The initiator party wants to get Switzerland out of Schengen and of the EU bilaterals - which will happen as a consequence if this passes. Like a Brexit, basically.
Edit: but the CHexit will work just fine, because of the Swiss exceptionalism.
Way worse than Brexit, as Switzerland is much smaller, landlocked and had no colonies or anything like that. This would be a suicide for the country. Just populism to mobilize the electorate.
Makes far more sense than the “population must increase forever” pyramid scheme the rest of the West is running. Check out Canada for a look at what happens when you try to juice GDP via population growth at the expense of literally everything else.
The data/facts disagree with you. In a low birth rate society a constant influx of new tax payers is required. Without it you end up with decades of stagnation like Japan.
1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own
2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it
This sounds like a strong argument for having a stable cap. It's not a total immigration ban and would freeze population at a steady state. This makes all of the boom and bust problems easier, not worse
But either way, European nations are nearly all screwed - their expenditure on pensions and healthcare will quadruple in the coming decades as the demographics change heavily towards elderly peple.
Pop increase faster than housing / good jobs. The usual. Tried to juice economy post covid with MASS Indian immigration, for reference peak "Chinese" immigration was post HK handover was 60k, settled at 40k per year, lots of Chinese wealth transfer to Canada. Indian immigration went from 60k per year to over 140k, outrageous amount. Bluntly, most of west including Canada gets second tier immigrants, all the good opportunities in US, Canada doesn't get to retain tier1 talent, and Indian immigrants are in aggregate less wealthy. The entire point of brain drain is to get best brains, or in lieu get wealth. Canada got neither. This not knock on Indian immigrants, who work just as hard as every other, just acknowledging value proposition is not the same.
The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.
Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.
Canada is really bad with housing and inftrastructure. Blame immigrants not crack head white politicans who see bike lanes as the devil take car and oil money whole worshiping Trump and far right parties all over the world.
Immigrants not worth their economic value are the problem. That's not blaming "immigrants" but "immigration policy", which like housing policy - failure of politicians. But ultimately immigrants, who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat. And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
A lot of people on the internet blame Canada's malaise on their historically lax immigration stance.
While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.
Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and
1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)
2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)
3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)
6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)
7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech
all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.
At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.
THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.
Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.
Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.
Serious question: what is ONG? I assume it's like LNG (liquefied natural gas), but after multiple searches, all I can come up with is Oklahoma Natural Gas, NGO in French, and On God.
Here in Nova Scotia, Canada, mass imigration is driving the most intense building of everything boom, ever. And it just went up a notch.
Plenty of Swiss imigrants as well.
No country is running a "population must increase forever". You only hear that when the public pensions are discussed because they are unsustainable. The argument is not " population must increase", it's more "human labor is the most critical resource and we must get as much as we can".
You can fear the results of runaway immigration in the short term, like cultural clashes, organized crime and brown people in your neighborhood. But you can't deny the results on the long term when you allow talent to go to your country and end up with more nobel laureates of New Zealand origin than New Zealand.
This is only about the Schengen, Switzerland is not a part of the EU, and even before the Schengen, the borders between the EU and Switzerland weren't heavily controlled. I got in trouble at German airport for going by train from Lausanne to Milan, and then plane to Berlin, I had no entry step into the Schengen because they didn't bother doing that on trains (pre-Schengen).
Everything else is negotiated under separate treaties. This would revert Switzerland to pre-Schengen, which is sad, but it wouldn't be suicidal.
> This is only about the Schengen, Switzerland is not a part of the EU
Not really, the bilateral are a package and the EU doesn't want CH to pick and chose.
If freedom of movement stops, a whole lot of thing also stop. It happened the last time SVP got something similar voted on (introduction of quota for foreign immigration), on a smaller scale (erasmus and horizon which are the higher ed and academic research collaboration, CH was a heavy recipient of the latter).
> the bilateral are a package and the EU doesn't want CH to pick and chose
It really depends who is in power where when and if the 10mm limit is crossed. If there is a conservative in Paris or Berlin, chances are Switzerland can simply abrogate Schengen.
Schengen is a minor treaty about border controls. The actual issue are the Bilateral I agreements, which link free movement with many aspects of free trade. If Switzerland drops that, it needs new free trade agreements, which take many years to negotiate and ratify.
I think we do bilaterally with our trading partners/border friends.
Freedom of movement across the EU has created a massive backlash. Politicians can keep ignoring that. Or they can modify Schengen, perhaps by admitting that FOM makes immigration decisions a collective one. (Germany letting in a massive wave of immigration means a massive wave of immigrants for everyone.)
How did it not work out? A lot of things the EU claimed were red lines ended up being crossed. Look at the Horizon programme. Supposedly an inviolable "privilege" tied to FoM, the UK called the EU's bluff, left, and UK is now back in Horizon anyway.
I wish Schengen would one day apply mirror visit policies, to make countries taste their own poison. Like - "Ok UK, you want out of Schengen? Fine. You will now pay 162 EUR for a single one time entry per person. Thank you very much for your interest.". Or "Oh, you want a 5 year multi entry visa, which EU can grant for like 30-60 EUR? It will be reciprocal 1086 EUR for you. It was a pleasure of doing business with you, sir.".
And do the same with every other renegade, including reciprocal mirror tariffs and stuff. Want to play games? Let's play them together.
Switzerland was part of Schengen from day one… New EU Entry exit/system will put CH in the same boat as UK with mandatory control at the border with scan of face and finger print + travel authorization. Switzerland would be completely locked.
But some people are going to be happy as it would mean no more grocery shopping on the other side of the border.
Switzerland officially joined the Schengen Area on December 12, 2008
March 26, 1995 (The Implementation): The Schengen Area officially became effective on this date. Internal border controls were finally lifted among seven member states.
And somehow despite this, the European economies had the biggest share of global GDP back then.
And now they're more integrated than ever, have more immigration than ever, have created the EU as their "big daddy" leader and enforcer, and yet they can't stop losing share of GDP to the rest of the world. Stange. Maybe they should hit the brakes for a second and reflect that their current course of action isn't the cure but the disease.
Like ASML, Concorde and Airbus were created via European cooperation when EU was a nascent baby and present day Schengen freedom of movement did not exist. Now we EU bureaucracy, open borders unlimited freedom of movement but haven't created the next Airbus or ASML. Food for thought that the EU is tackling the wrong issues on its economic stagnation. Maybe the solution is not more EU, but less EU.
The root issue was already visible in the 1970s. When birth rates drop below replacement, you eventually end up with a society with more old people than kids. And when you have a society like that, you naturally invest more in maintaining the society and less in building the future.
Yeah lets compare the world now to a world pre rise of Japan, East Asia and China. Im sure less European imtegration would have resulted in Euro dominance continuing.
I agree more bilateral agreements are good but having even more fragmented markets is not and was not a long term model of sucess.
It's not the population cap, but that bilateral agreements with the EU depend on the free movement of people. Without it, Switzerland could lose access to the EU market, which accounts for 51% of their exports. Switzerland cannot just choose whatever they like from the agreements and cancel what they don't. They will have to accept whatever in order to keep in the EU common market, or the country will suffer massive troubles. Switzerland needs the EU much more than the other way around.
Plenty of us remember when Switzerland was not in the Schengen though. This might be good for Americans, who haven't been able to get working visas in Switzerland since EU countries now have priority. But otherwise, I don't see much changing beyond border procedures.
True, maybe. It is really hard to say. I'm not pro leaving in any sense (beyond being an American who used to work in Switzerland and wouldn't have that chance today because of the Schengen).
Most of the downsides would be on the goods side. Swiss companies would loose market access and the chance of "better" trade agreements is even worse then the UK, especially currently.
When you drive through there is someone standing looking at the line of cars and if they don't like the way you look they point to the side and you have to explain yourself and your cargo. It's like an arbitrary border control right now.