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A comment on Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show.

Re:Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show by jsnell on Sunday February 09, 2014 @04:45PM (#7207431)
This is of course potentially disastrous. Our startup is based in Switzerland, with about half us working in Zurich and the other half in the EU. The goal has always been to do most new hiring in Switzerland rather than continue building a distributed organization. If the immigration situation changes drastically, we'll probably need to instead grow in other countries. And after that happens, there really is very little point in keeping the company registered and paying taxes in Switzerland at all. Even in the current situation being outside of the EU is already rather inconvenient.

And I'm sure ours isn't a unique situation. A sane immigration policy has been one of the main things Switzerland has going for it. For example Google Zurich can't be at all happy about this.

(As is normal in these kinds of things, the vote to restrict immigation was concentrated in the rural areas where no immigrants would move to. Meanwhile the places where immigrants actually have an impact voted against the proposal).

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Re:Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show by Hermel on Sunday February 09, 2014 @05:10PM (#7207558)
Yes, such quotas are a pain in the ass for a startup. The company I worked for lost a foreign employee because his residence-permit was not renewed after two years.

However, I'm not afraid about Google - they have all the legal processes in place to get non-EU citizens into Switzerland that face quotas already today. And in the worst case, they can still offer them a job in another office.

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Re:Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show by jsnell on Sunday February 09, 2014 @05:39PM (#7207684)
Oh, Google as a whole will of course be fine. But it'd be insane to have a huge engineering office in a small country and a bad immigration policy. So they'll grow elsewhere, and Switzerland loses out. (I worked in Google's Zurich office the last time there was a big immigration quota scare, IIRC 2008 or 2009 when they cut various quotas in half with no warning. It definitely wasn't treated internally as casually as you imply.)
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