It's actually kind of genius.

It implicitly reframes a debate about immigration, to a debate about ecology/sustainability.

Like I'm not defending it or saying it's honest. But as a marketing jiujitsu move, it's actually impressively creative.

I think that immigration actually is an ecology/sustainability issue. There are economic and cultural effects to immigration as well, and that's what people tend to focus on, but they aren't the only issues to consider. I think every country that has their shit together should be giving serious thought to immigration and sustainability, especially knowing that a massive number of climate refugees are coming in the near future. Preparing for that now would go a long way to keeping quality of life up while still helping out.

This specific policy may not be well intentioned, it may even be a means to avoid taking in those refugees when the time comes, but this is the kind of thing that nations should be thinking about right now.

Im sure the ecology is much improved by letting people stay where they are and be poorer. In fact we should start to remove people from all rich places so the can live in sustainable poverty.

The answer to immigration, for those that view it as a problem, is to make the places people are leaving more desirable to stay: social welfare, sustainable energy, affordable food and housing, and security - both physical and financial. The US has been trying hard to make itself undesirable for immigrants (suddenly, after decades of turning a blind eye in exchange for cheap labor), instead of focusing on helping to make the living situation in south America more tenable.

It’s kind of what we get for completely wrecking the global south tbh - the number of democracies we overthrew, the drug cartels we propped up, the damage we did is finally coming to bear fruit and it’s just as sour as the soil we tilled.

Leaving those climate refugees where they are wouldn't mean they were poor, it would mean they were dead. There are all kinds of irrational extreme positions that would maximize environmental protection. Certainly the best thing we could do for the environment would be to kill ourselves off, but very few people would argue for that. Instead it's better to go for something more balanced and limiting the number of people coming in your country to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable.

> to an amount the land can sustainably support seems pretty reasonable

Is the land in refugees home countries better able to sustainably support the populations on average, whether moving because of climate, lack of a way to support the people, etc?

That avoids accusations of bigotry which Europe has convinced itself doesn't exist within its domains.

Border control is not equivalent to racism. The people pushing for it loudly just tend to be doing it for blatantly racist reasons. Unsurprisingly, those people tend to abuse any ounce of power given to them. When they're granted extraordinary government powers, they make up official sounding reason to achieve their racist agenda. Hence the general consensus that any talk of border control is racism. The non-racist-driven border control agenda just controls the border, and shut the fuck up about it. They don't boast about arrests, they don't make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs, they don't send in the military to schools to grab kids out of class, they don't shoot people in the face when they look at them wrong.

You think people who support border controls are simply prejudiced based on skin color? Like, their problem with Little Mogadishu or Little Bangladesh is that people in those places don't need sunscreen? Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?

That's literally not what he said. He's saying the majority of people supporting border controls are not racist, but the vocal minority are the ones who "boast about arrests" / "make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs"

Exactly. This is one of those "not everyone who cares about border controls are racist, but most racists care a lot about border controls" situations

This seems like a sarcastic/unserious comment, but based on my interactions with people who are supposedly anti-immigration - yes, it's entirely based on skin colour.

Someone from India, China etc whose family immigrated in the 1800s to work in gold mines/railroads etc and probably has deeper roots in the country than the person criticising them = immigrant, bad, shouldn't be here. Somehow simultaneously taking all the jobs and living off the state and not contributing.

Someone from Europe/America/Canada with white skin who either came here as a child or was born here to immigrant parents = not a problem at all, they "don't count" for some reason.

I agree the people who lump children of Chinese railroad workers in with illegal immigrants are racist. But it’s the pro-immigration folks that do that pervasively, under the label “people of color.” Meanwhile, you have to look at pretty fringy parts of the right to find that.

Fringy parts like the POTUS?

Show me where Trump wants to deport descendants of Chinese railroad workers? Heck, he’d give half of China H1B visas if it were up to him.

There are no descendants of the Chinese railroad workers to deport, because that was already done in 1882: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2024/11/19/g-s1-34...

>Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?

You do realize who a great deal of the "southern Italians" in certain parts of New York and New Orleans actually are, right? Or is your point solely about religion?

They’re Albanians?

Yes, by extraction (Arbëreshë), although they are Catholic and speak Italian.

TIL.

Europeans, with some exceptions (the UK, Germany, maybe Sweden), generally care way, way less about accusations of bigotry than Americans do, and the Swiss are one of the most DGAF nations in this regard.

I believe people migrating to Switzerland are largely educated Europeans, so population density must be their biggest concern about migration

Need to hold them liable to one child per household policy if, for some reason, Swiss start having a little bit more sex and bit more children.

You don't have to jump right to one child per household (which is a bad idea anyway) but maintaining sustainable population levels should extend beyond just border control. It should include things like building out infrastructure in underdeveloped areas and encouraging (or perhaps even requiring) people to move in the new spaces, enabling and encouraging remote work to free up unnecessary office space and concentration of workers to city centers, and the promotion of sex ed, family planning, and birth control so that the children being born are going to parents who want and are ready for them.

To be fair that's not specific to SVP's populist initiatives, the parliament pushes bills with nonsensical names all the time.

It is a population cap, you can read this proposal its like 5 lines of text.

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.

It's a migration cap. There's no provision on sterilizing Swiss women should the threshold be reached through birthrate…

They're economically sterilizing themselves by starting a conflict with the EU at that point.

No, it's an immigration restriction. There's no way it applies if the Swiss start having 5 kids each.

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).