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Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

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Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#281

Post by joe_mamba »

tim333 wrote: post #279
joe_mamba wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do. Of course business owners suppress wages. By using immigrants as leverage to tilt the supply/demand of labor in their favor. Duh.

Businesses seldom set the immigration policy. They just try to get value for money like everyone else.

>Businesses seldom set the immigration policy

Why are you putting words in my month? I never said they did, but they do lobby the government to set an immigration policy that favors business and assets over labor, d'uh!

>They just try to get value for money like everyone else.

No, they're not like "everybody else". If corporations want cheaper tabor, they just tell the government and they open the immigration taps. But if workers want higher wages they can't have the government deport excess labor. It's a power asymmetry.

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#282

Post by roysting »

Gud wrote: post #125
roysting wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Don't worry, your path of good intentions will get Switzerland there too soon enough.

Are you at all aware only 3.5% of the population (all urban and not ethnically Swiss) determined the outcome of that referendum, regardless of how clumsy of an attempt it was by the indigenous to preserve their culture, heritage, and people?

I understand you may have never thought of it as such since the "education" we provide the common people deliberately obscures the true nature of the "democratic vote", the process by which the lowest common denominator is easily manipulated to control and effectively frack a whole society. It's our dirty little secret about "democracy".

The common understanding of democracy is not at all democratic, it's effectively tyranny wrapped in a nicer bow and with a cute image makeover and far more subtle mechanism; tyranny by a simple "majority" and the even smaller delta, the defector in the stag hunt that brings down whole countries.

We rely on your continued belief in and support of democracy and you are doing a good job of that, even when it's no more democracy than a small group of traitors throwing open the gates of a besieged fort in the middle of the night.

It's actually why what you believe is good and just, democracy, is actually the most diabolical dark pattern evil humanity has ever devised, a pernicious mental virus that makes a people seek their own destruction; mostly because it hides in plain sight and looks cute on the face of it.

Consider this a peek into reality.

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#283

Post by Saline9515 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #275
Saline9515 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends where you are, and the local culture. Besides, if a society wants to have less children, it's a choice that doesn't imply the need for immigration. Let people bear the consequences.

I don’t think any nation is willing to bear the consequence of functional extinction in the next 100 years like South Korea is facing.

South Korea won't be extinct in 100 years, it's one of the densest country on earth, if its population reduces by 60% in the meantime it will be dense like...Switzerland. Is Switzerland in the state of "functional extinction"? No. (Also, same density as North Korea).

Meanwhile every Indian flees their awesome home country, and no one complains about the emigration and indian population reduction. Maybe because it's also a way for them to fix the selective abortions and widely biased sex ratio that came as a consequence?

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#284

Post by dyauspitr »

Saline9515 wrote: post #283
dyauspitr wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think any nation is willing to bear the consequence of functional extinction in the next 100 years like South Korea is facing.

South Korea won't be extinct in 100 years, it's one of the densest country on earth, if its population reduces by 60% in the meantime it will be dense like...Switzerland. Is Switzerland in the state of "functional extinction"? No. (Also, same density as North Korea). Meanwhile every Indian flees their awesome home country, and no one complains about the emigration and indian population reduction. Maybe because it's a…

You seem to know very little for confidently spouting “facts”. Functionally extinct means it’s a country of old people that can’t make any more kids. Population density has nothing to do with anything - https://www.keaf.org/en/book/EAF_Policy_Debates/The_Risk_of_...

Indians will directly tell you it’s not awesome but it’s definitely on the path to being so. If it can pull off its performance from the last 15 years for the next 15, it will be developed.

India’s birth rate is far below replacement rate already. So much so that the government is starting to encourage people to have more kids again.

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#285

Post by tadfisher »

Avicebron wrote: post #124
tadfisher wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

The aggregate effects on employment caused by immigration work on an identical timescale. If your point is, "people are terrible at blaming individual outcomes on aggregate statistical phenomena", then I agree with you.

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#286

Post by 627467 »

mrtksn wrote: post #96
brightbeige wrote: post #68

Recent, related New Yorker article that goes into the background leading up to the vote https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl... Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”

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 j…

> Yes, that’s the dilemma of the rich countries.

Yeah, it's also not unusual system: just look at gulf countries, singapore, HK,... the problem is europeans themselves talked themselves into some kind of system that prevents them from following the same model. They still would love to though

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#287

Post by includenotfound »

brainwad wrote: post #258
includenotfound wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently got the Swiss passport but I'm still very much an immigrant. I am also a dual citizen, and frankly, hold not much love for this country. It's a secondary thing to me, the way having a nice car is: yeah it's nice, yeah I wouldn't want to give it up, but no it's not my identity and it's not the end of the world, despite me possessing it. I did not "wait" for it. I came here, worked a bunch, made more money t…

+1 to your last point. The best you can hope for as a country is to select immigrants who align better with your ideals than with their home countries'. I think that's why Americans think integration is so easy - because immigrants to America deliberately choose America for its well known ideals. Whereas overland refugees aren't choosing Switzerland or even Europe this way, they are just coming because it's next door…

Yeah, I mostly agree, except that I didn't come to Switzerland because it's next door, but because I was sick of working hard and making no money in my home country - and it was either Switzerland or the US. I had offers from both, but chose Switzerland because at the time I was still brainwashed by the legacy media and believed that the US is hell on Earth (which I regret now)

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#288

Post by Thraway198 »

brainwad wrote: post #191
Thraway198 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What???? Why would we have to do that? Runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world? We have billions of people on the planet. GPD not going up is NOT an existential threat.

The complexity of society has got to be somewhat proportional to its population. If we halve the population, we won't just half the GWP. It will be lower still due to less specialisation. Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.

Ok so this means we need a certain amount of immigration. Surely the existing populations of each country can decide if they want more than what's necessary?

Not to mention automation is only increasing. Japan will have a booming robot export business going in a few decades.

A lot of these arguments about "needing" immigration to support aging populations are just thinly-veled neoliberal excuses.

Re: Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

#289

Post by Rnonymous »

anonym29 wrote: post #190
Rnonymous wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe the right doesn't really care about abortion that much, its not really something i hear parties discuss. Their main focal point is immigration, anti-muslim sentiment. The left can be for reduction of GLOBAL human growth, but still increase LOCAL growth, which is primarily caused by immigration not birthrate.

If one supports both reduction in global growth and a simultaneous increase in local growth in wealthy, western countries, where is the reduction supposed to come from? Isn't this essentially indirect advocacy for massive, rapid decrease in global growth in the global south? Isn't that a very colonialist / western supremacist position?

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