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IMMIGRATION

Voter support for new immigration curbs slides

Swiss voters are ready to reject a proposal to restrain population growth by severely limiting immigration, according to the results of surveys released on Wednesday.

Published: 19 November 2014 22:23 CET

Voter support for new immigration curbs slides

Ecopop poster (detail)

The so-called Ecopop proposal, to be decided in a national vote on November 30th, was opposed by 56 percent of citizens surveyed by the gfs.bern opinion poll institute for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation.

The results mark a drop in support for the initiative, launched by an association for ecology and population, that calls for net annual immigration to be capped at 0.2 percent of the population.

The aim of the initiative is to keep a lid on urban sprawl and to promote “sustainable preservation of natural resources” by restricting the number of people allowed to move to the country.

The federal government and parliament have campaigned against the proposal saying that it would fail to resolve environmental problems and would be harmful to the economy.

The proposed immigration formula would translate into a net immigration ceiling of 17,000 people a year, compared to the recent average of around 80,000.

Simonetta Sommaruga, federal justice and police minister, has said the initiative would have an adverse impact on Swiss companies that need the flexibility to be able to recruit from abroad when skilled personnel are unavailable in the indigenous workforce.

Another poll conducted for 20 Minutes newspaper found 58 percent of respondents opposing Ecopop, compared to 53 percent at the end of October.

Political scientist Thomas Milic, from the University of Zurich, told 20 Minutes the weakening of support for the proposal can be explained by the campaign by opponents, which has intensified in recent weeks.

The proposal comes after Swiss voters in February backed an initiative for unspecified immigration quotas over concerns about too many people moving to Switzerland from the European Union.

The government has not yet implemented the initiative for immigration quotas and has more than two years to develop a plan for this.

Polls show that voters are also likely to turn down a bid to scrap tax deals for wealthy immigrants across the country.

Around 5,600 individuals (based on 2012 figures) benefit from such deals, which involve imposing taxes not on revenue or assets but on cost of living expenditures, including housing, transport and employees.

Five cantons, including Zurich, have done away with the tax deals, while another five cantons have toughened the regulations.

Surveys also show lack of support for the other initiative to be voted on at month’s end to force the Swiss National Bank to almost triple its gold reserves while preventing it from selling off any bullion.

Central bank chief Thomas Jordan said on the weekend such a move would be “fatal” for the SNB, limiting its ability to act to control prices and support the economy.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.