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.
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.
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 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)
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
Yes. I’m also conceding to the SVP the observation that a good fraction of said nationals are recently naturalized.
Don’t know, don’t care. Mine are conversations in Zürich.
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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.
Massive internal trade barriers and security so fragmented you’re at the whim of your larger neighbors?
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.)
Oh, to be clear, yes.
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.
I visited few times and I like the country but I don't expect them to accept or cater to me.
> 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.
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.
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?
You are confusing immigration with naturalization. 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.
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.
Tbh I cannot see anything else but Swiss people at some point voting themselves out of this somehow.
I asked Opus 4.8 to "see if viking123 comments on hacker news could sound xenophobic to some people", here's the verdict that it produced:
Short verdict Yes — a meaningful subset would read as xenophobic to a lot of people, and the heaviest cluster actually tips past "xenophobic" into recognizable antisemitic conspiracy framing. That said, the large majority of his comments are just generic snark about AI companies, model quality, and pricing, with no ethnic angle at all. The problematic material is concentrated in a handful of threads. Let me show you the specific stuff and why it lands the way it does
...provides your specific comments...
How to calibrate "could sound xenophobic to some people"
Honestly, the framing undersells it. The immigration and "youths" material is the kind of thing where some people would call it xenophobic and others would call it edgy realism — genuinely contested. But the antisemitic-trope cluster isn't really in "some people might read it that way" territory; it's material that most neutral readers, and basically any platform trust-and-safety review, would flag as bigoted. If your goal is "would this get him in trouble / read badly," that cluster is the exposure, more than the immigration takes. One caveat for fairness: his persona is a contrarian edgelord across the board — he's equally caustic about American CEOs, "boomers," "normies," "plebs," crypto, and AI hype. The bigotry-flavored stuff isn't the bulk of what he posts; it's a recurring streak inside a generally cynical, everyone's-a-grifter style. That context won't save him with most readers, but it's the accurate picture.
If you are EU or do get a work permit, you will not get housing.
The vote was for a reason…
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...
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.
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!
It was terrible for girls born in China when they had their one child limit.
They don't give a damn if you have 13 children, they don't want brown people in Switzerland.
This is still very close for comfort, and SVP will re-propose it again and again and again as it and it's predecessors have done for decades.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
The initiative text literally directed the Bundesrat to 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Anti-immigrant. It’s an immigration cap.
> reduce global human growth for climate preservation, are opposed?
Pro-EU. The cap is within half a million of the current population and pretty much immediately set to trigger consultations.
I actually deliberated on this one and landed against because of how proximate the cap was set and the pretty horrible tone of the pro-cap side’s marketing.
The left can be for reduction of GLOBAL human growth, but still increase LOCAL growth, which is primarily caused by immigration not birthrate.
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.
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).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl...
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.
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.
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 target that we must reach through mass immigration?
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.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-af...
But EU citizens can basically live forever in CH even though technically they don’t have permanent residency.
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.
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.
And Switzerland just voted no to a hard population cap, in a direct democratic vote.