It's not completely irrational. It's a fixed placative number yes.

But reality is also we don't produce more food than we already do. More people means more import and it's actually lowering the quality of the available food, making shopping more complicated, etc. And that's just the food quality aspect, what about pensions? Health care? ...

>what about pensions? Health care?

What about health care if there's no more 'room' for the immigrants who make up a substantial fraction of health workers in Switzerland?

Swiss people are perfectly capable of becoming health workers? What kind of argument is this?

That's an option, but it takes a long time to train and recruit locally, costs a lot of money, and you'll probably have to increase salaries to get the required numbers. If there were an easy and cheap way to recruit all the required staff locally, that would already be happening.

So the solution is to import uneducated and non-certified individuals from other countries at lower pay and hope you can pay them less and teach them? As if that is any easier? Sounds like the only reason is so health conglomerates can provide lower pay.

No, you can import educated and certified healthcare workers, as many European countries, including Switzerland, have been doing for a long time. It’s easier and cheaper, which is why everyone’s doing it.

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Cuba has a reputation for producing highly skilled doctors, and they're not allowed to move to the US.

Fertility rates are low and people are ageing, like everywhere in Europe. There will be a moment that simply there won't be enough workers. The reality is that there is already a lack of healthcare professional even without a population cap that would only get worse given the case.

Sounds like modern slavery, import people from poorer countries to tend to the rich and elderly in countries that made short-term sacrifices to not build a future for themselves independently.

Import people from poorer countries with a salary of 100k CHF and wonderful life conditions. Anyway, what I mean is that it's nor worth it for Switzerland, in my opinion, to break the agreements with the EU to limit the population artificially to a random number.

Most of food is imported anyway, Switzerland is a very small country. This is a very silly argument, I'm sorry, it does not make any sense. "making shopping more complicated" what does that even mean.

What about pensions? We are talking about foreigners working and paying taxes in Switzerland, a lot of them in very specialized jobs. Health care? A lot of doctors and nurses are foreigners, too. But apart from all these cliches about how good immigrants are for the economy, the main issue is that all bilateral agreements with the EU depend on the free movement of people between Switzerland and the EU. Without that, Switzerland losses access to the EU market and becomes and isolated country. It is nonsense.

Honestly I don't know import statistics but the majority of food I eat is from Switzerland. A lot of imported products are complicated because they often contain more weird stuff like artificial colouring, sweeteners or thickening stuff.

Familien nachzug is a thing where people can get their elderly parents (or anyone family really) to move to Switzerland a lot more easily. This can indeed add additional costs to the pension and health care system.

The implications with the EU surely could be problematic.