This past Friday the government announced their response to the immigration initiative approved on February 9th. They put together a task force which looked at over 50 solutions and decided to keep to the one which is closest to the initiative’s original wording: as of January 2017, all foreigners who want to immigrate to Switzerland to work and who will be staying for longer than 4 months will become part of a contingent. Before there is any panic, let’s point out that this does not affect foreigners already living here and this is already the case for foreigners coming from outside the EU states, so this will only affect Europeans hoping to migrate here as of January 2017.
The government will decided on the specifics as to how many people will be in each contingent, and will probably take into account how many jobs are available in various sectors or the unemployment rate in the targeted cantons. What is new is the “border-crossers” will also be a part of a contingent.
The contingents will also be built to answer the needs of the Swiss economy, which means that in some cases, the contingent could even be larger than the current situation. The aim is to make the best use of the work force already in place and only bring in people as per need.
To the displeasure of the SVP, the government will not prevent families from joining workers and will not put a contingent on asylum seekers.
The fact that they reduced the time required before someone falls in a contingent requirement category from 1 year to 4 months is irritating the tourism and farming industries.
The corner stones of this amendment will be sent out to all interested parties until the end of the year, but the government will already enter talks with the European Commission before the summer break.
The Justice Minister, Simonetta Sommaruga, summed up the problem for upcoming negotiations with Europe as follows: “whichever way you look at it, we will either not be following the people’s will or we will be breaking our agreement with Europe.” She admits that the coming months are going to prove very difficult from a diplomatic point of view, “we don’t know what the outcome will be, but the people’s decision must be abided by.”
One thing seems clear, with Switzerland caught between a rock and a hard place many things can happen between now and January 2017. We will do our best to keep you updated.
