Immigration of EU nationals to Switzerland ‘has stabilized’

The number of people immigrating and leaving Switzerland from the European Union has stabilized.

Published: 15 February 2019 21:37 CET

Immigration of EU nationals to Switzerland 'has stabilized'

That is the conclusion of the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) in its new Immigration Statistics 2018 report, which was published on Friday.

The report (here in French) shows that net immigration (that is, the number of people entering minus the number of people leaving) in Switzerland for EU and EFTA nationals was 33,088 last year.

That is just 90 people more (or 0.3 percent higher) than in 2017 when net immigration was 30,799.

Crucially, the 2018 figure is also only half the record number of 60,957 – the highest since the Swiss–EU bilateral agreement on the free movement of persons (AFMP) came into force.

A politically significant figure

The relatively low net immigration figure for 2018 comes in the midst of a long-running debate over immigration in Switzerland.

The conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has been trying for years to push through initiatives to counteract the impact of the AFMP and ensure Switzerland has the final say on the number of immigrants entering the country.

In 2014, the party’s “against mass immigration” initiative, which called for quotas on EU nationals entering Switzerland, was backed by voters in a referendum.

But the Swiss government went into crisis mode and quickly worked to limit the impact of the referendum which seriously threatened already fraught Swiss–EU relations.

The Swiss parliament finally passing a much watered-down version of the immigration initiative in 2016.

An end to the free movement of persons treaty?

In response to this setback, the SVP, along with the group Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (AUNS), last year launched a new anti-immigration initiative designed to kill off the Swiss–EU treaty on the free movement of persons.

In their introduction to the initiative – which has been dismissed out of hand by the Swiss government – the SVP and AUNS argue there are too many foreigners in Switzerland and this has led to everything from rising house prices to increasingly dangerous streets.

But as Swiss broadsheet NZZ points out, the net migration figures of 60–80,000 people a year from the EU cited by the campaign’s backers are no longer current, which could take some of the wind of the campaign’s sails.

However, the Zurich daily also pointed noted the SVP could also put to the fact that when the AFMP was rolled out, the Swiss government said net immigration of just 10,000 people a year could be expected.

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.