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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

#711

Post by hocuspocus »

pjmlp wrote: post #660
hocuspocus wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're throwing a lot of words that you don't understand nor have much relevance to the topic. Before bilateral agreements and the freedom of movement, not Schengen which was ratified much later and is completely irrelevant here, you needed a work permit , not a visa (lowercase), which anyway at CERN is the equivalent of a diplomatic permit given to all international and tax-exempt NGOs in Geneva/Switzerland. And of…

Getting a B permit in 2003 - 2004 was indeed hard enough experience that I ended up not staying there and refuse any job offer from Swiss companies to this day, regardless of the Swiss friendships I managed to make there. My stay at CERN was temporary, and every single company where I had an interview clearly communicated to me that the paperwork to get a B permit instead of a Swiss national, or a foreigner with exis…

Bilateral agreements were signed in 1999 and freedom of movement enacted in 2002 so you must not have looked very hard. Also claiming that immigration from a country like Portugal was hard before FoM is extremely funny given the number of Portuguese immigrants in Romandie.

Words have a meaning and bringing diplomatic permits to the topic when they follow their own rules and are specifically outside any immigration quota is not particularly helpful.

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

#712

Post by account42 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #569
breakyerself wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing. When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives. Then those white men feel spurned. They imagine they weren'…

> There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing. How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination? > When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspective…

It's also not even defined what a fair shot means - once you discard merit and start trying to counter for all kinds of past or inherent disadvantages there is really no end to it.

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

#713

Post by mike_hearn »

tpm wrote: post #697
mike_hearn wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it did. Spain just gave 500,000 "undocumented migrants" a residence permit. They can now freely move throughout the continent. That sort of act was never envisioned when the Swiss agreed to FoM with the EU, which for most of its history was used only by a tiny minority of people all of whom had a similar culture. The EU/Swiss agreements don't have to be negotiated as a whole. The whole guillotine clause schtick…

What EU-Switzerland agreement was broken by the EU by this action of Spain? And please do be exact which one and how. Otherwise stop telling lies. > Nothing stops European countries being reasonable and looking for ways to work with each other on whatever areas they can agree; it's a deliberate ideological choice to refuse. Yes, and it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members…

The treaties don't explicitly say "you may not grant residence en masse to city sized populations of illegal immigrants", because not doing that was considered so obvious it didn't need to be said at the time they were written. Such treaties don't cover a lot of possible but unlikely eventualities, which is why it's bad and wrong to make treat renegotiation artificially difficult.

> it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members') interests

It doesn't protect their interests. That's the whole point. If it were about protecting the interests of European countries they could negotiate their each interest individually and independently with each other. The EU construct is deliberately designed to ignore the interests of any specific member state in favour of the interest of a new entity, the European Union, which has an entirely separate set of interests that don't correspond to the interests of the people living in it.

> Which is why neither the UK nor Switzerland nor other non-members can pick and choose

They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully. Hence why the EU/Swiss relations aren't governed by membership and why the EU has agreed to work with the UK on various interests without requiring membership (despite denying they'd ever do this at the time).

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

#714

Post by mike_hearn »

whazor wrote: post #677
mike_hearn wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't catastrophic to the British economy. Why would Switzerland be so different?

Most British people think Brexit is a failure. For Switzerland it would be significantly worse since they are surrounded by Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. So all trucks would be stopped at border. Food prices are already super expensive and this would make it worse.

They think it's a failure because their political class refused to use the new powers to implement the will of the people on immigration, not due to economics (which, again, were not affected).

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

#715

Post by myrmidon »

lqet wrote: post #647
kuerbel wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am German and live near the Swiss border. My wife is Swiss. I always tell Germans: if you want to get a feeling for the life of an immigrant in Germany, go to a non-touristic region in Switzerland. It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, an…

That's interesting (and a really fun stunt to pull). I always had the impression that the situation is slightly better for other minority-dialect foreigners (Vorarlberg/Südtirol) compared to "vanilla" german speakers, but that might wrong...

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

#716

Post by mike_hearn »

tpm wrote: post #701
mike_hearn wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the same as Britain, which didn't suffer any economic damage from leaving the EU. Look at current trade ratios, GDP and other core stats vs neighbouring France. No difference. The EU single market is apparently not as important as it's cracked up to be. The EU has sanctioned Switzerland before and it didn't matter. And the Swiss economy is very strong.

only there are several studies like this: "These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%" https://www.nber.org/papers/w34459

If you read them carefully, you'll find no such studies are using a valid methodology. It's not a hard question to answer either, just compare like with like.

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

#717

Post by 0xy »

whazor wrote: post #677
mike_hearn wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't catastrophic to the British economy. Why would Switzerland be so different?

Most British people think Brexit is a failure. For Switzerland it would be significantly worse since they are surrounded by Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. So all trucks would be stopped at border. Food prices are already super expensive and this would make it worse.

Brexit was a referendum on immigration. It was the number one issue. Yet, successive governments since Brexit have turned immigration up to 11. No wonder they think it's a failure, the will of the people was ignored (and it's having real political blowback, with both major parties about to get reduced to dust according to polling).

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

#718

Post by tpm »

mike_hearn wrote: post #713
tpm wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What EU-Switzerland agreement was broken by the EU by this action of Spain? And please do be exact which one and how. Otherwise stop telling lies. > Nothing stops European countries being reasonable and looking for ways to work with each other on whatever areas they can agree; it's a deliberate ideological choice to refuse. Yes, and it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members…

The treaties don't explicitly say "you may not grant residence en masse to city sized populations of illegal immigrants", because not doing that was considered so obvious it didn't need to be said at the time they were written. Such treaties don't cover a lot of possible but unlikely eventualities, which is why it's bad and wrong to make treat renegotiation artificially difficult. > it's the fine and reasonable ideol…

So no treaty was broken? Why did you write "Sure it did" when you know it wasn't?

> They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully.

They didn't. What happened was that some parts of some treaty were renegotiated or amended and agreed by both parties. Which is quite common in any such relationship.

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

#719

Post by soraminazuki »

account42 wrote: post #702
soraminazuki wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe we have hundreds of years of documented history to learn from, yet human intelligence is still blinded by bigotry.

That others have learned a different lesson from history compared to your beliefs does not mean that they are ignorant of it.

You're projecting. I wrote a factual statement, that bigotry still exists in today's world, and you somehow took that as an assault on your values.

So what exactly is the different lesson you're referring to? Given that bigotry still exists, I can only take that lesson to mean "bigotry good."

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

#720

Post by tsoukase »

A population ceiling is not a serious decision for a modern country like Switzerland, esp given their 1.29 kids per family. They could cap by proffesion, region or even origin nation. But a hard cap reminds something between One child policy of China and Brexit, which both didn't go well. First problem will be the shortage of workers in specific fields or regions.
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