% of the voters voted.

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.

To me it seems like EU countries are independently embarking on the Canada-policy of importing a whole bunch of South East Asians and Latin Americans. From Hungary to Ireland, you see the same trend.

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.

I think this somewhat federation causes problems similar (by design!) to those that the Federal System within the United States encourages. The "finger pointing" allows for status quo to carry on as usual, while the overlapping & glacial judicial systems legislate glacially from their antiquated benches...

----

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.

Switzerland getting Indians with German passports, maybe not something that was thought back in those days when there were signed? Western Europe will be a massive powder keg in 20 years

Is this Berlin that decides anything and rolls it out contintent-wide with us in the room right now?

Immigration is not devolved. The whole point of Schengen is the opposite of devolution of immigration.

You are confusing immigration with naturalization. Only if Berlin starts handing out German passports do they dictate EU immigration single-handedly.

27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?

Big difference between permanent residency and naturalisation.

That is kinda the intention, not the accident thing

I don't know the overall ratio, but my experience working with many immigrant workers is that they had no real intention of staying and instead are just arbitraging cost of living between [rich country] and [poor country] for their family back home. Emphasis on home.

There are 40k naturalisations each year (a similar number relative to population as in the US). Around 13% of the Swiss citizens have acquired the nationality via naturalisation (8% in the US).

There are all sorts of reasons people emigrate. It varies based on the jobs they’re doing, where they’re from, and where they’re going. And whatever their intentions, things change. And, why must there be a universal answer for everyone?

Sounds like you have a really limited interaction with immigrants. I’m lifelong immigrant (4 different countries) in every single one of those countries majority of immigrants want to stay. Permanent residency is a constant conversation topic. There are definitely immigrants thinking like your explanation, but definitely a minority. .

The SVP is not considered "moderate". They are a far-right party. The fact that they are wide spread and gather a lot of votes does not make them "moderate".

Source: am Swiss

Meat trafficking over the border is one of my hobbies.

As an anecdote re Germans: A friend of mine did an Auslandssemester there and was surprised to see "No Germans" signs for some of the housing options. Always makes me chuckle as an example how "relative" xenophobia is.

They don’t want the working class southern Europeans around, they don’t have problem with the rich southern Europeans.

I wont call this xenophobia. Its just rich people annoyed by the poor hanging around outside the working hours.

That's as stupid as it is old. Locals would do it for a proper salary. But the same locals do not want to pay the proper salary!

Turn the brain on from time to time!

Who told you that? Swiss don't even want Germans, which is actually the biggest minority apparently. FFS, Germans! The original racists.

PS. I am German.

Why don’t you let people decide who works with who in a free market and if you are worried about low wages introduce higher minimum wages.

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.

You’re not really accounting for where the money for those “naturally rising wages” come from. A restaurant in the US is making the same (or frankly less) than it used to 10 years ago accounting for inflation. They can’t really afford to pay people more because of the higher consumer index. So the only real option is shutting down. Or in the US for farming. They already run on razor thin margins with a lot of variability from weather, pests etc. They were essentially making it work because of illegal immigrant labor. Now that Florida increased its crackdown on illegal labor around 30% of orange orchards have disappeared in a few years and probably a lot more as time goes on.

The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers. If the person paying that Sri Lankan were to go to jail for his violation of labor law, the situation would be different.

> The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the 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.

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?

Locals are not going to clean sewers and you know it. Society in general made it very clear over the last decades that jobs like that are shit, only losers are doing them, and that you need a degree to be worth something. If you want to blame something for this, blame neoliberalism. It helped create a culture in which educational credentials, professional careers, and market prestige became dominant measures of success, making many forms of manual labor appear less desirable.

maybe next time it will be 11M

How many of those were born in CH?

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.

You can get housing, you have to trade money for time and commute with the (frequent and reliable) public transportation.

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...

> You do realize German nationals (followed by French) are the top contingent in term of immigration to Swizerland

Yes. I’m also conceding to the SVP the observation that a good fraction of said nationals are recently naturalized.

>55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes?

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.

I find it hard to believe the kids of the Swiss elite would be cleaning sewers if not for the low pay.

The issue is this means in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen - which is very doable over two election cycles.

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.

> We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside

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)

When a person relocates to a country where their labor is more productive, a large amount of new economic value is created. Much of that value is captured by the migrant through higher earnings, but a lot also accrues to the people in the community they join.

So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country

> 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

False economy. More engineers, particularly diversely trained ones, are more likely to create self-reinforcing clusters. Nobody complains Silicon Valley has too many engineers (other than during a hiring off cycle) because in general, more engineers means more wealth and opportunities for each engineer.

German passport == German.

> we can all take inspiration from the living memories of balkanization

Massive internal trade barriers and security so fragmented you’re at the whim of your larger neighbors?

> For example finding nursing staff is very challenging

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.

> Western Europe will be a massive powder keg in 20 years

Western Europe has been a powder keg for at least three millennia. The only thing keeping a cap on it recently was American hegemony. (EDIT: to be clear, American hegemony is waning. The powder keg is uncapped, and we’re one of the parties throwing in matches.)

I mean, Kt. ZH also had the Wohnungsinitiative today, because not even Swiss people can find housing in ZH anymore.

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.

> How many of those were born in CH?

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.

No no, they would have totally done it if the immigrants didn’t suppress the wages and the pay was %15 higher. Now they need to do some office jobs for 5 times the pay since the unemployment rate is %3. There are no Swiss sitting around and not cleaning the sewers because the pay was too low, it will have to fetch workers from other industries.

If the SVP says it, it must be true :) What's their sources? I'm sure they could find a couple of anecdotes, doesn't make it significant.

Overcrowding by immigrants does not mean the location will vote in favor of restricting immigration. After all, those are the places with the highest number of immigrant voters, who will not support such restrictions.

I guess the question for society is: do we want businesses who cannot pay domestic workers a fair wage to exist in our country? Or do we want them to exist elsewhere and we import those products?

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.

Switzerland has onlite elite kids? What do the Swiss with <80 IQ do for a living? They're probably not gonna get a job at ABB, Google, UBS or ETH.

I mean technically, it was also rejected by the Kantons-as-entities so if that 5% is unevenly spread, theoretically it could still be rejected by Kantonal majority…

> in aggregate only around 3-5% of the total population needs to flip in it's opinions for CHexit to happen

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.)

I believe the point was more that Germany can accept lots of immigrants being a large country, and freedom of movement will allow them inside all countries, which can lead to backlash.

This is literally what anyone means when they can't or can't easily find anyone for anything which isn't evil or suicidal.

Free borders policy is a special case of free market, so of course more competition is intended to drive the cattle prices down .

> 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.)

> 27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country.

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.

And if they displace someone trying to join the engineering workforce say right out of school? What about housing?

Some countries print them out very liberally though. Sweden did not require financial self-sufficiency or language ability until like 2 weeks ago. I raised this point back in like 2015 and was promptly called a racist. So these have been handed to people who have nothing to do with the country. Few other countries have done this too but less so. Now all their children etc. will have unfettered access to Switzerland.

Tbh I cannot see anything else but Swiss people at some point voting themselves out of this somehow.

So what?

I despise such openly xenophobic posts.

And Indian immigration tends to be the most educated and wealthy. It's also the wealthiest ethnic group in the US. By far.

In any case, leaving Schengen for Switzerland would be de facto equivalent to Brexit, an economic disaster.

Switzerland thrives by attracting highly qualified professionals for it's service and manufacturing industries and yes, also at the lower end where Swiss nationals aren't lining up to be plumbers, couriers or cleaning staff.

While they're at it, they should kick out the French, the Germans, the Italians, and any other immigrants refusing to speak Swiss.

It's a give/take. Even Israel & Spain have fenced borders (the latter on African continent)[i.e. it's not just USA "being racist"].

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.

Berlin is basically forcing the EU's hand regarding the Gaza war, so, yes?

> 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.

America is who's propping up all the far right parties now. America wants a destable, fractured Europe. Russia too, but America has more funds.

Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass.

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).

> What's their sources?

Don’t know, don’t care. Mine are conversations in Zürich.

Immigrants can’t vote.

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.

> a democratic vote to confront the EU

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.

> Nothing in this referendum directs Berne to do that

The initiative text literally directed the Bundesrat to withdraw from the bilaterals 2 years after exceeding 10m if they couldn't be renegotiated.

There is no fixed demand for jobs, nor fixed supply of housing. Immigrant consumption creates a lot of jobs and immigrant labor creates a lot of housing

And that point is wrong. An immigrant with a legal residence in Germany but no permanent residence permit can't just pack up and go live elsewhere.

Look up the "lump of labour fallacy". The jobs market is not a zero-sum thing.

> if they displace someone trying to join the engineering workforce say right out of school? What about housing?

Civilisations that learn to balance this conflict between growth and limited resources thrive. Those that cap their growth can do fine, but they obviously won’t be as rich, powerful or influential as those that manage it.

> refusing to speak Swiss

I know this is tongue in cheek. But one of the hallmarks of a nation of immigrants is the enforced tolerance of speaking multiple national languages. Lots of people who only speak on throws off that balance.

The plumbers I had were all Swiss. There is not an overproportional amount of foreigners working in this profession.

Your comments do land on the xenophobic side though. E.g."Indians with German passports": You need to pass a naturalization and language tests before applying for citizenship. Until recently you couldn't even apply without living in the country for 6+ years - now reduced to 4+. So how do you or potential Swiss know they are Indians? The first thing that comes to mind is that you're assuming it by the way they look.

Only in the same sense that Hungary was dictating Russia and Ukraine policy.

> America is who's propping up all the far right parties now

Oh, to be clear, yes.

The party that proposed this vote has always opposed the treaties with the EU and yes this whole thing is just a thinly disguised way to repudiate the treaties as soon as practicable. They know what they are getting, it's not a cake-and-eat-it-too thing.

> While they're at it, they should kick out the French, the Germans, the Italians, and any other immigrants refusing to speak Swiss.

What's this Swiss language you speak of? I never heard of it. You must mean Romansh but that's only 0.5% of the population or so. You'd have to kick out 95.5% of the Swiss population too then?

> Even Israel & Spain have fenced borders

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.

Maybe they prefer living amongst themselves than make number go to the moon. If these guys are such GDP rocket fuel and a solution, they can make their own country the best in the world.

I visited few times and I like the country but I don't expect them to accept or cater to me.

> It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany

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.

How is that related to immigration?

> 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.

> It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations

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.)

> 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.

Yep, someone points it to GP down below. One needs to apply for immigration again in the next country if they want to travel for more than a vacation.

The timescale that the "lump of labour fallacy" operates on, as in the aggregate effects on employement, doesn't necessarily work for most people (individually).

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.

I understand and encourage the "breaking up" aspect. Smaller, more home-rule societies.

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.

Who's they?

> If these guys are such GDP rocket fuel and a solution, they can make their own country the best in the world.

Not every country in the world gives the same opportunities, it's only natural many motivated individuals may try their chances elsewhere, I see nothing wrong with it.

I'm an European and I have many grandparents and their relatives who emigrated to Argentina, US, Canada a century or so ago.

My parents left communist Poland for Italy in the 70s.

Many of my friends left Italy and now reside in the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia and some in the US too.

Overly xenophobic anti immigration stances don't resonate with me at all.

Immigration is a net benefit for humanity, it has had a huge impact on distributing human capital where it could best express it's talents.

Like everything it has its cons and regulations are needed. But none of those should be rooted on open racism.

That’s their point. Switzerland is a nation of immigrants. We don’t tend to be portrayed as such outside. And the SVP tends to forget this. (As does the GOP.)

In Switzerland they are voting on naturalisation... which means you are at the whim of people living in the same place. If you don't fit in you'll have a hard time, if they don't like you for whatever reason etc, wrong hair colour, you name it. In Germany it's an administrative act with clear demands.

Switzerland want less than B1? I find B1 barely can have a normal conversation.

> 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.

Slovenia joined EU rather fast (2003), so that might also have contributed to the prosperity. Joining EU is not exactly "breaking up", is more like "joining".

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...

IDK about Argentina, but the US, Australia and Canada went through the whole cycle post WWII. At first they opened up their borders because they were in need of workers. However, at some point, due to various factors, including rising anti-immigration sentiments, they retightened their immigration policies again. This all happened pre-1990s. And all of those are immigration countries, unlike countries in Europe.

> no room for negotiation in it. The government page itself spells out the hardline consequences

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.

Mate, none of those governments were led by natives but immigrants and their descendants.

Unless you live under a rock it's not Crazy Horse or Geronimo sitting in the white house, but a descendant of immigrants.

> Bilaterals is a treaty, not a diktat.

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.