This article makes it seem like the Swiss have been somehow singled out, but the same restriction applies to a number of countries, many of which are firmly US allies.

It applies to everyone except 18 countries. Gonna post them here as many articles mention "18 key alies" without naming all of them:

Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

I'm stunned they put Korea on the list, given this is dressed up as an anti-China measure, and Korean leaderships flipflops between anti-China and pro-China every ~4 years when the opposition replaces the government. There's also lots of cases of e.g. Korean Samsung employees happily moving to Chinese companies to leak IP for a boatload of cash.

TW semi employees also happily move to PRC. Korea got clipped too hard by CHIPs, Samsung needs AI unless you want PRC phones proliferate even more globally.

The URL is Swiss.

I'm just one Swiss guy but here's my two cents... Are you asking in a war-related scenario or about regular non-wartime trade? I think the "we trade with allies only"-rhetoric makes the discussion sound much more martial than the trade-related language Switzerland would have expected (notice how the Swiss response only uses economic and commercial terms). Totally understandable if either country was at war or the products in question were directly arms-related. But as it stands, moving the discussion from CH buying AI-chips to military neutrality feels a bit besides the point from a Swiss perspective.

So to your question, I think Switzerland wants to be considered as: someone's trade partner, generally yes (or maybe we call it "trade allies" now?), but not someone's potential ally in war. Military neutrality has always been the number one principle in the Swiss Confederation's foreign relations. If this now is supposed to be an unspoken economic sanction against Switzerland then is the message behind it: "Hey everyone, be our military ally or have nothing to do with us"..?

All of them at the same time, they want to eat their cake, have their cake, sell their cake and rent their cake. Neutral means you get to profit from doing business with all sides at the same time while spinning some virtuous BS PR how you don't take any sides while you deal under the table with bloody war lords. That's how Switzerland and later Austria got rich in the cold war, by being the middle men between the NATO and USSR deals. Today it's being a middle man between NATO, China, Russia.

There's always gonna be demand for middle men to wash dirty laundry of various countries' deals that they prefer to keep secret so they can pretend to stay clean on the public scene.

European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense since the US never hesitates to flip the switch from "you're a valuable ally" to "you're our bitch, whaddaya gonna do about it?" whenever it needs to strong-arm you into complacency, and so the EU should invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry, but who am I kidding, this is always falling on deaf ears and nothing's gonna change.

To be fair, what country doesn't act like they have this cake replicator technology? Certainly the U.S. and England are firmly in cakeism territory.

I don't think it's too much wrong with using the exploits you've got since every country would do that if they could, just don't piss on peoples' heads and tell them it's raining.

Pretending you're neutral while you're dealing with all sides is a very hypocritical definition of neutrality that people aren't buying.

> Pretending you're neutral while you're dealing with all sides

That's the very definition of it though.

Switzerland is not that neutral anymore. For example, they have been adopting the same EU's sanctions against Russia, so they do not have the same role of middleman.

> European countries would do well to stop being so complacent and relying on US for high-tech and defense, and invest heavily on having a competitive local defense and high-tech industry,

Yes, I like this speech better with the von der Lyon accent, when I heard it a couple days ago.

Got a source to that? Knowing VDL I don't doubt it, just would like to hear it for myself to have a laugh, since she's the most hypocritical, useless, corrupt, champagne socialist in Europe.

Depends, do you want those words nearly verbatim? Here's a clip I heard today: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931650.953_queenursulaind...

Here's "its in no ones interest to break the bonds of global economy": https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737931650.953_queenursulaind...

Working backward: https://noagendaassets.com/enc/1737672200.295_davos-queenurs...

I may have conflated someone else talking about defense at Davos this week with her speech(as). Apologies.

Even when preceded by "champagne", the word "socialist" shouldn't be allowed to appear in the same sentence as her name.

It also means not wanting to interfere into other peoples buisness so much. Swiss has not invaded anyone in a long time.

Yes.

Being from Denmark I have always been puzzled by how US/UK media portray us as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of MENA immigration than our neighbors. Meanwhile Switzerland has been doing what almost amounts to white-only immigration to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from Albanaia and Serbia.

Neutrality is good for PR.

> to the point that their "troublesome" immigrants are Europeans from France and Italy

Depending on the canton, it is virtually impossible to become a Swiss citizen, even if you are married to a Swiss national and have been resident for ten years.

That's not true. If you are married to a Swiss, it's easy: https://www.eda.admin.ch/countries/china/en/home/services/ci...

Also, otherwise, it's easy but not automated. Lots of foreigners get a Swiss passport every year.

IME the Swiss national football team has more Albanian and Serbian last names than Italian, and that's usually a pretty good proxy. They clearly managed to get residency. Easier for the kids of the foreign parents?

The US media doesn't portray Denmark this way. The only European countries whose immigration policies I've even heard of are Italy, Greece, Sweden, Germany, and the UK, and even those were only a couple of times (e.g. I vaguely remember something about Brexit).

Half of the US media portrays half of the country as neo-Hitlers for being slightly more critical of immigration than their neighbors. We generally have one of the most open borders, relatively straightforward legal immigration paths and more than twice as many Green Card holders than Denmark has people. We also, at least for the moment, still have unrestricted birthright citizenship, a policy pretty much no countries in Europe have.

So, don’t feel so alone.

You have the added problem of 1% of them actually being neo-nazis.

Sure. Racism never died. The problem is when you lump a bunch of people who don’t deserve it in with the actual Neo-Nazis and paint them with an extremely broad brush as all of the same kind. If you look for Nazis, you can find them, but if you simply see Nazis everywhere, you don’t even have to look.

Being from the US, I would say that US media does not portray Denmark at all. Except once every few years as Greenland hodlers.

Pretty much everything I know about Denmark is from watching Danish language TV on Netflix.

> Except once every few years as Greenland hodlers

Only definition of Hodler seems to be: a true believer in cryptocurrency

Is there some secret project going on in Greenland? :-)

In this sense I meant hodl as in “hold”, “refuse to sell”. Completely unrelated to the lost Atlantean technology hidden under the ice, which can compute hashes 100x faster.

I'm also from Denmark, Our immigration policy is no better.

Sorry but I'll respectfully disagree. I've lived in Copenhagen, Zurich and the US anf traveled allt hose countries extensively. Danes are not portrayed as hitlers nor is CH doing "almost white-only immigration." Check out at least the french parts of Switzerland as a counter example. But I am sorry for any country that doesn't enforce their laws. Immigration only works if the rule of law works and when that's the case, it doesn't matter where people come from.

I'm not trying to take sides in this, but your link seems to support the parent who you're disagreeing with. You have to get to the 14th most popular origin to see the first non-European immigrant. Which this, like usual, follows a power law distribution. So yeah, looks like most immigrants are coming from Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Kosovo. Last I checked, they are all white European countries.

> Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Kosovo. Last I checked, they are all white European countries.

Kosovo has never been white (it's majority-Muslim, culturally Middle Eastern) and whether Italy/Portugal/Spain are considered white fluctuates based on politics.

> Kosovo has never been white (it's majority-Muslim, culturally Middle Eastern)

TIL Muslim == brown. I always though Indonesians were Asian.

As an American, searching Google images, I really am surprised these people are not considered white. These are the whitest looking "middle easterners" I've ever seen. They really just look like their neighbors: Greeks, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania...

> TIL Muslim == brown. I always though Indonesians were Asian.

Indonesia is Muslim for different reasons. In that part of the world the religious divide follows the historic culural/ethnic divide (for the same reasons) and is a useful shorthand - I could have equally pointed to how Kosovans drink their coffee, but that would have been less legible.

> As an American, searching Google images, I really am surprised these people are not considered white. These are the whitest looking "middle easterners" I've ever seen. They really just look like their neighbors: Greeks, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania...

America famously didn't consider the Irish "white" until relatively recently, and Irish people are whiter than white skin-tone-wise. Of course if you've spent much time around Irish people you can immediately see the difference between the Irish and their next-door neighbours, but that goes for all of these distinctions.

Kosovo-Bulgaria-Türkiye is ethnically continuous, you'll find people from Türkiye and Syria who look much like Kosovans (and, more importantly, have very similar cultures). Greeks are another group who are "white" or not depending on current politics. Serbians are Slavs, continuous with Slovaks or Ukrainians, which again is a group whose whiteness is a political question (even Poles haven't always been "white" in America). Romanians are their own unique thing (as the name suggests, they're the last of the Romans, and have a distinct culture that reflects that).

There might be some part of the population missing in those particular numbers (refugees). For example there should be approximately 67'000 Ukrainians on that list, but I don't see it.

Yeah but considering EU and free movement agreements, little bit apples and oranges comparison.

The US classifies people into racial categories based on skin tone, and then imagines that these racial categories are objective and used around the world.

The original comment by a Dane here said "white," a skin tone.

I suspect they meant the US-cultural racial category "white" (which is of course named for the skin tone).

The first non white country there is Eritrea at 14.

TIL that Turkey is considered a white nation.

Either case Switzerlands demographics don't seem too different from their neighbors like Austria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Austria

I won't doubt that they have a Euro-centric immigration policy, but I'm curious why a landlocked nation in the center of Europe really needs anything else.

I'm from a West African country and our immigration policy is arms open to our neighbors, and non-existant for European countries except for the UK.

> TIL that Turkey is considered a white nation.

What is a white nation?

Sorry, I know it sounded like sarcasm but it's a real 'today i learned'.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-fantastic-science-of-turkeys-whit...

Apparently, there's a LOT of debate over if the Turkish are white, middle-eastern, or their own thing. I just always thought of them as being middle-eastern due to the ottoman empire.

France and spain still have south american and african territories.

Foreign-born != Non-white

(This is not a comment on what you said but something for the whole thread)

May I kindly ask that we do not say "white" and "non-white" as if it has a global definition? I think all people here mean "European" when they say "white". There are many Europeans with dark skin color and being "white" is very context dependent, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Turks

I mean I, as someone non-European although with very light skin and blue eyes, take no offense from the usage here personally as I understand you mean European, but I still think it'd be nice to be more considerate.

What would be really considerate, is not bucketing people by the color of their skin at all. Seems like a radical call these days…

I fully agree, I just wanted to keep it on a single topic.

> almost amounts to white-only immigration

This is wrong.

> In 2023, 30,223 people applied for asylum in Switzerland, an increase of over 20% compared to 2022. The main countries of origin were Afghanistan, Türkiye, Eritrea, Algeria and Morocco.

https://ecre.org/aida-country-report-on-switzerland-2023-upd...

Compared to only 2,122 asylum applications from refugees in Denmark in 2023 overall.

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/denmark/asylum.php