> benefits from diverse cultures

You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).

>benefits from diverse cultures

You mean Germanic, French, Italian, Austrian and Swiss cultures itself right? Because mentioning anything else would be blown out of proportion and betray the harmful ideology you are trying to conceal.

It's not just the state - it's your neighbors pushing the same building restrictions as the rest of the developed world, where people say "I don't want another neighbor next to me", which results in too few apartments for even the existing people's children...

> There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy

European unity works well in a world of mostly-stable populations. Having mass migrations from large, relatively empty countries, to pretty full ones, is going to make the full ones increasingly expensive to make housing for, to power, and to water.

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

Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)

> execute a Swexit

It wouldn’t be full Chexit. Just renegotiating and then rejecting the Schengen chapter. It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.

damn, the word 'execute' reverberated interestingly

It veers too close to Logan’s Run when they cap things like that. I’m sure it’s just policy action at the various thresholds but it sure sounds odd.

Capping a population is a short term solution creating huge issues for the following generations. Examples: lots of places this happened.

Can you explain how adding frequency to the train network will not work to compensate higher ridership?

Are they counting “frontalieri” towards that cap?

No? Funny how that works, isn’t?

> This initiative is a trap. Essentially, it would allow for the termination of bilateral agreements with Europe

Or their preëmptive re-negotiation.

I’m not sure describing it as a trap is fair. Nobody voting on is confused about what the thresholds require. I’m not thrilled at how close they both are. But the fundamental idea of a maximum sustainable population for an Alpine republic isn’t abhorrent to me.

Meanwhile SVP head politicians employ quite a few foreign workers at all levels of employment hierarchy.

It's pathetic.

I must wonder though who could profit from Switzerland leaving Schengen. Okay pass checks are only a little hassle, but visas can become bigger, and judicial cooperation on international crime just drops. And yes, no more cross-border workers either way.

Here you go (if you understand French, German, Italian or Romansh, there is a video)

https://www.admin.ch/fr/initiative-durabilite

https://www.udc.ch/actualites/campagnes/pas-de-suisse-a-10-m...

This is a way to enable deportations and curb permit prolongations, to delay reaching the 10m cap (which will create really bad consequences).

As an immigrant in Switzerland, I am quite WORRIED.

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.

Cruelty to immigrants, mostly. That's literally the only project the right is able to sell the population on anymore. Why a round 10M cap? Because this is just garbage slopulism, and 10M makes for a great slogan.

Will you find any serious economist defending this? Any sociologist? Of course not.

Moved out last year after 10y in the Zurich area.

There's always been a pull-and-push between getting skilled workers and protecting the internal labor market. Right-wing political parties never made a secret of the fact that they hated immigrants, because they stole jobs and redirected/exported money that would have otherwise been received by Swiss. IIRC this was historically mostly felt in Ticino (the southern region), where Swiss companies sourced very cheap Italian labor by undercutting Swiss salaries by a lot, shrinking the job market for Swiss people (a Swiss can barely get by in Switzerland with an equivalent Italian salary).

Switzerland is geographically in the middle of Europe, but it's not part of the EU. This allowed the country to thrive outside some of the more restrictive EU regulations and keep its own currency, but because it has a smaller job market that can barely replenish the high-skilled workers pool and is often in defect (not just finance bros, but also doctors, for instance), it always had to import workforce from neighboring countries to some extent. Over the last 40 years Switzerland basically opened up to more-or-less follow many EU rules and put in place agreements to have a play in the same market and be allowed to easily keep importing people it needs.

This initiative as I understand it would be equivalent to a Brexit (because sooner or later the cap would be hit, considering more housing keeps being built), which would undo 40 years of openings and IMO greatly weaken the integration with EU, and as a result the country as a whole.

It's being proposed in order to maintain quality of life. No one wants to be overcrowded. This is a sane solution: collectively agree on the maximum tolerable population. Then it's down to individual responsibility to obey the norms of one's society.

Edit: unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant. Swiss voters have a right to decide how they want to live. They're not beholden to EU laws; they can make their own sovereign decisions, and everyone must respect that.

The people behind this are conservative politicians. They have done so a lot in the last 20 years or so and keep on trying, but the EU regularly stops their shenanigans.

For the most part the swiss already decided to try to cherry pick as much as possible. They know that if they want to limit movement, then the EU will also limit movement from swiss to other EU countries. And the swiss always disliked that, so they could not go through with it. You can also see that with the UK - they are out of the EU but suddenly want free movement and free trade. Some people can't decide what they want.

With a birth rate or 1.29, they will need to accept immigrants or face the consequences of a declining population. My guess is that in the end, the next generation of old folk will want taking care of.

I agree, but it's also a lot easier to promise a silver bullet to everything than to propose improvements to the actual, hard problems.

Yes infrastructure are strained, but it's not like nothing is being done. It's just that it take decades, and will be too little, too late.

Same thing with housing. Every one is saying we need to make the procedures more efficient, but when it comes time to actually makes changes, there's no consensus to drop anything.

They could have done better, but it would have been very easy to make nothing but empty promises. I prefer they didn't.

Although I thought weird that SVP brought the "we will need to increase retirement age" themselves. It's actually pretty likely, but sounds like a massive own goal so close to the vote given how unpopular it is.

> This referendum is an attempt by the members of SVP/UDC, the right-most party, to show that on immigration topics they have more popular support than what their relative power

Not really about immigration but EU relationship. Almost every SVP initiative tries to create a contradiction in the constitution with foreign agreements to force an "exit".

> The strong point of the Swiss political system is that the government is, by law, made up by all significant parties.

It's a tradition, not a rule (the composition of the council is simply the result of an election by the parliament).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_formula_(Swiss_politics)

Yeah, the marketing for this referendum has been awful. But as a mixed-heritage Swiss-American (continental Indian), I’m also sympathetic to the argument that some geographies and political systems have a natural maximum population they can sustain. (Unsurprisingly, the SVP’s marketing may be the thing that tips me against this.)

I wonder if that number can be adjusted based on the amount of arable land, or based on the ease of construction (quite the nebulous term here admittedly). The number of mountains presumably makes this hard to compare.

America is soooo big and soooo sparsely populated

That is an utterly meaningless statistic. Canada, with four times the population, ranks #233, because most of the country is uninhabited / uninhabitable.

Don’t be so quick.

You know full well that the polls are 52% no. It will be a razor thin rejection and the SVP will try again until they find one that passes.

Don't look at tiktok then. It seems pretty much won in there.

It really doesn’t have to. Britain being incompetent is sort of its own chapter in governance.

The Swiss ruling class don’t have as much disdain for their populace. It will only end up that way if the Swiss people will it.

A lot of the UK’s problems were a result of the EU being vindictive as well. The EU won’t act vindictively because they aren’t in the EU.

> without population growth there will be no economic growth

This is not true. Productivity is the mediator between a constant population and economic growth. (The world economy has grown much faster than its population over the last 100 years. And the U.S. still out produces the more-populous India.)

The EU expansion politics was a success. E.g. Poland was a great industry place for cheap labour, now it becomes a richer economy, they consume more expensive from Germany and France.

It's not about free movement, but "free trade"/joint market.

Having rich countries support its poor neighbors is an ingenious solution to improving your quality of life. You impose your rules, regulations and monetary policy, they get capital for internal improvements. If there's no huge waste or theft (which sadly exists), you end up with wide, strong and stable continent-level middle class. Which is great goal, as we can see when observing Switzerland -- wide, strong and stable country-level middle class.

Last time Switzerland attempted something like this (~10y ago), it got burnt, hard (lost a lot of EU related projects and academic financing). Cutting the economical/market ties with the EU, considering its position and dependencies, is a suicide.

This is about Swiss - EU relations. Everyone understands that a yes vote means the Swiss equivalent of „exiting the EU“.

All Swiss-EU contracts contain a „Guillotine clause“ where if one contract is broken, all are immediately gone. The initiative explicitly requires breaking the freedom of movement contract, which immediately severs all other links to the EU.

This _is_ pure political agenda driven campaign using immigrants.

Hm. Are there any difference in the consequences for the immigrants, if they are kicked out because of arbitrary population cap, instead of anti-migration laws?

What is rational about this exactly? They share no borders with the countries most immigrants come from, they are moving the problem to Spain, Italy, Greece.

What's rational in the arbitrary number of 10 millions for no reason at allM

I agree. Every country has a limit, unspoken or not, let the people decide. Anything less is undemocratic.

It is in fact based on stuff like this but hyperboled into a placative number. The "9.142 million initiative" would sell just as good.