I guess the question for society is: do we want businesses who cannot pay domestic workers a fair wage to exist in our country? Or do we want them to exist elsewhere and we import those products?

To society a startup with a 99%% chance of failing to IPO is no different from a sweatshop which also wants skilled but cheap labor.

The solution is obviously the American one. Make everyone so afraid of their job prospects that working for a startup isn't materially different in terms of job security.

And if they displace someone trying to join the engineering workforce say right out of school? What about housing?

> It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages

Sort of. You’re simply not going to have an agricultural sector with at Canadian and American wages without significantly higher food prices and protectionism. One day we may automate that. But that will still be more expensive for the foreseeable future.

Voters seem to be picking domestic production and low prices, with low wages being a side effect. (Business interests of course love those.)

Free borders policy is a special case of free market, so of course more competition is intended to drive the cattle prices down .

This is literally what anyone means when they can't or can't easily find anyone for anything which isn't evil or suicidal.

If the SVP says it, it must be true :) What's their sources? I'm sure they could find a couple of anecdotes, doesn't make it significant.

And that point is wrong. An immigrant with a legal residence in Germany but no permanent residence permit can't just pack up and go live elsewhere.

Only in the same sense that Hungary was dictating Russia and Ukraine policy.

How is that related to immigration?

> Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly

That's what I was responding to.

Note the UK left the EU and accepted more immigrants than before. We didn't force them. Hungary and Poland never accepted Syrian immigrants either and they weren't forced to accept them iirc.

Was wondering how long this thread could go before someone made it about the omnicause.

It's a give/take. Even Israel & Spain have fenced borders (the latter on African continent)[i.e. it's not just USA "being racist"].

Every jurisdiction needs to limit immigration more (which EU's dispersed jurisdictions make impossible, by statute) before any one country can tackle any of their other lacks/disputes. The current EU setup is the inverse of USA's, where the feds technically regulate most immigration issues (instead of EU's individual memberstates having most power), but not all.

> It’s incredibly hard to naturalize in Switzerland. Less so in Germany

Is it? Asking out of curiosity, from a cursory look both countries require self-sufficiency, language (in fact Switzerland looks a little easier on this), no criminal background, an integration test to be taken (and both seem easy) and time in the country.

Only major difference seems to me is Germany takes 5 years in paper (more like 6-7 in reality with bureaucracy) and Switzerland takes 10 years in paper.

Your comments do land on the xenophobic side though. E.g."Indians with German passports": You need to pass a naturalization and language tests before applying for citizenship. Until recently you couldn't even apply without living in the country for 6+ years - now reduced to 4+. So how do you or potential Swiss know they are Indians? The first thing that comes to mind is that you're assuming it by the way they look.

To be pedantic, what is and isn’t German qua German (versus Deutsch) is a bit of a shitshow [1] to the point that one could correctly argue that Germans pee se are more Frankish than Germanic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Germany

> refusing to speak Swiss

I know this is tongue in cheek. But one of the hallmarks of a nation of immigrants is the enforced tolerance of speaking multiple national languages. Lots of people who only speak on throws off that balance.

> While they're at it, they should kick out the French, the Germans, the Italians, and any other immigrants refusing to speak Swiss.

What's this Swiss language you speak of? I never heard of it. You must mean Romansh but that's only 0.5% of the population or so. You'd have to kick out 95.5% of the Swiss population too then?

America is who's propping up all the far right parties now. America wants a destable, fractured Europe. Russia too, but America has more funds.

The plumbers I had were all Swiss. There is not an overproportional amount of foreigners working in this profession.

Maybe they prefer living amongst themselves than make number go to the moon. If these guys are such GDP rocket fuel and a solution, they can make their own country the best in the world.

I visited few times and I like the country but I don't expect them to accept or cater to me.