This was an interesting read. The equivalent story for Switzerland would not be so rosy, unfortunately. I wish we had a points based system here, they seem like a useful addition of fairness to the fundamentally unfair global migration situation.
Permanent residency (C permit) is only possible after 5 and 10 years of residency in Switzerland, so not comparable with Japan's fast track system for highly skilled professionals. Only option 1 is possible. Visas for non-EU countries are restricted. This favors highly educated people anyway which is the same as in a point-based system. For example, if your salary is low, it's basically impossible to get a visa.
I don't see how the point-based system would be an improvement, the system is already based on fairly unambiguous rules. You meet the requirements, you get the visa/permit. You don't meet the requirements, you don't get the visa/permit.
For example:
- You'd like to get a work visa as a third-country national? Meet the requirements in FNA, Chapter 5, section 1 [0].
- You'd like a C-permit (permanent residence permit) in Kanton Zürich? The requirements, in as much detail as I could ever ask for, are here [1].
Switzerland has to be the most rule-based society I've ever lived in. This is baked into the very constitution itself as Art. 9 [2]: "Every person has the right to be treated by state authorities in good faith and in a non-arbitrary manner."
Having gotten a Swiss C-permit (permanent residency) myself on the five year fast track it was rather easy. But looking at previous interactions it all feels very dependent on what privilege you have in the form of your nationality.
If you are from a "good" country things are a lot easier. E.g. I didn't have the TELC B1 test done when I sent in all the papers. So I had a co-worker help write a formal letter explaining I would forward the test results when ready and got the permit before the results.
There is even a set of countries that are exempt from the language requirement (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain,
Greece, and Liechtenstein). Some of which make sense as they share a language with Switzerland while others I wonder what the story really is...
In contrast, friends from a "bad" country would be stringed along on 6 month L-permits, also for the spouse (who didn't get the right to work) while I brought my partner (we still aren't married) and got her a B-permit that could easily be upgraded to a working visa from the get go.
There are very few people from 'good' country list that want to go to Switzerland (or any rich country) for nefarious reasons. Be it running from law or wanting to live off benefits. So there is less hoops to check those people.
There are far more incentives to try to get to rich country from a poorer country, if you make the process too easy you will get an increase of people wanting to come in. And those are hardly going to be only doctors and engineers. It will be poor and low income in general, willing to bet all.
This isn't fair, its discriminatory and racist approach. But it is also reality of this planet. Life is unfair.
One problem with Swiss immigration is that due to our treaties with the EU, we basically have to let in every Eurozone immigrant, which limits our leeway in immigration with the rest of the world.
Overall, I argue that those treaties are worth the price, and they are entirely fair considering what we want from the EU, but they are unfair in their treatment of Euro vs non-Euro immigrants.
Traditionally, it was more local than that: It was done on a community level. But it is becoming increasingly an administrative process because the previous system was too obviously arbitrary.
Outside of Luxembourg Switzerland has the highest net migration rate by percentage of population of all western countries. Based on that I don't think it's intolerance of immigration as much as "scaling problems" as you put it.
* In Switzerland, about 30% of the population are foreign born — comparable with e.g. a classical immigration country like Australia, higher than Canada, and twice the proportion of the US. So I would not agree that the Swiss are particularly intolerant of immigration.
* Switzerland is relatively densely populated, especially considering that a sizable proportion of it is not really habitable.
> In Switzerland, about 30% of the population are foreign born
Not really true, it's around 23% and on about 1,900,000 immigrants, over 85% are Europeans, 300,000 are Italians, 295,000 are Germans and 110,000 are French, which are not really immigrants in the real sense being official languages in Switzerland (Italians were over 450,000 in the 80s, so there are less Italians than before in Switzerland).
On the other side Germans were very few in the 80s and are now the second largest group, due to tax benefits Swiss banks can guarantuee to very rich people (Switzerland is basically a tax heaven, that's the main drive for immigration, they are not really having an "immigration problem" like other countries in Europe are facing).
One popular example of such auto inflicted "immigration" is Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA founder, who lived in Switzerland for 40 years or Carlo De Benedetti, industrialist and media publisher, who's born Italian but naturalized Swiss citizen .
One other point to consider is that immigration in Switzerland is also due U.N. agencies being there.
The third and last point: Switzerland is surrounded by Alps, immigrant go there using planes, they are not the kind of immigrants that come to Europe on shitty boats in the Mediterranean sea.
The discrepancy between our numbers is most likely that about a third of the foreign born population of Switzerland is naturalized. The number you're citing is foreign NATIONALS. But naturalized immigrants still are foreign born.
> [Italians, Germans, and French] are not really immigrants
They were born in one country, and moved to another, which makes them immigrants. Whether they speak a national language is immaterial (and, in the case of Germans, the spoken language in Switzerland is not all that close to many German dialects).
Is an Asian Indian or a Kenyan in the US "not really an immigrant" if they speak fluent English?
> tax benefits Swiss banks can guarantuee to very rich people
Swiss banks used to be fairly powerful, but I can assure you that this power did not quite extend to setting tax rates for individuals. You're probably thinking of Lump-sum tax agreements, which do exist, but only for about 5000 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump-sum_tax
> a tax heaven, that's the main drive for immigration
There are certainly a good number of wealthy immigrants for which this is true, but for the vast majority, I'd think that high wages are the main driver. This is true both for countries like Portugal, whose immigrants typically take low skilled jobs, and countries like Germany, where many immigrants are in high skilled professions.
> immigration in Switzerland is also due U.N. agencies being there
True, but not numerically all that significant on a national level.
> not the kind of immigrants that come to Europe on shitty boats
I can assure you that Switzerland still has more of those than billionaires coming for the tax benefits.
> They were born in one country, and moved to another
That's a moot point in my opinion, Italians in Switzerland come mainly from the areas near the border (I used to live half an hour away from Lugano).
And there's a big difference: Italian is an official language in canton of Ticino (southern Switzerland) because the population is in large percentage of Italian heritage, it was formed by occupying Italian cities, and is an independent self governed Region inside the Helvetic Republic (formerly Helvetic confederation) where Italian is the solely official language.
Kenya uses English as national language because it was colonized by UK, but their original language is Swahili.
Kenya and US don't share a border where both countries use the same official language.
> Italians in Switzerland come mainly from the areas near the border
Do you have any data on this? Anecdotally, it feels like quite a few came from southern Italy.
> the population is in large percentage of Italian heritage
Most of them were Swiss for several hundred years before Italy was a country, so I'm not sure how far that heritage extends.
I know for a fact that Swiss Germans see themselves as quite distinct from Germans, and Romands see themselves as distinct from the French, and I don't think Ticinesi see themselves as any more Italian than the other population groups.
> where Italian is the solely official language.
Bosco/Gurin would like to have a word with you…
> Kenya and US don't share a border where both countries use the same official language.
Use Kenya and Tanzania, then. Or France and Belgium. Or the Netherlands and Belgium.
In the decade 1961-1970 Italian migration to Switzerland increased, because Switzerland needed more and more workers, in 1964 the two countries signed a new agreement about immigration policies and in 1970 there were over a million Italians in Switzerland.
Italian came mainly from Lombardy, Piedimont and north east (an area called tri-veneto) but in the middle 60s thanks to the economic boom in Italy they had the option of staying home so Switzerland started looking for workers in the southern regions.
> Most of them were Swiss for several hundred years before Italy was a country
Italy existed before it was an official country
Swiss occupied Italian cities in the 1500s
> don't think Ticinesi see themselves as any more Italian than the other population groups.
Just like in Veneto they see themselves differently from Italian from the south
It doesn't make them different though...
> . Or France and Belgium. Or the Netherlands and Belgium.
In fact they aren't immigrants
They are both EU citizens
The point is Ticino and northern Italy close to the border (Varese and Como area) are practically the same place
In Switzerland they speak Italian, French and German, in Italy we speak Italian and French and German are two recognized official languages, in some areas there are two official languages, documents can be written in both and places have double names for example Bolzano/Bozen or Noasca/Nauchi
There is even a franco-provençal recognized community in Apulia, in the deep south. Those countries go back in history for thousands of years, they had relations from the dawn of times, saying that an Italian or a French in Switzerland is an immigrant is like swearing in a church.
That's why we made EU, because especially the original group of 12 should have no reason to call people from other countries "immigrant"
> on about 1,900,000 immigrants, over 85% are Europeans, 300,000 are Italians, 295,000 are Germans and 110,000 are French, which are not really immigrants in the real sense being official languages in Switzerland
Who ever said that immigrants don't count as immigrants if they already speak the national language?
My mother's family immigrated from the UK to Australia when she was a child. They all spoke English as a native language. That fact didn't make them any less "immigrants". Back then (early 1950s), the vast majority of immigrants to Australia were native English speakers and had always been (back to the very start of European colonisation). It was only in the subsequent decades that immigration to Australia diversified and native English-speakers became a successively smaller percentage of all immigrants. But even today, the number one country of birth for foreign-born Australians remains England; China and India are in the second and third spots, respectively; New Zealand fourth. (Australian immigration statistics treat the four constituent countries of the UK separately.)
Full disclosure, my uncle went to live in Switzerland in the 70s because Canton Ticino is Italian, people living there were and still are Italian and they chose to have Italian as official language, because it was their language.
Italy and Canton Ticino share a common border and speak the same language.
Same thing on the French side, a little less on the German one.
UK and Australia aren't even on the same side of the planet!
Whereas the border between Italy and Switzerland if you pass with an Italian plate or document is virtually non existent.
I used to go skiing in Livigno and it is faster to got through Switzerland, most of the times they didn't even stop us.
They saw the vignette on the windshield and didn't even bother to go out in the cold to check.
I don't consider a French person in Italy an immigrant, but a fellow European.
Switzerland is basically part of the EU without the Euro.
They adhered to the free trade market in 1972, entered EFTA in 1992, they are part of Schengen since 2008, EU is the largest trading partner for Switzerland importing ~50 billions of goods and services, accounting for ~7% of Swiss GDP, why in the hell some Swiss think that Europeans (especially those coming from bordering countries) are immigrants is incomprehensible to me...
I think maybe the issue is that the word "immigrant" means informally different things to different people, and something else again officially.
A person from country A who voluntarily moves to country B with the intention of staying there permanently is officially an "immigrant". That's the international standard definition used in immigration statistics, so we can compare immigration statistics between different countries. As far as the official definition goes, it doesn't matter whether the source and destination countries have a common border or are on other sides of the planet, whether they speak the same language or not, whether they are culturally alike or culturally dissimilar.
Now if you are talking about what "immigrant" means informally, that's something which varies in different countries. In Australia, you get anti-immigrant sentiment, and a lot of Australians respond to that anti-immigrant sentiment by saying "we are all immigrants! (except for the Indigenous)". In Europe, I think the term "immigrant" has a more negative connotation. That method of "reclaiming" it doesn't work if your ancestors have lived in the same place so long that nobody is really sure when they immigrated to it, but whenever it was, it was likely thousands of year ago. Hence the term tends to be associated more with immigrants from poorer countries, whereas immigrants from richer countries don't want to be called that, and others don't want to call them that, even if that's technically what they are.
> Switzerland is basically part of the EU without the Euro.
Well, Denmark and Sweden are officially part of the EU without the Euro. Switzerland is not officially part of either the EU or the EEA. Although a messy system of piecemeal bilateral deals makes it a quasi-member of the EEA.
> why in the hell some Swiss think that Europeans (especially those coming from bordering countries) are immigrants is incomprehensible to me...
Because by the formal official definition of the term they are, even if by many people's informal definitions they are not.
It’s the large numbers. One of the Swiss Sunday newspapers has published the latest numbers today. Depending on the canton, foreigners are between 15% and 50% of the population. And among children below 6, the Swiss have become a minority in their own country.
How would you define "originally"? Switzerland has demonstrable signs of habitation by Homo erectus 300,000 years ago and by Neanderthals. It was part of the Roman empire for several hundred years.
It has been de jure independent since 1648 (with the exception of a few years of Napoleonic control), and de facto for at least 150 years before that.
And yes, in between there were were several hundred years where Switzerland was part of whatever passed for "France" and "Germany" in those times, but I'm not sure that era was any more fundamental than the rest of history.
That used to be common until a few decades ago, but naturalization for Swiss-born children of immigrants has become much easier in recent years (and much more of a legal right, rather than a privilege granted at the discretion of communities).
What is the benefit of large scale immigration beyond helping with the low birth rate? Switzerland is a successful economically prosperous country with a strong cultural identity.
> Switzerland is a successful economically prosperous country with a strong cultural identity.
Who is also countinously looking for people going to work there.
I got a call for a remote job for a U.N. agency two weeks ago.
They are calling it immigration, but it's more people going there for tax benefits or because have been called there or because the U.N. and many Financial or Legal HQ offices are there.
One of the answers to your question is in your second sentence. A significant part of migration is highly educated people moving to a different country for skilled work. Which benefits the host country because it means their companies get the skilled workers, are more productive, and pay more taxes. (Before someone says "They're taking our jerbs!", in Germany and Switzerland they are desperate for good engineers.) It's even better if they were educated elsewhere, meaning the host countries get these highly educated labor force "for free".
On the flip side, it's a brain drain for the exporting countries, of course.
>Which benefits the host country because it means their companies get the skilled workers, are more productive, and pay more taxes.
If a country already has a high per capita GDP why does it need more money? What do the people in the country gain from more money in total? More labor generally lowers how much workers are paid so each person in the country is likely to get less money afterwards. More productive workers means more workaholic workers which again moves the bar so locals are now expected to work more as well. Again, a net loss for the existing population.
Thanks for accusing me of lying. Got any statistics to prove me wrong? I suppose I should also do research to prove what I believe to be right, but from the amount of headhunters contacting me on LinkedIn, my gut feeling is I'm not wrong...
BTW an abundance of graduates don't always equal "good engineers". There is also an abundance of mediocre engineers.
I've lived in a major urban region of Switzerland for the last 12 years and I could not disagree more. I've seen companies looking for capable software engineers for years, including paid relocation and arranging temporary housing for them to move into.
Brutal != high salaries. I know someone who got triple the salary when moving from Germany to the US without even trying that hard (FAANG would have been something like 6-8x the salary).
Points remove the subjective nature of acceptance process which makes it more fair. It is much fair than a old lady sitting behind a desk and judging you based on 10min of interview.
Yes. It favours the privileged but countries tunes the thresholds for points based on kind of people they want in their country. In the example you mentioned, more educated.
Countries regularly abuse and malware their own regulations for their own purposes. For example, Japan imports cheap labour from Nepal and Southeast Asia, and treats said labour very poorly. There is no avenue for “fair” treatment for the affected parties
It's not clear that points systems like this really select for optimal benefit, though. They tend to be biased toward the qualifications that are already well represented in the country.
Looking at immigrants I've met, yes, qualifications count for something, but sheer hustle and ambition can play a role as well, and often those propagate into the next generation too.
In hiring decisions, I was told to try to select for potential, not qualifications. Points systems are the classical "select for qualifications" move.
I don't think anyone said they're optimal benefit. But on the whole increasing the education and income level of your immigration pool is going to be more beneficial to your country than the opposite.
Potential can be a part of the point system. You yourself made some sort of crude scale of potential when you were interviewing people. Nothing wrong with formalizing that.
Yes, it's considerably harder to administrate such a system in an objective manner. A points system has the advantage of being objective. But that doesn't necessarily make it fair or a well chosen policy.
I'd say it's impossible to administrate such a system in an objective manner. If you could administer it in an objective manner then you can quantify and formalize it.
A point system doesn't mean the parameters are well chosen but by it's very definition it's more fair then an interview without any formal requirements.
It’s fair to the country as the country is able to make informed admission decisions weighted by the needs of the country, rather than a take-all-comers model.
It’s fair to the applicants as they have a clear set of guidelines as to what they need to do to become eligible for admission. Need to learn English to boost your score (As in Canada)? Cool. That’s tangible and clear. On the other hand America’s system of, roughly speaking, “Indians need not apply” isn’t exactly fair to the applicants.
Note: a points based migration scheme doesn’t preclude for instance refugee admissions, and Canada’s system has a points escape hatch if a province nominates you based on their specific needs too.
Is it really fair? There are several countries with degree mills for things such as masters even when they do not show the competencies required for such degrees.
> I wish we had a points based system here, they seem like a useful addition of fairness to the fundamentally unfair global migration situation.
Let's not kid ourselves: fairness* would be if migration would _not_ be restricted. A point-based system is a good way to further grant privileges to the already privileged, though.
* As in: no additional layer of unfairness created by the State.
I live in a country with nationalised healthcare and a strong welfare system. About 75% of gov expenditure is pensions and welfare.
If the borders were completely open then it is likely this system would collapse or perhaps be forced to introduce the idea of "second class" citizens with tiered benefits.
It's possible this might not happen but as far as I know the experiment has never really been tried.
There's a lot more to nations than just "land and freedom of movement". There's a regulatory climate, political system, local culture(s), defence, social contracts. It feels to me a bit like you are handwaving away all the "hard" parts of being a nation.
The half-way solution is to restrict immigration those who can demonstrate they'll contribute and not be a drain on locals (i.e, not divert too much resource away from existing citizens who currently benefit from and support the system). It's very divisive and a compromise that leaves many unhappy. Interested in your thoughts on balancing universal benefits with open borders.
Housing prices in e.g. Zürich and the surrounding area are already insane. There's something fundamentally sad about being priced out of the place you grew up in, let alone the country.
Also competition for jobs. I know of one instance where a country fast-tracked permanent residency for those who study accounting. Guess what happened? There's now a glut of accountants and real wages have dropped.
