Its honestly so annoying, every 3 years we have to vote against the same garbage proposal because the SVP is unwilling to accept the will of the electorate.
Immigration is being controlled, EU immigrants require a work contract to come here (and consequentially 80% are employed with the rest split between spouses, kids and students). I strongly prefer this system over having some random bureaucrat in Berne decide who is "valuable" and who isn't.
If Swiss population growth were entirely attributable to the children of existing Swiss residents, then this initiative would be pointless because it wouldn't change anything, and we would not be having this conversation.
So yes, it absolutely is about immigration, regardless of the wording.
Apparently you are unable to understand that if people who have been crying about immigration for 20 years that now push this things does not mean they have changed their mind. They just try to hide what's obvious to confuse uniformed voters (like old people who just see big number and remember the 1970s).
The first time I was in Switzerland was 1985, and even then, I would not call it "homogenous." The people at the time spoke French, German, Italian, and Romanisch. Switzerland is an excellent example of the "harmonious" rather than "homogenous": it manages to integrate people from four linguistic groups into a well-ordered society.
China has 8-10 major dialects that are not mutually intelligible, but many would say that China is pretty homogenous. 90% of the population is classified as "Han Chinese," even though the subgroups are quite visibly different from each other.
While it's terribly fascinating for linguists it's generally understood that the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture.
> the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture
Switzerland speaks languages from the Italic and Germanic clades of PIE [1]. That makes them about as dissimilar as Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages are from each of them.
Helvetia is a confederacy specifically because Switzerland has never been particularly homogenous. Homogeneity explains, in part, Nordic and Japanese success, though less and less the former in the modern era. It does not explain Switzerland’s.
Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires. The Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment. Arguably it was the Swiss greater class homogeneity that explains their success.
> Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires
Swiss territory has been part of, variously, the Roman Empire, various Germanic kingdoms, the Carolingian Empire, the HRE and Napoleonic France. Swiss independence was really only enshrined at the Congress of Vienna, I believe at the courtesy of Metternich. Of Austria-Hungary.
> Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment
Source?
> the Swiss greater class homogeneity
Yes, Switzerland was universally poor and started becoming wealthy with less inequality than other nations in the 1920s. (Note that in the 1910s like 15% of Switzerland was foreign born.)
The homogeneity pitch just doesn’t work for Switzerland.
Thank you. If the source is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, the Founders were operating on bad information. Napoleon wasn't the "first successful foreign invasion" of the Confederation, unless we're being cute about how the HRE was organised.
"In early modern Switzerland, the Swiss Confederacy was a pact between independent states within the Holy Roman Empire. The populations of the states of Central Switzerland considered themselves ethnically or even racially separate: Martin Zeiller in Topographia Germaniae (1642) reports a racial division even within the canton of Unterwalden, the population of Obwalden being identified as 'Romans', and that of Nidwalden as 'Cimbri' (viz. Germanic), while the people of Schwyz were identified as of Swedish ancestry, and the people of Uri were identified as 'Huns or Goths.'
Modern Switzerland is atypical in its successful political integration of a multiethnic and multilingual populace" [1].
I know plenty of Swiss-for-generations Swiss whose complexions would not have passed as white a hundred years ago.
Switzerland does not have a homogenous population, and to a reasonable person who has travelled in Switzerland I think this is an insane thing to be defending. A significant proportion of the population (certainly for Europe) do not even share a common first language. Significant proportions sit on different sides of the reformation which is again a big deal for Europe. etc
Homogeneous isn't likely the correct word. Shared cultural norms and "harmonious" is often more accurately what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous".
> what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous"
The Nordic countries were historically ethnically homogenous. Switzerland has been a multi-ethnic place since like the Helvetii were being picked on by Caesar.
Then they should say white. I'm prepared to give a lot of leeway when conversing with non-native speakers but as somebody who has grown up within a culture that understands that the concept of cultural homogeneity cannot refer to native speakers of non-mutually-comprehensible languages or historically antithetical religious positions, if they choose to use the word in novel ways that's their problem not mine!
I don't know what the exact word is - I wouldn't quite say "culture", as there are clearly different cultural backgrounds at work, but just as with Canada mixing French and Anglo traditions, there is a generally homogenous Western European metaculture at work, premised on the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, the rule of law (and equality of opportunity under the law), freedom of religion, the importance of education and hard work, private property, and personal responsibility.
Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change
> it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world
For most people in developing countries, Swiss banks are places where politicians and rich people stash ill-gotten wealth (corruption, crime, etc), because they know the banks will never let the legal system get back the money.
Because it favors social cohesion and social trust, which are strongly correlated with economic success. Americans are reflexively thinking of race, but that's entirely incidental and basically irrelevant.
But Switzerland emphatically does not have a homogenous population. It has an exceptionally diverse population, linguistically, religiously and culturally. And yet as you say it has an exceptional record when it comes to cohesion and social trust. Living the dream!
The social cohesion of Switzerland is mainly within the linguistic communities. Many Francophone Swiss hardly speak a word of German (just as their Belgian counterparts don't speak Dutch). And a large proportion of Switzerland's "diverse" immigrants are in fact from just across the country's borders (particularly Germans). "Diversity" is not what explains Switzerland's wealth.
Absolutely agree, and of course I would never argue that "diversity" explains Switzerland's wealth. It occupied a pretty unique and interesting place during the Reformation, and maybe there is something there. But the idea that either diversity or homogeneity can explain economic performance is obviously not bourne out by any serious examples. I was thinking about Belgium (and also thinking about Harry Lime) whilst typing away--it seems a bit of a counterexample to Switzerland where the same linguistic and cultural diversity within a country can lead to very different outcomes and senses. Nobody would ever write "Il n'y a pas de Suisse" as Destrée wrote "Il n'y a pas de Belges"--long history vs short history and as always the Reformation upheavals explain it perhaps
1) While Switzerland combines several ethnicities and cultures, the fusion dates back almost a millennium. The Old Swiss Confederacy arose in the 14th century, before Italian, French, and Romansh were even recognized as separate languages.
2) The Swiss federal structure goes to great lengths to give autonomy to the distinct groups.
So it’s not accurate to say that Switzerland is “homogenous” in the same way Denmark is homogenous. But it’s not like Switzerland’s Italian-speaking population grew from nearly 0% to the current 8% over a period of a few decades. There is a common umbrella identity encompassing these groups that dates back a long time.
Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This is an extraordinary level of diversity for a European country, and as other commentators have noted it isn't like there's a lingua franca: a large proportion of Swiss do not speak the languages used by other groups fluently--for example, 85-87% of Swiss don't speak French at all!
This should be quite straightforward evidence regardless of your cultural assumptions, but many people may not be aware of the impact and cultural importance of the Reformation in Europe, which in general meant that nations ended up with a state religion that was either Catholic or Protestant. Switzerland was pretty exceptional and in the 16th Century (which is the important period here) the population was split pretty much 50/50. This religious diversity is pretty important to its history as well as to wider European history.
I wouldn't call that extraordinary diversity - these are all Western European. I note you've added a new caveat "for a European country" as a get out of jail free card, but this "diversity" is extremely long-standing and, still, exists within Western Europe, the cradle of a hilariously disproportionate percentage of all of the social, civic, scientific, and technological advances the world has ever seen.
Interesting statistics and I for one will back up your analysis. But the Alpine woolly mammoth in the room is that, in 21st-century Europe, "cultural and religious diversity" does not, for most people, imply a heterogeneity of Germanophones and Francophones, or Protestants and Catholics. It means something else.
Sorry if cultural history and facts are a bit dull. I don't really want to argue about *something else* though; let's leave that to the *something else*ists.
It's not that the facts you presented are dull. It's that given the massive extra-European population influxes since WWII, the "cultural diversity" of any given West-European country (including Switzerland) is now far broader than the linguistic and religious distinctions you keep mentioning. You surely know this.
It's not even true, 40% of the population has an immigrant background. And as for low crime, yes, blue collar crime. Please don't ask about white collar crime, we don't talk about that here...
Why do people say China is “homogenous” when people speaking Cantonese can’t understand people speaking Mandarin? It’s because those groups of people have been part of a common polity off and on since the Qin dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.
Similarly, Switzerland has been a thing, in various forms, since French and Italian were considered different dialects of vulgar Latin. The groups that speak the four different languages nonetheless share 800+ years of common political and social history.
I’m pretty sure people say China is homogeneous because 90+% of the population is a single ethnicity, and approximately 100% is “Asian” for some meaning of that word.
What you’re describing is national unity or identity or something like that, not homogeneity.
Kind of a funny example, since Japan got crushed by the poster boy country for diversity, and this nonsense about homogeneity played no small part in their arrogance in thinking they could win.
I wonder why this got downvoted. Are we not supposed to mention the war? Does it make people uncomfortable to be reminded of how their rhetoric mirrors that of fascists?
That doesn't make much sense. Do you think foreign money is directly paid to people who would otherwise be welfare recipients? Is there anything foreign money can't do, would you say?
When foreign money flows into the economy, it generates jobs, and because there is so much of it, these jobs can be well paid. And when you got a population that has a low unemployment rate and high wages, you consequently need to spend less money on social welfare.
> the research doesn't mention anything about the socioeconomic environment in which each of the children grew in.
The main trick behind randomized control trials is that you can disregard factors like this because these effects would be randomly distributed as well.
Not always, and in this case, the study is very light on details on how the selection process was done. The burden of the RCT is on the research team and the quality of the randomization varies between studies.
If a study is going to draw debatable conclusion after 10 years on high dose Vitamin D during pregnancy, I'd expect at least some comment in the study on the general socio economic landscape and grouping.
SpaceX needs 4 profitable consecutive quarters to be included. If you have a lot of faith that they will achieve this I recommend you buy day 1 so you can ride the highs when the passive money eventually pours in.
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