Swiss vote to curb EU migrants sparks warnings
Swiss foreign minister Didier Burkhalter - Photo EU Council
(GENEVA) - Switzerland's knife-edge decision to curb immigration from the EU raises major problems, heavyweight Germany warned Monday, as Swiss authorities moved to limit the damage to ties with the 28-nation bloc.
As both sides mulled the fallout from Sunday's referendum in which 50.3 percent of voters decided to void a pact giving equal footing to European Union citizens in the Swiss labour market, Germany said resolving the issue would be an uphill task.
Steffen Seibert, spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said Berlin respected the result.
But it "raises considerable problems", he added, noting that Merkel had repeatedly emphasised that free movement was a "prized asset" for Germany.
Viviane Reding, deputy chief of the EU's executive, said Switzerland could not expect to keep the benefits of free trade without accepting freedom of movement.
"That is not possible. You take them all or you leave them all," Reding said.
Europe's economic powerhouse Germany is the top trade partner of neighbouring Switzerland, which is not a member of the European Union.
Germans have also been major beneficiaries of the full opening of the Swiss labour market to EU citizens since 2007.
Switzerland is home to a 284,200-strong German immigrant community, the second-largest after Italians.
On Sunday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned that the result "is going to create plenty of problems for Switzerland in a host of areas".
Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter was scheduled to make Germany his first stop on a Europe-wide diplomatic drive to explain the vote and seek a solution.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said "we will review our relations with Switzerland".
But the EU is also facing internal dissent over its own borderless labour market -- notably the westward movement of east European workers -- and traditionally sceptic Britain said the Swiss vote was a lesson.
"What this does reflect is that there is growing concern around the impact that free movement can have," said British Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman.
Boost for far-right parties
The vote has also been seen as a boost for anti-EU parties, including the far right, within the bloc ahead of European Parliament elections in May.
"Switzerland has clearly called time on diktats from Brussels," said Celine Amaudruz, a lawmaker from the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party, which masterminded the vote.
She said it was simply a matter of a country setting its own immigration policy.
As an alternative to EU membership, staunchly independent Switzerland in 1999 signed a raft of deals with the bloc.
They were approved by the public in a referendum in 2000 and then phased in. An extension of the freedom of movement rules to cover the EU's ex-communist member states was even backed by Swiss voters in 2009.
But the mood has shifted.
While Switzerland has long had a sizable foreign population, over recent years the proportion has climbed from one-fifth to roughly a quarter.
The right-wing populist Swiss People's Party that crafted the referendum proposal argued that with 80,000 EU citizens arriving per year -- more than the 8,000 predicted before the rules were liberalised -- the nation of eight million needed to apply the brakes.
It also spotlighted the 280,000 people who live in neighbouring countries and cross the border daily to their jobs.
The party blamed supposedly excessive migration for ills including undercutting Swiss workers' salaries, driving up rents, stretching the health and education systems, and overloading the road and rail networks.
'Potentially serious consequences'
But the government and business opposed the immigration plan, saying that Switzerland's robust, low-unemployment economy and ageing population needs a stream of foreign workers, and that reviving past quotas on their numbers would be pointlessly bureaucratic.
The referendum measure binds the government to renegotiate the labour market deal within three years. The current rules stay in force in the meantime.
"Switzerland is not going to rip up its deal with the EU on freedom of movement," Burkhalter insisted.
An EU source said the vote had "no immediate consequence" for ties, since the ball remains in Switzerland's court.
The government said it aimed to draft a law this year to implement the vote. The EU source said that only then could Brussels decide whether Switzerland was breaching its treaty obligations.
If Switzerland were found at fault, it "would potentially have very serious consequences for our relationship across the board," the source said.
If the two sides fail to agree and Switzerland voids the free movement accord, then a "guillotine" clause comes into force to freeze the entire package of Swiss-EU deals including on trade.
IMMIGRATION IS NOT A RIGHT
Globalization destroys all cultures. Massive immigration, a component of globalization, destroys both the immigrants' cultures and the host country's culture. In the US the mixture of cultures is called "the melting pot." All public schools have taught this melting pot ideology for the last hundred years: America is the land were the world's many cultures melted into the wonderful American culture. Yet America is known for its lack of culture; European cultures could not survive such a degree of melting and mixing. For some decades each nationality occupied its own towns and city sections. New York City still has an area called Little Italy. But when the politicians betrayed the blue collar workers and eliminated America's 200 year old system of protective tariffs, Free Trade (globalization) set in, destroying the blue collar jobs and the separate European communities. America became a land of no culture, high crime, materialism, and militarism.
Big corporation and banking financial elites have powerful lobbies in Wash. DC and Brussels who pass out ₤£€Billions in campaign contributions and bribes. The financial elite want massive immigration because it supplies their blue collar and service jobs with low wage workers. Their lobbyists and captive corporate press (Media) try to convince W. Europeans that immigration is good for their countries. In fact, it is good only for the financial elite. The argument the fin. elite-owned Media and politicians use to convince the people to allow immigration, is the argument that we should have racial equality and non-discrimination. This argument, however, is false. Countries have the right to limit or stop immigration; it is neither racism nor discrimination to do so. Think about it. Think for yourself, not what the mainstream media tells you. Racism and discrimination, by definition and practice, are THE TREATMENT OF ONE RACE BETTER THAN ANOTHER RACE.
Examples of racism are not hard to find in the World. Here is one: With the help of the English, many European Jewish people, both before and after World War II, invaded the ancient country of Palestine. These Jew people stole millions of homes, farms, and shops from the individual Palestinians who had owned and lived on them for millenniums. This was brazen and simple theft, they never paid anything for what they took. Since then the Palestinian people have lived as second class residents in their own country, now called by the world Israel. Israel's apartheid policy of denying basic human rights to the Palestinians today, supported by the US and the EU, goes past stealing real estate; it treats the Palestinian people as a lower class than their Israeli overlords. The apartheid laws make the Palestinians lives worse, and their dignity suffer. THAT is an example of racism.
This is NOT racism: France limits immigration to 1,000, or eliminates it entirely. In this action, France is not denying basic human rights to any of its residents, as the Israelis are. Nor is France denying human rights to non-residents (foreign citizens residing in their own countries)--- For it is not a human right of one man to immigrate into the country of another. Each country belongs to its own citizens, not to the world at large. The streets, the jobs, the communities, all belong to the citizens of that country who created them over the difficult course of centuries. That is why we have borders, and that is why we have nationalities. The richness and strength of Europe throughout history has depended on their distinct and diverse nationalities, their differences, their sovereignty. The EU politicians, as agents for the financial elite who apparently care about nothing but increasing their personal wealth, is very clever in its public relations, speeches, and TV & newspaper releases, to further their goal of corporatizing W. Europe into a shallow-minded consumption society, and E. Europe into a source of cheap labor, underpaid immigrants, sweatshops, and plantations. It is the EU and its elite overlords who are racist, not the people who oppose their immigration plans.
Without its own unique culture and traditions, its language, ways of dress, manners, and a thousand other things, a country has no culture and no true communities. Such a country becomes instead like the Tower of Babel. The Bible says that it was Babel's pride that led them to build ever skyward. It is our greed for cheap goods and cheap servants, and our pride claiming to be morally superior non-racists, that can lead to our decline. A little immigration is good, like spice. Too much immigration destroys. The millions of immigrants we have allowed in should be treated courteously, with respect, and given full rights regardless of their race. But we have allowed far too much immigration. It should be stopped, immediately, brought to zero.