Fact Check on the Chaos-Initiative
Switzerland is no accident. It is the result of generations who have founded families, immigrated, researched, cultivated, and collaborated. In doing so, they have overcome language barriers, cantonal borders, and, increasingly for decades, national borders. This cooperation and exchange form the basis of the Swiss prosperity that we now take for granted.
Image Source: swissinfo.ch
The "No 10 Million Switzerland Initiative" challenges this foundation by gradually cornering Switzerland. The initiative promises control but delivers losses: fewer nursing staff with increasing demand, significant losses in the old-age and survivors' insurance (AHV) system, fewer researchers at universities, and less legal certainty for the more than half a million Swiss citizens who currently live and work in Europe.
What worries us most about this initiative is not the number "10 million." It's the logic behind it: that fewer people automatically means fewer problems. It's a logic based on stagnation instead of progress. Logically, immigration leads to a greater need for housing, education, roads, and energy. But these problems would also exist with population growth due to a higher birth rate, because they arise from insufficient construction, insufficient investment, and excessive delays. A population cap doesn't build a single apartment. It doesn't relocate a road. It doesn't train any healthcare workers. The existing problems with immigration would thus persist for years, expand, and create new, even greater problems after the cap is implemented.
Anyone who wants progress and prosperity for Switzerland must first acknowledge that the concerns behind this initiative are real. Switzerland needs to invest. It must better utilize the labor potential of its own citizens by addressing structural problems such as the excessive cost of childcare. It must create more targeted incentives to solve the shortage of skilled workers in essential sectors like nursing. It must promote social housing so that apartments are available and affordable throughout Switzerland. And it must tackle the structural problems of the pay-as-you-go social security system.
Volt Switzerland is committed to structural solutions to these various problems, instead of continuing to ignore them and hiding them behind the immigration debate.
Therefore: No to the initiative and yes to a Switzerland that meets its challenges with conviction, not with fear and pseudo-solutions.