6 ms·

Calling it a population cap for something that seems to be about stricter border controls is a wild marketing choice.

• bootsmann 5mo ago
  It is a population cap, you can read this proposal its like 5 lines of text.
  • gmac 5mo ago
    No, it's an immigration restriction. There's no way it applies if the Swiss start having 5 kids each.
  • stymaar 5mo ago
    It's a migration cap. There's no provision on sterilizing Swiss women should the threshold be reached through birthrate…
    • l23k4 5mo ago
      They're economically sterilizing themselves by starting a conflict with the EU at that point.
  • usefulcat 5mo ago
    If Swiss population growth were entirely attributable to the children of existing Swiss residents, then this initiative would be pointless because it wouldn't change anything, and we would not be having this conversation. So yes, it absolutely is about immigration, regardless of the wording.
  • panick21_ 5mo ago
    Apparently you are unable to understand that if people who have been crying about immigration for 20 years that now push this things does not mean they have changed their mind. They just try to hide what's obvious to confuse uniformed voters (like old people who just see big number and remember the 1970s).
• kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
  That avoids accusations of bigotry which Europe has convinced itself doesn't exist within its domains.
  • kgwxd 5mo ago
    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-driven border control agenda just controls the border, and shut the fuck up about it. They don't boast about arrests, they don't make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs, they don't send in the military to schools to grab kids out of class, they don't shoot people in the face when they look at them wrong.
    • rayiner 5mo ago
      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?
      • themanmaran 5mo ago
        That's literally not what he said. He's saying the majority of people supporting border controls are not racist, but the vocal minority are the ones who "boast about arrests" / "make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs"
        • autoexec 5mo ago
          Exactly. This is one of those "not everyone who cares about border controls are racist, but most racists care a lot about border controls" situations
      • 5mo ago
• oytis 5mo ago
  I believe people migrating to Switzerland are largely educated Europeans, so population density must be their biggest concern about migration
• crazygringo 5mo ago
  It's actually kind of genius. It implicitly reframes a debate about immigration, to a debate about ecology/sustainability. Like I'm not defending it or saying it's honest. But as a marketing jiujitsu move, it's actually impressively creative.
  • autoexec 5mo ago
    I think that immigration actually is an ecology/sustainability issue. There are economic and cultural effects to immigration as well, and that's what people tend to focus on, but they aren't the only issues to consider. I think every country that has their shit together should be giving serious thought to immigration and sustainability, especially knowing that a massive number of climate refugees are coming in the near future. Preparing for that now would go a long way to keeping quality of life up while still helping out. This specific policy may not be well intentioned, it may even be a means to avoid taking in those refugees when the time comes, but this is the kind of thing that nations should be thinking about right now.
    • panick21_ 5mo ago
      Im sure the ecology is much improved by letting people stay where they are and be poorer. In fact we should start to remove people from all rich places so the can live in sustainable poverty.
      • autoexec 5mo ago
        Leaving those climate refugees where they are wouldn't mean they were poor, it would mean they were dead. There are all kinds of irrational extreme positions that would maximize environmental protection. Certainly the best thing we could do for the environment would be to kill ourselves off, but very few people would argue for that. Instead it's better to go for something more balanced and limiting the number of people coming in your country to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable.
        • no-name-here 5mo ago
• hocuspocus 5mo ago
  To be fair that's not specific to SVP's populist initiatives, the parliament pushes bills with nonsensical names all the time.
• cromka 5mo ago
  Need to hold them liable to one child per household policy if, for some reason, Swiss start having a little bit more sex and bit more children.
  • autoexec 5mo ago
    You don't have to jump right to one child per household (which is a bad idea anyway) but maintaining sustainable population levels should extend beyond just border control. It should include things like building out infrastructure in underdeveloped areas and encouraging (or perhaps even requiring) people to move in the new spaces, enabling and encouraging remote work to free up unnecessary office space and concentration of workers to city centers, and the promotion of sex ed, family planning, and birth control so that the children being born are going to parents who want and are ready for them.