Snow caps, yes: people caps, no. In a national referendum this week, the people of Switzerland voted against a hard cap of 10 million on the population. The vote was called by the conservative Swiss People’s Party in an effort to control the country’s population growth, which is driven entirely by immigration.
Switzerland is a unicorn among the world’s nations: a successful multilingual state. The country was forged in the medieval and early modern wars of Europe, where its cantons of German, Italian, French and Romansh speakers joined together to form a federal union to defend itself against the powerful monarchies around it.
Hemmed in by mountains, the Swiss had natural protection. But they augmented it through military preparedness and a reputation for producing tough fighters. Since 1506, the Pope has been protected today by the Swiss Guard, which has now evolved into an agency combining police, security and investigation functions.
Switzerland successfully stayed neutral during WWI and WWII. That neutrality was backed by required military service from every man. On completing military service, Swiss men are required to retrain every so often and to keep a military rifle at home with a stock of ammunition. With a population of 9 million, Switzerland can mobilize up to 200,000 men quickly.
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To discourage foreign aggression, the Swiss built a huge network of tunnels, bunkers, and hidden weapons. To discourage a Nazi assault in WWII, they hid gun emplacements and tanks behind the facades of houses facing mountain roads over which any invading force would have to pass. Switzerland today has enough shelters for its entire population – something no other country except perhaps Israel can boast.
But the latest invasion does not come with tanks and guns, it comes by plane, train, car and foot. Since 2002, the Swiss population has grown by nearly a quarter. With the fertility rate of native Swiss women at a lowly 1.29, this growth clearly came from immigration. Most migrants are from Europe, but thousands have come from all over the world, from Algeria to Somalia. The official count of the Muslim population is now estimated at over 6%.
More migration means more expensive housing, competition for jobs, and worse access to education, healthcare, and other services. This discourages natives from having children. But at the same time, lower native fertility leads politicians and business interests to urge more migration, in a circle more vicious than virtuous, ending in mass replacement migration. We’ve seen this pattern not just in foreign countries like Sweden and Switzerland, but arguably in U.S. states like California.
Against the population cap were who’d you expect: multinational businesses, most of the media, the EU, UN, NGOs, academics and pro-migration groups. NPR’s headline sums up the reaction of the U.S. left: “Swiss reject right-wing’s bid to cap population…” Of course, for NPR, the fact that Switzerland “foreigners today make up nearly one-third of the population” is a good thing, and anyone proposing migration caps is automatically “right wing.”
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The Economist, a venerable British publication firmly in favor of mass migration for cheap labor and growth at all costs, wrote on X that “Switzerland is rich partly because it is a hub for international business. It will struggle to remain so if it is closed to foreign brains.” For globalists, national borders must be open and restrictions are wrong economically and morally.
Voting for the cap were many – but not enough – ordinary Swiss, particularly in the rural areas. They are concerned about increased pressures on housing, healthcare, and roads. Proponents want to preserve not only Switzerland’s magnificent countryside, but its unique lifestyle and political balance. Already, several migrant groups outnumber the minority that speaks Romansh, one of the country’s four official languages.
If the referendum had passed, then once the country reached the cap of 10 million people the government would have been required to limit asylum seekers and family reunification, and end free movement of people with the European Union. Fear of how the EU would react, given the importance of the bloc to landlocked Switzerland’s trade, was one reason many city-dwellers and business lobbies opposed the cap.
Score one for the globalists. But if pressures continue to build, a similar referendum on controlling migration to Switzerland will come again, and next time, it might just pass.
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