[kuerbel]

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 for some swiss, that's a problem. They blame them for not finding a job or an appartement. Just read the comments on inside paradeplatz, you can translate with any llm, on a post about the referendum. A subset of the swiss Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem, the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".

Also voted no of course.

[lqet]

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.

[reaperducer]

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.

Sounds like Seattle in the 2000's.

As soon as one of the locals found out you're not from there, you get the "Seattle Freeze."

Fortunately, I read about it in a book before I moved there, so I knew it when I recognized it. But that didn't make it any less uncomfortable.

I guess with SEA filled with expat tech people these days, it's either gotten much better or much worse.

[xinayder]

> 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]

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.

[myrmidon]

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]

Yes a “grützi” at the right moment is often priceless, especially when abroad.

[jansport123]

seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"

[rayiner]

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.

[pstuart]

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.

[rayiner]

> When it's about "yay community! its kinda nice

I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.

For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.

[pstuart]

I hear you, I'm trying to find the bright side in "community" where people who don't know each other at least treat them as "brothers". The insular part is fucked and we need need to evolve past that.

> For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.

Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.

[fouc]

tribalism, Us vs. Them, racism, patriotism/nationalism, etc all seem closely related.

In terms of social life, and romantic life, it's interesting how heavily we rely on shared/common background, which tends to cause this clustering effect.

[soraminazuki]

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]

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]

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.

[account42]

That others have learned a different lesson from history compared to your beliefs does not mean that they are ignorant of it.

[soraminazuki]

You're projecting. I wrote a factual statement, that bigotry still exists in today's world, and you somehow took that as an assault on your values.

So what exactly is the different lesson you're referring to? Given that bigotry still exists, I can only take that lesson to mean "bigotry good."

[kansface]

I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.

[soraminazuki]

You've got it backwards. That's a defeatist take that results in the exact kind of misery and cruelty documented in detail throughout history. Society prospers when people look past their differences and work together to improve things. It suffers when demagogues successfully divide the public and exploit the chaos to loot the resources required to improve the lives of everyone. Making punching bags out of a group of people is sure way to create instability.

[BobaFloutist]

Is it cliquishness, or is it genuine joy at an unexpected connection?

[doctorpangloss]

The people who fixate on this stuff are projecting.

[xenonite]

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]

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.

[sashank_1509]

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.

[dpark]

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]

Or perhaps said American genuinely is unaware of how much more biased other ethnic groups are in their own homelands.

[pyuser583]

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.

[tqi]

Yes that's why country clubs and the Greek system never caught on...

[JuniperMesos]

And this is why it's in the interest of Japanese people in Japan not to make it easy for you to have an opportunity to hire people for jobs in Japan.

[influx]

And that seems suboptimal for a Japanese company?

[deaux]

I've actually been in such a situation and I didn't. Or if I did have such a bias it must've been rather small as none of the applicants benefited from it.

[deepsun]

Yes, and that's normal (except for maybe eastern European cultures who better hire an American/west European).

[dlahoda]

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?

[vasco]

> 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]

> 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.

[deaux]

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.

[aprilthird2021]

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]

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]

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?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.

[breakyerself]

That isn't the premise. The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong.

Also when did we change the subject to college admissions?

[rayiner]

> The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong

Yes. And the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college and medical school admissions.

So why is it unreasonable for the people you call “mediocre white men” to conclude they’re being discriminated against? If Harvard and other elite universities are willing to go to the Supreme Court to defend such discrimination, doesn’t it stand to reason—absent data to the contrary—that the myriad companies and institutions run by graduates of those universities are doing the same thing?

[1] Those numbers are medical school admissions, but the numbers for college admissions is similar: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

[khriss]

> Can you show me where the “mediocre white men” are on this chart?

I think you will find that they tend to be at home, according to this graph https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/2023-demograp....

From the report 'Specifically, Black males received sentences 13.4 percent longer, and Hispanic males received sentences 11.2 percent longer, than White males'

So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites? It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.

[rayiner]

> So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites?

Yes. Your report shows that white men are more often given probation, which explains much of the difference. That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.

Your report also shows that black women received 6% shorter sentences than white women. So there seems to be more at work here than black versus white. We need less discretion in sentencing across the board.

> It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.

That describes people who point to sentencing disparities to justify affirmative discrimination in school admissions and employment.

[aprilthird2021]

> There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.

How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?

> 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.

I just don't agree with this idea of "giving a more fair shot" if it's enforced because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments. I don't like it to bolster diversity and I don't like it to cut diversity (what many white nationalists in the US wish would happen in industries that hire from abroad like tech).

[account42]

It's also not even defined what a fair shot means - once you discard merit and start trying to counter for all kinds of past or inherent disadvantages there is really no end to it.

[breakyerself]

A fair shot would be hiring based on qualifications and not race, relion, etc. There seems to be no end to people wanting to perpetuate a status quo that advantages themselves. You might feel differently if you were part of a group that faces discrimination at every turn.

[breakyerself]

How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?

Usually someone who feels discriminated against will get legal representation, file a lawsuit, and use the discovery process to strengthen their case. They can compare their treatment to that of people who don't share their minority status. They can show internal communications. Call witnesses. compare the companies workforce to other similarly positioned companies.

> because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments

1. So what?

2. People's judgement should be second guessed if they're racist.

3. One of the easiest ways to reduce discrimination in hiring is to replace names on resumes with numbers before letting hiring managers access them. Which barely slows down anything and eliminates a variable that isn't relevant to the candidates qualifications.

[znpy]

Wow that’s racist

[breakyerself]

How?

[yogorenapan]

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]

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]

No it's people disliking importing the cultures and problems that made those people worse off in the first place.

[CGMthrowaway]

>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]

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]

The middle class can’t afford F350s today.

[panos_news]

"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]

> 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.

[einpoklum]

The text of the proposal disagrees with your claim. Or - are there lots of Europeans seeking asylum in Switzerland?

[wqaatwt]

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]

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...

[amadeuspagel]

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.

[0xWTF]

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]

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.

[api]

It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years.

Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”

Maybe we should just keep expanding it. Declare everyone white. Black people are just white people with more melanin.

Then we can be racist about aliens from outer space.

[wqaatwt]

There is a distinction between racism and xenophobia, no need to assign the same label to everything. i.e. the thing about Italians was cultural an educated immigrant from Northern Italy would have been considered as white as a French (not that there a significant number of those in the US) at least.

[api]

Technically yes, but usually I think there’s a racist undercurrent to xenophobia.

The US stopped accepting refugees recently… except white South Africans. I’d say these people share no more culture or values with the average American than a Central American refugee. Maybe less. I’d much rather party with a bunch of Central or South Americans than a bunch of Apartheid lost causers.

If ethnically white people were pouring across the US border I don’t think many of our immigration hawks would care much, even if some were committing crimes.

[mothballed]

There's certainly a racist undercurrent to generalizing Afrikaner emigrants as "Apartheid lost causers."

Certainly there is no reason other than Apartheid concerns to leave South Africa for the USA... none at all...

[Gormo]

> It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years. Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”

This idea is mostly a modern fabrication. Various more granular ethnic biases were of course present throughout American history, but those were never conflated with racial categories: in times and places where the white vs. black racial division was relevant, the ethnic groups you're referencing were always considered "white".

And the types of discrimination that people in white ethnic groups sometimes experienced was of of a type and of a degree vastly different from that experienced by black people. They're really two very distinct phenomena, and weren't evenly distributed throughout the US -- black people in the South had the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other horrifying things to deal with, whereas white immigrant communities in the Northeast or Midwest never experienced anything remotely similar.

[eqvinox]

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]

Yes, that's how nations work. Otherwise you end up paying for the world's social security while not collecting everyone's taxes.

[eqvinox]

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-jo...

This thread is about migration and residence, not benefits.

[cycomanic]

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.

[ndhbxyd]

Racists havent heard of Ashbys Law of Requisite Variety.

Its also why they get left behind by everyone who has.

Its an ever growing complex and unpredictable world. Sameness is not a strength in complexity theory.