Switzerland’s right-wing party recently asked voters to cap the country’s population at 10 million. They said “no” — literally: The Swiss put such things to a nationwide vote. There is much here for the Right to learn and, as usual, more to forget. The autopsy of this restrictionist miscarriage sheds some light on the immigration struggle — but much more importantly, on how readily the populist Right can botch it, even at its most sophisticated.
Switzerland is the ideal laboratory for bizarre political experiments: The electorate is uber-educated, efficient, morally flexible, and subjected to constant pulse checks via referendum. Its “right-wing” party, the SVP, has topped every election for 25 years and fields the most polite nativists you will ever meet. Still, the proposition went down by a 55% majority.
It was the first time a country had ever tried to set a ceiling on the number of people allowed inside it, which tells you most of what you need to know about the idea. Despite the fascinating, mildly amusing nature of this scheme, the commentary on it has oscillated between deeply redundant and downright painful to read.
The Guardian’s “insight,” as ever, was an exceptionally excruciating specimen: “Open societies win. Openness to immigration was long the defining superpower of the US.” The paper is, you’ll notice, rather less lyrical about the fruits of “openness” closer to home. I recommend the Guardian start with the newly released “Grooming Gangs” report.
It gets better. “Switzerland’s remarkable ascent from peasant backwater to high-tech economy in 200 years tells the same tale. With no natural resources, Switzerland has grown wealthy because it has provided a stable economic climate that attracted foreign innovators.” Yes — the native Swiss, who hold one of the highest rates of Nobel Prizes per capita, would still be tilling the soil were it not for the genius of “foreign innovators.” In fairness, Switzerland has benefited from generous legal migration, but the author is conspicuously shy about where these “innovators” hail from. I do not recall Albert Einstein arriving in Switzerland in 1895, stowed in a freight truck.
This narrative does not make sense to begin with, since third-world migration — unlike European Union migration — is almost entirely for family reunification and asylum reasons, with only 8% citing economic activity as their primary motive. At least they are honest: 85% of Eritreans, the largest refugee group in Switzerland, are entirely dependent on social welfare. As even Trump has pointed out, foreigners make up 75% of the Swiss prison population.
Switzerland does not need to import any more Einsteins to decipher the problem: some of its guests are clearly running amok. The SVP just needed something popular and effective to address this glaring, frankly apolitical issue of migrant dysfunction. So, let’s take a look at what they devised. It appears to have been plagiarized from the delusional writings of Thomas Malthus. Because it is a strict population cap, it draws no line between asylum-seekers, EU workers, and Swiss newborns. Interestingly, the policy’s author, Thomas Matter, spent his City of London years sharing a wine bar with a young Nigel Farage — which explains his love of economically disastrous solutions to migration. Rather than aim their policy at the relevant target, which the Swiss likely would have pulled the trigger on, the SVP aimed it squarely at its own feet.
Their rhetoric on this initiative was also impressively off-target. They didn’t file it as an immigration initiative, but as a “sustainability” initiative. They ran a dozen muddled narratives: housing, congested trains, “natural resources,” and Alpine scenery being paved over by sprawl. They also emphasized the rural-urban split, performative anti-elitism, and sentimental appeals such as Matter’s declaration that “our fatherland, our dear homeland, is bursting at the seams.” It amounted, in the end, to a whimper: We need room for cows.
So much of this rhetoric revolves around casting the Swiss as docile Alpine folk who ask only, and very politely, to be left in their meadows, undisturbed by criminals and ambitious cosmopolitans. Never mind that the Swiss were once Europe’s most feared mercenaries, then tamed this godforsaken crop of mountains, and now run one of the most ruthless cognitive meritocracies on Earth.
This self-pity goes well beyond the SVP. Land at a Swiss airport, and the country greets you aboard the airport’s underground shuttle with audio of a high-pitched Swiss villager welcoming you — with nature scenery, yodeling, and cowbells playing in the background. Why they chose to introduce themselves to the world as a cultural petting zoo, I could not tell you.
Nor is any of this uniquely Swiss. European populists and “trads” of all stripes have long refused to write any serious policy — on immigration above all — and instead attempt to sell voters a museum gift shop diorama version of their nationhood. It is blatantly inauthentic and mildly disturbing to watch politicians skin-suit traditions and cultures that are, in most cases, long gone, in order to gain seats from which they will propose little to nothing that would actually save the existing culture.
BRITAIN MUST AVENGE HENRY NOWAK
Voters aren’t buying it: The snow globe version of their countries is both tacky and overpriced. People do not want to climb into a time machine, cosplay their great-grandparents, and mount guard over ruins. No, they want to grow — richer, stronger — and to feel they are building an exhilarating new age.
The population cap, in both its literal policy and its rhetorical framing, is a Last Man’s dream for Switzerland. It is the pinnacle of unambition: a vow to cap the biological, economic, and technological capacity of their own people. Marketing immigration restriction as a time capsule, rather than an aggressive wager on one’s populace — which is what it should be — is a dead end, even if the policies do somehow come to pass. No one, anywhere, has ever been genuinely inspired to defend a smaller tomorrow, no matter how “quaint” it may be. Enough with this snow globe nationalism.