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Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

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Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#381

Post by selimthegrim »

rayiner wrote: post #272
kgwxd wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Border control is not equivalent to racism. The people pushing for it loudly just tend to be doing it for blatantly racist reasons. Unsurprisingly, those people tend to abuse any ounce of power given to them. When they're granted extraordinary government powers, they make up official sounding reason to achieve their racist agenda. Hence the general consensus that any talk of border control is racism. The non-racist-d…

You think people who support border controls are simply prejudiced based on skin color? Like, their problem with Little Mogadishu or Little Bangladesh is that people in those places don't need sunscreen? Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?

>Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?

You do realize who a great deal of the "southern Italians" in certain parts of New York and New Orleans actually are, right? Or is your point solely about religion?

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#382

Post by jansport123 »

kuerbel wrote: post #348
bapo wrote: post #146

Swiss here and able to vote. In fact, just posted my voting letter today, before taking a 1h bike ride through the biggest city in Switzerland, having lots of space and freedom biking around in our beautiful city. When taking the train to my parents house, I pass several farms and landly smaller cities. Alot of free space in between those, train mostly has spare seats, depending on rush hour timings. There usually ar…

Also swiss here. So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans. They are educated and highly skilled and for some swiss, that's a problem. They blame them for not finding a job or an appartement. Just read the comments on inside paradeplatz, you can translate with any llm, on a post about the referendum. A subset of the swiss Middle class has decided that they d…

seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#383

Post by JumpCrisscross »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #377
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homogeneous in the modern use What does it mean if it includes heterogenous populations from linguistic, historic, religious and even cultural backgrounds?

While it's terribly fascinating for linguists it's generally understood that the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture.

> the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture

Switzerland speaks languages from the Italic and Germanic clades of PIE [1]. That makes them about as dissimilar as Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages are from each of them.

Helvetia is a confederacy specifically because Switzerland has never been particularly homogenous. Homogeneity explains, in part, Nordic and Japanese success, though less and less the former in the modern era. It does not explain Switzerland’s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#384

Post by tempay »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #333
tempay wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with everything it's complicated but it's more true than not: https://nccr-onthemove.ch/indicators/how-qualified-are-migra... More importantly, education isn't everything. Half the economy runs on work that doesn't need higher education and that locals largely won't do: cleaning, care, hospitality, construction. The Spanish and Portuguese speaking workers doing those jobs are propping up a standard of living for e…

Won't do or won't do for slave wages?

I can't comment outside of Geneva but it's hardly "slave wages":

* https://www.mission-geneve.dfae.admin.ch/en/manual-labour-mi...

* (scroll to the cost breakdown) https://batmaid.ch/en/about-us

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#385

Post by foldr »

logancbrown wrote: post #202
foldr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>what about pensions? Health care? What about health care if there's no more 'room' for the immigrants who make up a substantial fraction of health workers in Switzerland?

Swiss people are perfectly capable of becoming health workers? What kind of argument is this?

That's an option, but it takes a long time to train and recruit locally, costs a lot of money, and you'll probably have to increase salaries to get the required numbers. If there were an easy and cheap way to recruit all the required staff locally, that would already be happening.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#387

Post by TacticalCoder »

rayiner wrote: post #162
bapo wrote: post #146

Swiss here and able to vote. In fact, just posted my voting letter today, before taking a 1h bike ride through the biggest city in Switzerland, having lots of space and freedom biking around in our beautiful city. When taking the train to my parents house, I pass several farms and landly smaller cities. Alot of free space in between those, train mostly has spare seats, depending on rush hour timings. There usually ar…

> benefits from diverse cultures You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).

> Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people.

That's a very dumb theory. People cannot just be exchanged: you cannot take say, 60 million people out of Bangladesh, put them in Japan, and expect Japan to stay the same. Just as you cannot take 60 million Japanese, put them in Bangladesh, and expect Bangladesh to stay the name.

That's a fact. But I could give a shitload of historical examples too... Here's one: when white and black people arrived in the americas, there was still cannibalism taking place in both northern and southern america. The americas had neither white nor black people. Today there's no cannibalism anymore and there are not many kids sacrifices happening in the US to please Inca/Maya gods anymore either.

A slightly more reasonable theory is that if you import people through immigration at a reasonable rate, you can assimilate those people. For example for a long time in Europe female genital mutilation wasn't a thing anymore. Now sadly due to mass migration, ask any ob-gyn doctor in western Europe what he sees and what kind of act he has to do: like re-stitching hymens to pretend the women-to-be-married are virgins (because, yes, there are patriarchal cultures where men are going to inspect a woman's hymen to make sure she's a virgin).

People just live in a fantasy land in their heads: there are 300 million women alive, today, who've been genitally mutilated (that's a very sizeable percentage of all the women out there). What's actually ongoing is weirder and shittier than most people realize.

I say good for Switzerland to curb immigration a bit.

People may be not dissimilar but cultures certainly are.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#388

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ericmay wrote: post #295
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK government let Scotland vote, it didn't allow the entire nation of the United Kingdom to vote on it The UK government represents the UK. Everything doesn’t need to be a referendum. > they allowed it because they know it will fail Irrelevant. They allowed it. If the EU agreed to Switzerland voting on Schengen per se , then it would be comparable. > don't think that is/was the only option on the table But it was o…

> The UK government represents the UK. Everything doesn’t need to be a referendum. > Irrelevant. They allowed it. Respectfully I just don't agree with your framing here. Another wrinkle could be Northern Ireland if we want to go into this further with the UK specifically. > But it was on the table. That makes it distinct from the other examples. It was on the table but it seems that it was on the table as a bargainin…

> How do you feel about the separatists movement in Alberta?

I’d say they have nothing to do with a Swiss immigration vote.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#389

Post by tpholland »

philipallstar wrote: post #356
tpholland wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Switzerland emphatically does not have a homogenous population. It has an exceptionally diverse population, linguistically, religiously and culturally. And yet as you say it has an exceptional record when it comes to cohesion and social trust. Living the dream!

Can you list the statistics that demonstrate the exceptionally diverse population?

Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This is an extraordinary level of diversity for a European country, and as other commentators have noted it isn't like there's a lingua franca: a large proportion of Swiss do not speak the languages used by other groups fluently--for example, 85-87% of Swiss don't speak French at all!

This should be quite straightforward evidence regardless of your cultural assumptions, but many people may not be aware of the impact and cultural importance of the Reformation in Europe, which in general meant that nations ended up with a state religion that was either Catholic or Protestant. Switzerland was pretty exceptional and in the 16th Century (which is the important period here) the population was split pretty much 50/50. This religious diversity is pretty important to its history as well as to wider European history.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#390

Post by wizzwizz4 »

yonaguska wrote: post #353
wat10000 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are awful. I’d be fine with Afghan refugees moving in. Even if we accept the premise that Afghan culture is “awful,” wouldn’t the fact that they’ve fled the country indicate they’re not exactly in sync with that culture? I live in an extremely diverse area with many immigrants on my street and it’s fine.

They could have fled for any number of reasons- that doesn't mean that they aren't exactly in sync with the culture they are coming from. And even if they aren't in sync with the culture they are fleeing- they very likely still hold radically different values than you. I met a man from Afghanistan sometime last year, however, once we got past the introductions and realized we shared things in common- he opened up to…

Sharia law is quite big! So big that I'm fairly certain that there is at least one aspect of Sharia law that you would agree with, even if (as it sounds like) you are overall against. If you accept that, you can have a honest discussion of the merits and detriments.

I find it's best to break these things down and discuss them individually (or discuss how multiple rules combine to produce a particular effect, as the case may be): then it's easier to tease out which arguments are honest ("I genuinely think X is better, for Y reasons") and dishonest ("I think X is better for Y reasons, but I believe you'll find Z more persuasive, so I'll say Z"). There's also a phenomenon where people attribute beneficial (or detrimental) properties to one, visible part of a system, when they're really due to another: consider the arguments about capitalism versus communism, which are rarely actually about economic policy, and are more often about other (on the face of it, unrelated) policies of the state: your interlocutor might realise this after detailed discussion, if that is what is going on, when otherwise they might have gone their whole life without noticing the misattribution (as many people do).

Cultural exchange can be mutually-beneficial, even if you both go away thinking "wow, that other guy was an idiot".

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