241–250 of 289 posts
Interesting that those supporting the motion claimed it was because there was no space left for new arrivals and that it put too much pressure on infrastructure like trains and yet the largest support came from the countryside which proably has less overcrowding and the cities were greatly against it. Makes me think that "overcrowding" wasn't thre real reason...
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Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do. The solution there is the same solution as the US. If the US introduced a (for example) 4x median salary fine for every year an employer employed someone not legally eligible to work the problem would fix itself. If they did not keep records assume 5 years or whenever the person's visa expired, since that is the most common case of illegal immigration. But the bus…
This kind of argument is the same as "guns don't kill people". Yes they do.
Never heard of a hard limit on population. What happens if you go over? It was terrible for girls born in China when they had their one child limit.
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.
Who benefits from immigration the most? The capitalist gains cheap and weak labor, consumers to sell products and services to, and rent apartments to. It doesn't matter to him if the money comes from benefits. The negative effects are externalized to ordinary citizens. The capitalists own the media, which they use to shape public opinion on immigration in their favor or divert attention elsewhere. It also gives them a target to deflect from themselves and their obscene enrichment at the expense of the taxpayer.
The problem with a population cap is that it conflates immigration that is net negative (people from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey and their children) and net positive immigration (Western immigrants) [1].
Here's a transcript of Studs Terkel in 1980 interviewing a couple of German publishers (from 03m22s to 06m10s) highlighting the citizens aversion to incompatible people, economic asylum-seekers, and who put those rules in place [2]:
Terkel: Is there a German attitude towards the Turkish minority here? There are quite a few Turks here.
Publishers: Yes. There is an attitude, especially against immigrants who are not coming from Europe, because now the Italians and so on, they are accepted. They are Christians. But those Turkish people build a kind of reserve army of the labor market and are very often detested, viscerally, by Germans. [...] I think the big problem that you have in Germany is the "Asylantenproblem" [asylum seeker problem] [...] This is part of the normalizing of German national consciousness, this question of the asylum possibilities. As you know, as a result of the liberation of Germany by the allies, in our constitution there is a fundamental right because many founding fathers of the Western republic had been immigrants, [...] so they stated that every man or woman, persecuted for political reasons, or racial reasons, and so on, had to have asylum in Germany. Now, when the economic crisis in Germany and the technological changes have brought about also more than 2 million unemployed people, there are tendencies within the right parties to restrict, to amend the right of asylum, with the argument that those "Asylanten", those asylum seekers, are not really politically persecuted; they are so-called economic asylants.
[2] https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bende...
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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.
> 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.)
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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 bourgeois 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 g…
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!
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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 bourgeois 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 g…
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 th…
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Weird to see free market and minimum wage in the same sentence. The people that I know who voted yes on this don't want the people at all, no matter if the wage. They don't want the population density and they don't want the dilution of their culture
What is weird about it, free market is not rule-free market.
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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 th…
In Switzerland the problem is the cheap foreigners commute over the border from Italy or France, and drive down the going rate for labour to levels where it's then unreasonable for people who actually live on Switzerland to do those jobs. This is especially the case in Ticino.
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What is weird about it, free market is not rule-free market.
It's an explicitly non-market-determined price.
Instead of supply/demand, capital availability and information disparity the price is determined by voting on it. A way to overcome the tragedy of the commons.