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Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million

205 points by FabCH 4mo ago

FabCH 4mo ago
In case people were wondering about the result of that thread which made the front page a few days ago…
- nairboon 4mo ago
  This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059
alephnerd 4mo ago
> Swiss citizens have rejected by a 55% majority... 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.
- FabCH 4mo ago
  Only 58% of the voters voted. 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.
  - alephnerd 4mo ago
    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.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > 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.)
      - anonymous908213 4mo ago
        > a democratic vote to confront the EU 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.
        JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations 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.)
        anonymous908213 4mo ago
        > 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.
    - FabCH 4mo ago
      I mean technically, it was also rejected by the Kantons-as-entities so if that 5% is unevenly spread, theoretically it could still be rejected by Kantonal majority…
  - whazor 4mo ago
    maybe next time it will be 11M
  - Arodex 4mo ago
    >55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes? 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.
    - blockmarker 4mo ago
      Overcrowding by immigrants does not mean the location will vote in favor of restricting immigration. After all, those are the places with the highest number of immigrant voters, who will not support such restrictions.
      - FabCH 4mo ago
        Immigrants can’t vote. Citizens with immigration background have been in the country for 10+ years, because 10 is the minimum for getting citizenship, at which point their voting patterns are more likely to be influenced by other factors and not their immigrant background. Plus, it’s a bit of a phenomenon that many citizens with immigrant background’s tend to vote for stricter immigration policies.
      - Arodex 4mo ago
        Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass. And it takes more than a decade to have a chance at trying to get naturalized in Switzerland - a process that takes more than a year and thousands of CHF. And naturalized immigrants have been shown to be ready to "pull the ladder behind them", even in countries where it is easier to get it (see the many interviews of Turks voting AfD in Germany or Indians voting Conservative in the UK). Edit: FabCH concurs.
        kgwgk 4mo ago
        > Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass. […] And naturalized immigrants can!
- tonfa 4mo ago
  More surprising it didn't pass the "majority of cantons" either (both are required for initiatives like this), I would have expected it to pass (there are a lot of smaller/rural/alpine cantons which tends to vote more conservative).
- brainwad 4mo ago
  The Masseneinwanderungsinitiative passed in 2014... and fuck all happened (despite the no campaign heavily leaning on the argument that it would kill the bilaterals, e.g. https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full). When push comes to shove, there is a solid bloc in parliament and the executive for saving the EU bilaterals, even if it means ignoring constitutional initiatives.
- epolanski 4mo ago
  Swiss are too educated to fall for this. They have among the lowest fertility rates on the planet and a huge over 50 population. There's no way they can keep being wealthy and comfortable without younger immigrants.
- BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
  So don't worry, only one or two terrorist attacks/Rotherham situations that the medias can't completely memory-hole and you'll be able to scream "It's like the bad guys from my Netflix series won, my duderinos!" on Reddit to your heart's content. #NotSorryForFlaming
anonym29 4mo ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > political right, the anti-abortion people 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.
- ivell 4mo ago
  It is about immigration, not population control.
- armenarmen 4mo ago
  I'm assuming that this is a proxy for an immigration debate if that's how the left and right split
  - stymaar 4mo ago
    Yes, but not just “immigration”, but open borders with the EU: most immigrants in Switzerland are EU citizens, and it fits in a broader framework of Swiss-European agreement, capping population would almost certainly imply withdrawal from this framework.
- Rnonymous 4mo ago
  In Europe the right doesn't really care about abortion that much, its not really something i hear parties discuss. Their main focal point is immigration, anti-muslim sentiment. The left can be for reduction of GLOBAL human growth, but still increase LOCAL growth, which is primarily caused by immigration not birthrate.
  - troupo 4mo ago
    It also looks like most of European right is explicitly anti-immigration, and all other issues are usually indistinguishable from left.
jeffbee 4mo ago
Cities once again save rural voters from civic suicide.
abc03 4mo ago
Maybe a personal analysis: It's a trend that is growing all over Europe. It's the equivalent of overtourism and a problem for the ruling parties (except the SVP that proposed it). Expect it to continue quite soon in Switzerland and other European countries (France, Germany etc.). Of course it doesn't make sense to curb immigration at 10 Mio and many know it. It was also for many a vote against the ruling parties. Although Switzerland is an immigration country, Swiss don't think this way. It's more farmer/alpine style: Welcome guests but expect them to leave again. Many Swiss also don't interact with foreigners a lot, including myself (besides at work). Many of my friends don't want to give up their prosperity. They are fairly advanced in their career and it's more about enjoying life. So for many of them it's more a rational decision than really a belief we should have more immigration. As long as I can benefit, it's good. For younger people it may be different. My wife, who is not native Swiss, was in favor. And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > It's a trend that is growing all over Europe 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.
  - viking123 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > Western Europe will be a massive powder keg in 20 years 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.)
ourmandave 4mo ago
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.
- Biganon 4mo ago
  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.
  - blockmarker 4mo ago
    27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?
    - leejo 4mo ago
      > 27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.
      - kgwgk 4mo ago
        That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to.
        leejo 4mo ago
        > That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to. I was addressing the implication in the "fact", which is incorrect anyway. One in five of that 27% were born in Switzerland: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/migration-integration/by-migration-status.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...
fsh 4mo ago
The SVP campaign in favor of the initiative was something else. Half the country is plastered with their posters, and social media is full of astroturfing. It didn't pay off this times, but the propaganda dominance of this party is concerning.
phendrenad2 4mo ago
I don't get why they would want to do this, when runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world. We're at a point where (I think, controversially) we need to sanction (or more) nations that aren't increasing their population annually. This is an existential threat facing the human race.
- Caracas288 4mo ago
  Most people have a local view of their world through their immediate surroundings, not a panoptic or holistic perspective on the earth or their nation. The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.
- Lanolderen 4mo ago
  It's aimed at immigration. Babies are OK. Not all that incentivized but OK.
- vladms 4mo ago
  30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues". It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
- Thraway198 4mo ago
  What???? Why would we have to do that? Runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world? We have billions of people on the planet. GPD not going up is NOT an existential threat.
  - brainwad 4mo ago
    The complexity of society has got to be somewhat proportional to its population. If we halve the population, we won't just half the GWP. It will be lower still due to less specialisation. Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.
poisonborz 4mo ago
Misleading to call this "cap population", no one can cap population. The vote was about capping immigrant benefits, mostly aiming germans (reaching 9.5m) and then Swiss EU isolation/"Swexit" (at 10m). Basically the right wing SVP's long term goals packaged in a format that was more palatable to the masses.
- newtonianrules 4mo ago
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brightbeige 4mo ago
Recent, related New Yorker article that goes into the background leading up to the vote https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerland-become-the-first-country-to-limit-its-population https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl... Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”
- viking123 4mo ago
  Then do like UAE? No permanent residency or naturalization
  - throwawaycan 4mo ago
    When people have no hope of not making it as a permanent resident or citizen, their incentives to perform well are not as high. Also immigration is a global market, you compete with other countries that might offer better conditions so you lose on the best workforce.
    - WarmWash 4mo ago
      I don't know the overall ratio, but my experience working with many immigrant workers is that they had no real intention of staying and instead are just arbitraging cost of living between [rich country] and [poor country] for their family back home. Emphasis on home.
      - BloondAndDoom 4mo ago
        Sounds like you have a really limited interaction with immigrants. I’m lifelong immigrant (4 different countries) in every single one of those countries majority of immigrants want to stay. Permanent residency is a constant conversation topic. There are definitely immigrants thinking like your explanation, but definitely a minority. .
gregorygoc 4mo ago
[flagged]
- ziggy42 4mo ago
  considering how many foreigners in Switzerland work in tech, it somewhat is
  - lnsru 4mo ago
    I have no hard proof. But I heard Switzerland is the single place in Europe that pays FAANG salaries that are somehow similar to US ones.
- 05hundred 4mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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. Posting guides explicitly state "That includes more than hacking and startups". 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).
hdb385 4mo ago
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mfuzzey 4mo ago
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...
- s1artibartfast 4mo ago
  Probably a pretty big selection bias there. People who don't like crowding and want space are more likely to live in the country. People already living in a dense City are less sensitive to more of the same. I have a friend who voted yes and he lives outside of Basel because he thinks the city is too crowded. If you've been there you might find that amusing. His most vocal complaint is about too many people on Swiss hiking trails and difficulty in Booking huts. More recently, he was laid off by a multinational pharma company where most of the Swiss office is now German immigrants. That's not to say culture isn't a factor, but it would be a mistake to apply American ideas of racism to it
  - therealdrag0 4mo ago
    Yep. 0 to 1 is much more noticeable than 99 to 100.
- thrance 4mo ago
  The less exposure to different people the more xenophobia there is... That's true everywhere.
hintymad 4mo ago
Just curious, how can a state cap the country's population (I assume not like the Chinese government)? This appears that they assume their birth rate will be so low that they will need to absorb immigrates?
- kgwgk 4mo ago
  I don't know about "need" but the 1% population growth of Switzerland is already coming mostly from immigration. (It's also the case in the US, and in the EU it's even worse: without immigration population is declining.)
clcaev 4mo ago
This is interesting — it put immigration limits directly up for a popular vote. For those voting to strictly limit citizenship, I wonder if they are supporting: a permanent underclass without full rights? or that basic needs to be more expensive? or that widespread automation will soon meet basic labor needs? addendum: thank you kgwgk
- kgwgk 4mo ago
  The vote was not about limiting citizenship. It was about limiting the number of residents - if anything the effect would have been to _reduce_ that permanent underclass with fewer rights.
comrade1234 4mo ago
Things were fine during Covid. Now that the tourists are back the trains and trams are packed. The marketing for this campaign specifically talked about trains being packed but it should have focused more on how Swiss natives have to move out of Zurich to find an affordable place to jive, but the SVP would never focus on Zurich because theyre unpopular here.
- Hammershaft 4mo ago
  Isn't that a consequence of Zurich housing & zoning policy?
- danielspace23 4mo ago
  What do tourists in trains have to do with population caps? Tourists are not registered citizens, they exist regardless of population caps.
- rsynnott 4mo ago
  The train thing is particularly weird. The trains and trams and buses in Dublin are overloaded. I have never heard _anyone_, not even the fringe racist parties who'd happily blame bad weather on immigration, blame immigrants for this. People generally blame the _government_ for it. As you'd expect.
sharts 4mo ago
Why cultures that depend on immigrant labor complain about the immigrants but never do the work themselves?
maverick451 4mo ago
Duh-muh, that evil, evil right-wing proposals. R.I.P. Switzerland
huntoa 4mo ago
Is it good to have an immigration policy roughly half the country detests? 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. [1] https://archive.is/mx1ni https://archive.is/mx1ni [2] https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bender-holger-klaus-and-peter-schneider https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bende...
- brainwad 4mo ago
  I don't know if it's good, but it's not possible to have it any other way since the population is roughly split on whether freedom of movement is great or terrible, and has been for decades.

205 points by FabCH 4mo ago

FabCH 4mo ago

In case people were wondering about the result of that thread which made the front page a few days ago…

nairboon 4mo ago
This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450059

alephnerd 4mo ago

> Swiss citizens have rejected by a 55% majority... 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.

FabCH 4mo ago
Only 58% of the voters voted. 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.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  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.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > 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.)
    - anonymous908213 4mo ago
      > a democratic vote to confront the EU 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.
      - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > It is a vote to adopt a policy that is in breach of your international treaty obligations 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.)
        anonymous908213 4mo ago
        > 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.
  - FabCH 4mo ago
    I mean technically, it was also rejected by the Kantons-as-entities so if that 5% is unevenly spread, theoretically it could still be rejected by Kantonal majority…
- whazor 4mo ago
  maybe next time it will be 11M
- Arodex 4mo ago
  >55% no is… ok? Typical for such votes? 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.
  - blockmarker 4mo ago
    Overcrowding by immigrants does not mean the location will vote in favor of restricting immigration. After all, those are the places with the highest number of immigrant voters, who will not support such restrictions.
    - FabCH 4mo ago
      Immigrants can’t vote. Citizens with immigration background have been in the country for 10+ years, because 10 is the minimum for getting citizenship, at which point their voting patterns are more likely to be influenced by other factors and not their immigrant background. Plus, it’s a bit of a phenomenon that many citizens with immigrant background’s tend to vote for stricter immigration policies.
    - Arodex 4mo ago
      Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass. And it takes more than a decade to have a chance at trying to get naturalized in Switzerland - a process that takes more than a year and thousands of CHF. And naturalized immigrants have been shown to be ready to "pull the ladder behind them", even in countries where it is easier to get it (see the many interviews of Turks voting AfD in Germany or Indians voting Conservative in the UK). Edit: FabCH concurs.
      - kgwgk 4mo ago
        > Immigrants can't vote on federal votations, dumbass. […] And naturalized immigrants can!
tonfa 4mo ago
More surprising it didn't pass the "majority of cantons" either (both are required for initiatives like this), I would have expected it to pass (there are a lot of smaller/rural/alpine cantons which tends to vote more conservative).
brainwad 4mo ago
The Masseneinwanderungsinitiative passed in 2014... and fuck all happened (despite the no campaign heavily leaning on the argument that it would kill the bilaterals, e.g. https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full https://www.emuseum.ch/internal/media/dispatcher/286887/full). When push comes to shove, there is a solid bloc in parliament and the executive for saving the EU bilaterals, even if it means ignoring constitutional initiatives.
epolanski 4mo ago
Swiss are too educated to fall for this. They have among the lowest fertility rates on the planet and a huge over 50 population. There's no way they can keep being wealthy and comfortable without younger immigrants.
BoingBoomTschak 4mo ago
So don't worry, only one or two terrorist attacks/Rotherham situations that the medias can't completely memory-hole and you'll be able to scream "It's like the bad guys from my Netflix series won, my duderinos!" on Reddit to your heart's content. #NotSorryForFlaming

anonym29 4mo ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> political right, the anti-abortion people 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.
ivell 4mo ago
It is about immigration, not population control.
armenarmen 4mo ago
I'm assuming that this is a proxy for an immigration debate if that's how the left and right split
- stymaar 4mo ago
  Yes, but not just “immigration”, but open borders with the EU: most immigrants in Switzerland are EU citizens, and it fits in a broader framework of Swiss-European agreement, capping population would almost certainly imply withdrawal from this framework.
Rnonymous 4mo ago
In Europe the right doesn't really care about abortion that much, its not really something i hear parties discuss. Their main focal point is immigration, anti-muslim sentiment. The left can be for reduction of GLOBAL human growth, but still increase LOCAL growth, which is primarily caused by immigration not birthrate.
- troupo 4mo ago
  It also looks like most of European right is explicitly anti-immigration, and all other issues are usually indistinguishable from left.

jeffbee 4mo ago

Cities once again save rural voters from civic suicide.

abc03 4mo ago

Maybe a personal analysis: It's a trend that is growing all over Europe. It's the equivalent of overtourism and a problem for the ruling parties (except the SVP that proposed it). Expect it to continue quite soon in Switzerland and other European countries (France, Germany etc.). Of course it doesn't make sense to curb immigration at 10 Mio and many know it. It was also for many a vote against the ruling parties. Although Switzerland is an immigration country, Swiss don't think this way. It's more farmer/alpine style: Welcome guests but expect them to leave again. Many Swiss also don't interact with foreigners a lot, including myself (besides at work). Many of my friends don't want to give up their prosperity. They are fairly advanced in their career and it's more about enjoying life. So for many of them it's more a rational decision than really a belief we should have more immigration. As long as I can benefit, it's good. For younger people it may be different. My wife, who is not native Swiss, was in favor. And compared to other countries, I think Xenophobia is low.

JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> It's a trend that is growing all over Europe 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.
- viking123 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > Western Europe will be a massive powder keg in 20 years 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.)

ourmandave 4mo ago

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.

Biganon 4mo ago
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.
- blockmarker 4mo ago
  27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Can there ever be a limit to immigration, or will it always mean you are literally Hitler and want to exterminate millions?
  - leejo 4mo ago
    > 27% of Swiss residents were born outside the country. Swiss nationality is not linked to your birth country, it is linked to lineage. There are second, third, (fourth, fifth, sixth?) generation immigrants in Switzerland that are not Swiss. Conversly, there are Swiss nationals that have never set foot in Switzerland.
    - kgwgk 4mo ago
      That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to.
      - leejo 4mo ago
        > That’s unrelated to the fact you reply to. I was addressing the implication in the "fact", which is incorrect anyway. One in five of that 27% were born in Switzerland: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/migration-integration/by-migration-status.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/population/m...

fsh 4mo ago

The SVP campaign in favor of the initiative was something else. Half the country is plastered with their posters, and social media is full of astroturfing. It didn't pay off this times, but the propaganda dominance of this party is concerning.

phendrenad2 4mo ago

I don't get why they would want to do this, when runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world. We're at a point where (I think, controversially) we need to sanction (or more) nations that aren't increasing their population annually. This is an existential threat facing the human race.

Caracas288 4mo ago
Most people have a local view of their world through their immediate surroundings, not a panoptic or holistic perspective on the earth or their nation. The power of collective action via votes isn’t a bayesian system, its just like the sum of many binary vectors.
Lanolderen 4mo ago
It's aimed at immigration. Babies are OK. Not all that incentivized but OK.
vladms 4mo ago
30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues". It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
Thraway198 4mo ago
What???? Why would we have to do that? Runaway depopulation is the biggest issue facing the world? We have billions of people on the planet. GPD not going up is NOT an existential threat.
- brainwad 4mo ago
  The complexity of society has got to be somewhat proportional to its population. If we halve the population, we won't just half the GWP. It will be lower still due to less specialisation. Also, unless you throw the elderly to the wolves, having very low birth rates leads to a huge drag from having too many retirees to support with your shrinking working age population.

poisonborz 4mo ago

Misleading to call this "cap population", no one can cap population. The vote was about capping immigrant benefits, mostly aiming germans (reaching 9.5m) and then Swiss EU isolation/"Swexit" (at 10m). Basically the right wing SVP's long term goals packaged in a format that was more palatable to the masses.

newtonianrules 4mo ago
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brightbeige 4mo ago

Recent, related New Yorker article that goes into the background leading up to the vote https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerland-become-the-first-country-to-limit-its-population https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl... Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”

viking123 4mo ago
Then do like UAE? No permanent residency or naturalization
- throwawaycan 4mo ago
  When people have no hope of not making it as a permanent resident or citizen, their incentives to perform well are not as high. Also immigration is a global market, you compete with other countries that might offer better conditions so you lose on the best workforce.
  - WarmWash 4mo ago
    I don't know the overall ratio, but my experience working with many immigrant workers is that they had no real intention of staying and instead are just arbitraging cost of living between [rich country] and [poor country] for their family back home. Emphasis on home.
    - BloondAndDoom 4mo ago
      Sounds like you have a really limited interaction with immigrants. I’m lifelong immigrant (4 different countries) in every single one of those countries majority of immigrants want to stay. Permanent residency is a constant conversation topic. There are definitely immigrants thinking like your explanation, but definitely a minority. .

gregorygoc 4mo ago

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ziggy42 4mo ago
considering how many foreigners in Switzerland work in tech, it somewhat is
- lnsru 4mo ago
  I have no hard proof. But I heard Switzerland is the single place in Europe that pays FAANG salaries that are somehow similar to US ones.
05hundred 4mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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. Posting guides explicitly state "That includes more than hacking and startups". 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).

hdb385 4mo ago

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mfuzzey 4mo ago

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...

s1artibartfast 4mo ago
Probably a pretty big selection bias there. People who don't like crowding and want space are more likely to live in the country. People already living in a dense City are less sensitive to more of the same. I have a friend who voted yes and he lives outside of Basel because he thinks the city is too crowded. If you've been there you might find that amusing. His most vocal complaint is about too many people on Swiss hiking trails and difficulty in Booking huts. More recently, he was laid off by a multinational pharma company where most of the Swiss office is now German immigrants. That's not to say culture isn't a factor, but it would be a mistake to apply American ideas of racism to it
- therealdrag0 4mo ago
  Yep. 0 to 1 is much more noticeable than 99 to 100.
thrance 4mo ago
The less exposure to different people the more xenophobia there is... That's true everywhere.

hintymad 4mo ago

Just curious, how can a state cap the country's population (I assume not like the Chinese government)? This appears that they assume their birth rate will be so low that they will need to absorb immigrates?

kgwgk 4mo ago
I don't know about "need" but the 1% population growth of Switzerland is already coming mostly from immigration. (It's also the case in the US, and in the EU it's even worse: without immigration population is declining.)

clcaev 4mo ago

This is interesting — it put immigration limits directly up for a popular vote. For those voting to strictly limit citizenship, I wonder if they are supporting: a permanent underclass without full rights? or that basic needs to be more expensive? or that widespread automation will soon meet basic labor needs? addendum: thank you kgwgk

kgwgk 4mo ago
The vote was not about limiting citizenship. It was about limiting the number of residents - if anything the effect would have been to _reduce_ that permanent underclass with fewer rights.

comrade1234 4mo ago

Things were fine during Covid. Now that the tourists are back the trains and trams are packed. The marketing for this campaign specifically talked about trains being packed but it should have focused more on how Swiss natives have to move out of Zurich to find an affordable place to jive, but the SVP would never focus on Zurich because theyre unpopular here.

Hammershaft 4mo ago
Isn't that a consequence of Zurich housing & zoning policy?
danielspace23 4mo ago
What do tourists in trains have to do with population caps? Tourists are not registered citizens, they exist regardless of population caps.
rsynnott 4mo ago
The train thing is particularly weird. The trains and trams and buses in Dublin are overloaded. I have never heard _anyone_, not even the fringe racist parties who'd happily blame bad weather on immigration, blame immigrants for this. People generally blame the _government_ for it. As you'd expect.

sharts 4mo ago

Why cultures that depend on immigrant labor complain about the immigrants but never do the work themselves?

maverick451 4mo ago

Duh-muh, that evil, evil right-wing proposals. R.I.P. Switzerland

huntoa 4mo ago

Is it good to have an immigration policy roughly half the country detests? 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. [1] https://archive.is/mx1ni https://archive.is/mx1ni [2] https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bender-holger-klaus-and-peter-schneider https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview-ursula-bende...

brainwad 4mo ago
I don't know if it's good, but it's not possible to have it any other way since the population is roughly split on whether freedom of movement is great or terrible, and has been for decades.