Projects show that about 55 percent of Swiss voters have rejected a proposed population cap of 10 million for a mountainous territory that currently has 5X the population density of the U.S. Lower 48.
The population of Switzerland has doubled within the lifetimes of its older citizens:
Only about 5 percent of Switzerland is reasonably flat buildable land. The Swiss are already crammed in like rats by U.S. standards, about 500 square feet per person vs. 750 here. There is a term in medicine for growth without regard to available resources: “cancer”.
(ChatGPT says an American who has wisely chosen to refrain from work and lives in taxpayer-funded public housing may have a higher material standard of living than a median Swiss as measured by (a) square footage per person, (b) air conditioning (only 5% of Swiss have it), and (c) car ownership. While the American who hasn’t worked for four generations cruises around in his/her/zir/their air-conditioned Nissan Altima, the working Swiss is provisioned with a public transit bus that may not have A/C or that has only feeble A/C. ChatGPT and Grok agree that Switzerland has 10X the murder rate of the U.S., though that advantage falls when Switzerland is compared to the “more racially homogeneous (often White) areas” U.S. states, such as New Hampshire and Maine. Grok specifically wrote “more racially homogeneous (often White) areas tend to have lower crime than heterogeneous ones” so I asked “Does that mean diversity is not our strength?” and the answer was “No”. ChatGPT agrees that the correlation between racial homogeneity and crime is accurate and that, similarly, we cannot abandon the axiom “diversity is our strength”.)
It will be interesting if we can get some demographics on those who voted yes vs. no to the cap. U.S. immigration is mostly low-skill and benefits the elite at the expense of the American working class (Harvard study), hence the tendency of the working class to vote for politicians, such as Donald Trump, who promise to limit immigration. Switzerland has a much higher percentage of high-skill immigrants, with at least 60 percent holding at least a bachelor’s degree (compare to 36 percent of U.S. immigrants). So a Swiss with a white collar job could cast a self-interested vote against mass importation of humans.
In the coming Age of AI and Robotics, what’s the scenario in which existing Swiss citizens become better off because someone who isn’t in the top 10% of human intelligence/skill has immigrated?
Separately, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal, published in a country with 1/5th the current population density of Switzerland, describes the idea of limiting population density as “radical” (source):
Your blog is a smorgasbord of ideas for New Americans like me and my four wives (ages 8, 9, and two at 11), all of whom I purchased in Kabul last year. A couple weeks ago, one of your blog posts helpfully suggested we might find great opportunity on cruise ships. Now, having read today’s informative post, I am wondering if perhaps Switzerland is a better option for us, given their clear objective of adding New Switzerlanders. Particularly apropos as I purchase additional child wives over the next year in Mogadishu and Karachi. We have one question for you as we consider our many options: will the Switzerlanders be as welcoming to our traditions of child rape as the good Americans have been?