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Re:Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show by fidotron on Sunday February 09, 2014 @05:00PM (#7207511)
These kind of moves are Europe's equivalent to the bus nonsense in Silicon Valley. It's the misplaced anger of a bunch of people that feel economically impotent and threatened by outsiders that seemingly operate in places they consider to be their homes more effectively than they do.

Removing freedom of movement of labour is highly retrogressive, and vast parts of the world would benefit from enabling it further, but we need to be better at getting to the bottom of this alienation at home question and how to resolve it because otherwise the fear of outsiders is just going to become more common and more acceptable.

Re:Swiss immigration: 50.3% back quotas, final results show by kkowalczyk on Sunday February 09, 2014 @05:14PM (#7207581)
It's actually the opposite of the "bus nonsense" and actually the concerns are valid.

In SV, poor(er) people complain about too many rich(er) people coming in.

When it comes to immigration, rich(er) people are afraid of too many poor(er) people coming in.

Also they are not removing freedom of movement, they put a limit on rate.

Which is something U.S. has been doing for decades and nothing bad really happened because of that.

In addition, the math for Switzerland is much different.

It's hard to change demographics of 300 million country by letting in a few hundred thousand immigrants.

According to the article, already 25% of 8 million Swiss are foreigners. That would be a pretty alarming number if you were native Swiss. If the current trend continues (80 thousand immigrants per year), that would be 50% in ~25 years.

Let's also not ignore the real danger of ethnic-based or religious-based conflict, like Bosnian War.