Voters weigh the real cost of less migration

Living in Switzerland, I have spent the last few months listening to a debate that would feel familiar to many Australians.

The country is too crowded. Housing is too expensive (Opens in new window). Roads and trains are congested. Public services are under strain. The population is growing too quickly.

Officially, the referendum (Opens in new window) held last weekend was about population. In reality, everyone understood it was about migration.

The proposal sought to cap Switzerland's population at 10 million people. Since natural increase accounts for only a small proportion of population growth, the only realistic way to achieve that objective would have been to sharply restrict immigration.

And that is what made the vote so interesting.

Across the developed world, politicians routinely promise to reduce migration. Public opinion polls regularly suggest support for lower immigration. Yet few countries ever come close to confronting the practical implications. Switzerland did.

In effect, the country conducted a rare national thought experiment. Citizens who believed migration was too high were invited to consider not only the perceived benefits of lower immigration, but also its costs. For perhaps the first time in a major destination country, voters were asked not whether migration was too high, but whether they were prepared to live with the consequences of substantially reducing it.

Switzerland peered over the edge. What lay below was not simply lower immigration. It was a future with fewer workers, sharper labour shortages (Opens in new window), slower economic growth, mounting pressure from population ageing, and difficult choices about how to sustain public services and economic competitiveness.

For all the concerns expressed during the campaign about migration, a majority of Swiss voters ultimately stepped back. The referendum was rejected.

That result should not be interpreted as an embrace of immigration. Far from it. Concerns about migration remain real and politically potent. The fact that 46% of voters supported the proposal makes that clear.

But the vote does suggest a distinction that is often lost in migration debates. There is a difference between expressing concern about immigration and being willing to bear the costs of significantly reducing it.

The lesson extends far beyond Switzerland.

As a frequent visitor to Australia, I was struck by how familiar many of the arguments sounded. Concerns about housing affordability, infrastructure pressure, population growth and migration have become recurring features of Australian political debate.

Yet Australia, like Switzerland, faces a fundamental reality. It is a prosperous economy with an ageing population and continuing demand for workers. Migration is not simply a policy choice (Opens in new window). It has become an integral component of economic and demographic sustainability.

Citizens may reasonably want lower migration. Governments may promise it. But when the implications are fully understood, the trade-offs become much harsher.

The Swiss referendum provided a rare glimpse of that moment.

For years, critics of immigration had argued that Switzerland was approaching a breaking point. This weekend they were offered an opportunity to act on that belief.

Voters paused.

They looked over the cliff-edge and decided that the alternative was riskier than the status quo.

Switzerland’s referendum may not have settled the migration debate. But it did achieve something unusual. It transformed a political slogan into a national thought experiment.

Having considered the answer, a majority of Swiss voters decided not to run the experiment for real.