4 ms·

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

• jansport123 4mo ago
  seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"
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  • xenonite 4mo ago
    Yes, we have a really well recognized Spanish team lead here, yet he’s mostly hiring Spanish people (in Switzerland), oh yes and one Italian is the exception. Also we had a German team lead hiring Germans, well surprise it is easier being with similar ones. Diversity back in the day meant Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering working together…
    • meken 4mo ago
      I’m an American and I just had the thought - if I was working in Japan at a Japanese company and I had the opportunity to hire, would I have a bias to hire other Americans? Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.
      • influx 4mo ago
        And that seems suboptimal for a Japanese company?
      • sashank_1509 4mo ago
        I’d disagree. I’m not American or British but and in my experience Americans or British are the least ethnically biased people on the planet. Any other group, I could believe that they are biased but not Americans, or British. Something in their particular culture right now.
        • pyuser583 4mo ago
          It isn’t just a lack of ethnic bias, it’s a belief in capitalism or professionalism or “enlightened self-interest”: hire the best person for the job, and everyone will be better off.
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        • dpark 4mo ago
          You’re responding to an American who says he’d be biased towards Americans and telling him he’s wrong. Maybe Americans are the least biased (though being an American I am not so sure) but that doesn’t mean we aren’t biased (even if sometimes for legitimate reasons like ease of communication).
          • ThrowawayR2 4mo ago
            Or perhaps said American genuinely is unaware of how much more biased other ethnic groups are in their own homelands.
            • sashank_1509 4mo ago
              Yes exactly, the American bias level right now is probably as low as it can get humanly.
    • deepsun 4mo ago
      Yes, and that's normal (except for maybe eastern European cultures who better hire an American/west European).
    • vasco 4mo ago
      > well surprise it is easier being with similar ones. It's not easier dealing with people from your own country but it is biased. From someone who has hired hundred+ remote developers in europe for 10 years to lead them and out of those hired a total of 2 people from my country. Wouldn't have been hard either. At the same time I see some managers doing this, currently in another fully remote company have a manager colleague that has hired 3 brazillians back to back. Go figure. Just shows you that it's a biased person in other respects (we all are) and that they make zero efforts to keep it in check (this is a decision you make).
      • rlpb 4mo ago
        > that has hired 3 brazillians back to back I've seen this kind of thing happen not through bias but because good people know good people, where by "good" I mean highly competent. They knew each other through university and other regional connections, so they happened to have the same ethnicity as one might expect from such a regional commonality. One got hired, referred another, and it cascaded. They were great to work with and highly competent, so I don't think there was bias even though it might appear that they're was.
    • dlahoda 4mo ago
      May be each foreigner in mgmt position should pass some exam on diversification and swiss history? Actually each foreigner to raise or get some state benefits should pass some exam?
  • aprilthird2021 4mo ago
    Because it's an unfalsifiable claim. If you need to bring in highly skilled people and most of them come from X Y or Z, it will be near impossible to distinguish in-group preference from a continuation of skilled immigration which for most countries that practice it, is beneficial for the economy. Also hiring is often based on trust and networks. People refer others to their company and jobs. That trust tends to work out pretty well for companies. If people get laid off they tell their friends and their friends pass on opportunities to them or try to help them find new jobs. And people tend to make friends with others they share a culture and language with. If you add a bunch of barriers to make companies have to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity or culture, that slows down hiring and can be an extra regulatory burden for what reason?
    • breakyerself 4mo ago
      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't hired because they're white. It's an easier pill to swallow and then the next thing you know DEI is the great Satan of low IQ white men.
      • rayiner 4mo ago
        Can you show me where the “mediocre white men” are on this chart?: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med-1.png?x97961 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med-1.png?x97... Are the “mediocre white men” the ones with a 27-29 MCAT/3.4-3.59 GPA, who have a 21% chance of admission to medical school whereas a hispanic student in that same range has a 61% chance? Are those the “mediocre white men” you’re talking about? > The companies get … more diverse perspectives That makes no sense. The premise of non-discrimination laws is that someone’s ethnic background doesn’t affect their “perspectives” in ways that are material to employment.
        • 4mo ago
  • rayiner 4mo ago
    If you’re part of the majority group, you really don’t see how cliquish people in minority groups are. Every time I get into a cab with another “brown” person, there is a Q&A. When they find out I’m from a muslim country, it’s all “my brother,” etc. I’ve always found it distasteful.
    • doctorpangloss 4mo ago
      The people who fixate on this stuff are projecting.
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    • pstuart 4mo ago
      People in general tend to be very tribal -- it's in our DNA. When it's about "yay community!" its kinda nice but most the time it's "other tribe bad". I think this is a core to a lot of legislation. Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.
      • soraminazuki 4mo ago
        I still can't believe we have hundreds of years of documented history to learn from, yet human intelligence is still blinded by bigotry.
        • broken-kebab 4mo ago
          The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.
          • soraminazuki 4mo ago
            That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.
  • yogorenapan 4mo ago
    I think it's pretty logical, though perhaps it is correlation rather than causation. Say I am hiring as a native English speaker in a Chinese company (while of course still knowing enough Mandarin to survive) and I have 3 candidates, one of whom also speaks English fluently. I would definitely be biased towards the English speaker, because I would work better with them. Now, it doesn't really matter what their ethnicity was, but there is a higher likelihood of them being of the same ethnicity. Especially if my first language is niche, the chances of hiring the same ethnicity would be higher. I've been on the receiving end of this before, being hired in part because I spoke English due to my manager while the rest of the company was primarily Mandarin
  • thisisit 4mo ago
    The broader concern seems to be “outsiders taking our jobs/raising house prices/voting in elections” etc etc. Anything perceived to be done by “outsiders” is an issue. Americans/British saying this about non-white immigrants. Switzerland about Europeans. India saying it about Bangladeshi migrants. It’s like people dislike others who are worse off them.
    • account42 4mo ago
      No it's people disliking importing the cultures and problems that made those people worse off in the first place.
  • deaux 4mo ago
    Because it is real, and there _is_ in fact a large difference in the propensity to do this across cultures. This post is about Switzerland, and as said by parent a lot of this is about Germans in Switzerland. Are Germans in Switzerland more prone to hiring another German rather than a French person, or Swiss person? I'm sure that such bias exists. But that bias is nothing compared to e.g. tendency for Indians to hire other Indians. Now of course some of this can be explained by economic opportunity. The extra benefit Germans can provide to other Germans by giving them Swiss job is smaller than for Indians. However that only explains part of it. If that was all, then Chinese people should bias much more to hiring fellow countrymen than Japanese and Korean people, while the latter two should be similar to each other. This is definitely not the case (note that we're talking about immigrants here, not 2nd+ generation). I'm sure there's been research on this subject, and there will be some cultural trait that proxies for how much immigrants from country X bias towards hiring others from X. I can even give you a proxy for funsies: embassies. Look at the employees at the embassy of country X in country Y. How many of them are from country X and how many are from Y? Now compare that across embassies. You'll see a lot of similarities with what I've sketched. Sometimes you'll see that both the embassy of country X in country Y, as well as that of country Y in country X (the other direction), are both primarily staffed by people from country X! In those cases it's common that country X has a much stronger bias than Y towards hiring people from their own nationality rather than based on aptitude.
• einpoklum 4mo ago
  The text of the proposal disagrees with your claim. Or - are there lots of Europeans seeking asylum in Switzerland?
  • wqaatwt 4mo ago
    Maybe its a bit like Brexit, i.e. not rational immigration being one of the major issues when it did nothing to reduce the immigration of (non-white) people from third countries and EU migration was rapidly decreasing anyway.
  • soco 4mo ago
    Funny enough, the voting of this weekend mentions as argument also "the lax asylum politics in the EU" while exactly THIS weekend the EU is strengthening a lot, and I mean quite a lot, the asylum procedures and including border controls. I guess they had to push it quickly before the Swiss voter notices...
• 0xWTF 4mo ago
  Swiss as racists. Amazing. People know Americans harbor racist feelings because they are surrounded by people of many races. But it's trivial to demonstrate racism among any population as soon as you introduce an "other" of virtually any type.
  • xenonite 4mo ago
    No it isn’t racism as Germans had the same skin color. Keep in mind that Germans aren’t stereotypical anymore. In Switzerland live over 41% migrants and children of migrants (just 8.4%). So the native Swiss are not just “surrounded” but greatly diminished.
    • eqvinox 4mo ago
      Yeah, sure, it's nationalism instead of racism. Born on the wrong side of the Rhine? F right off. No better at all. Worse, arguably.
      • account42 4mo ago
        Yes, that's how nations work. Otherwise you end up paying for the world's social security while not collecting everyone's taxes.
        • eqvinox 4mo ago
          Who's paying for what social services is an entirely different question, that is in fact being currently renegotiated: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-warn-eu-jobless-reform-could-cost-millions/91385529 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-warn-eu-jo... This thread is about migration and residence, not benefits.
        • cycomanic 4mo ago
          Yeah it's much better to make your money by enabling the worlds worst dictators to steal money from their populations. In fact it's all the other countries taxes that are paying for the swiss social security, because of all the aid money being funneled into swiss bank accounts.
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• CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
  >Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem Yeah, screw the middle class. What do they know anyway?
  • breakyerself 4mo ago
    I mean there is a tendency for people in the middle class to go all NIMBY and not want additional housing to be built which drives up the cost of housing. It's good that there's a middle class but there are also things that people in the middle class do that aren't good. Like drive f350s on their 40-minute commute to the office.
    • NetMageSCW 4mo ago
      The middle class can’t afford F350s today.
      • breakyerself 4mo ago
        Don't worry. They'll blame immigrants and elect even more radical right wing politicians.
• panos_news 4mo ago
  "So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans.". It can be about both though.
• khriss 4mo ago
  > the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans". Good to see (in a sad way) that some biases are constant across humans.
• lqet 4mo ago
  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, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior. My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.
  • myrmidon 4mo ago
    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...
  • kamma4434 4mo ago
    Yes a “grützi” at the right moment is often priceless, especially when abroad.
  • xinayder 4mo ago
    > 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. Literally what most expats go through in Europe. I live abroad for 6 years and here, a Central EU country, this also happens. I am trying to learn the language and even then I got told implicitly several times that I will still be treated as a foreigner, no matter how much culture and language I learn from the local country.
    • port11 4mo ago
      We can swap anecdata back and forth, but that doesn’t reflect my experience at all, now in my 4th European ‘expat’ (migrant, really) experience. Aside from a few somewhat racist remarks outside Berlin, I’ve always been treated fairly. Speaking the local language definitely helps, and living in 50k+ pop. cities. And then… you visit Switzerland. Very quickly you realise what GP is talking about. Switzerland is the only place where I’d love to live, but hate the feeling of being there.
• amadeuspagel 4mo ago
  Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is very different from blaming immigration for not finding a job. Jobs appear almost automatically (if some basic economic conditions are met), apartments have to be built and permitted. Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is also different from blaming immigrants. Blame has a moral connotation, and certainly no individual deserves blame because he lives in an apartment that you'd like to live in, whether he moved from another country, another place in the same country or another district of the same city, or whether he was born in that apartment. But that doesn't mean that immigration can't make it more difficult to find an apartment if not enough apartments are built.
• mda 4mo ago
  Eeh, not really. German's think because some Swiss resent them a little, it is all about them. EU countries, especially Italy, Germany and Portugal are the biggest immigration source in Switzerland (EU/EFTA immigration ~60%), Germany is ~13% of the total. Non EU, especially outside of Eurepean immigration is a smaller part, but if you looked at SVP pamphlets you see a very different picture. https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/migration-integration/foreign/composition.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...