Lying immigration debate

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Do you remember 2014? It was a time when the trains were always full, there was a lot of stress and the Germans took away all the jobs from the locals. “People are upset that there are too many Germans in the country,” a member of the SVP national council said on television. The voters sighed and said “yes” to the “mass immigration initiative.” After that, you didn’t hear much about immigration.

This will change again in the 2023 election year. After all, the number of German citizens in Switzerland has increased by about 15,000 since 2014, and 58,000 have been naturalized. With trains, the situation is as follows: after the recession caused by the pandemic, the number of passengers returned to the level of a decade ago. According to the SBB, the average seat occupancy rate is 23.9 percent.

But stop! Today no one talks about Germans and overcrowded trains. The housing shortage is at the center of the current immigration debate, an aspect that was only briefly mentioned in 2014. At that time, there were fewer vacant apartments in Switzerland: 45,355 on June 1, 2014 and 61,496 on the same day last year. The so-called vacancy rate was 1.07% in 2014 and 1.31% in 2022. By the way, in 1990 it was 0.44 percent, when there were 13,509 vacant apartments.

The point here is by no means to make people’s interests smaller than they really are. However, problems can only be solved if they are properly named. And for a constructive discussion, “immigration” is often too vague a term.

Undeniably, Switzerland has had one of the highest levels of immigration in Europe for many years. And yes, in too many areas of the city of Zurich there are no longer apartments for people with average earnings – as it used to be in Richterswil on Lake Zurich. Bloss: In this context, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to talk, for example, about the privileges of people with high incomes than about immigration?

However, in reality, the topic of housing is only emotionally discussed when it comes to housing refugees. Anyone browsing social media sometimes gets the impression that “lack of housing” is a code word that some may use to express doubts about those who seek protection in Ukraine without worry.

Certainly, more refugees will arrive in Switzerland in 2023 than in the previous few years. But dealing with this type of immigration is primarily a matter of resources. Here the federal government is first of all called upon: it must show the cantons and communes that it will not leave them in peace. Of course, one can foresee that the debate will take a different path: the SVP sets the tone, other parties will be under pressure and will present many ideas for tightening asylum practices. Are you willing to bet that there will soon be a demand outside the SVP for Switzerland to operate asylum centers in African countries? A proposal that never worked in practice; Denmark recently shelved plans to establish such a center in Rwanda.

On the other hand, other aspects of immigration are completely ignored. Of the 40,000 doctors practicing in Germany in 2022, almost 15,800 had a foreign diploma. According to the FMH Medical Association, our country has the second largest share of foreigners in the medical profession after Israel. At the same time, a strict numerus clausus applies to anyone who has completed his Abitur in Switzerland and would like to start studying medicine. Two years ago, the National Council discussed lifting this entry restriction. You can guess who opposed. That’s it: the politicians who are most outraged by immigration.

In 2014, passions flared up because of immigration, in 2023 because of immigration. And how our country’s problems are being handled (or how people are demanding scapegoats) is already clear today: the next fruitless immigration debate is bound to happen.

Source: Blick