I find it hard to believe the kids of the Swiss elite would be cleaning sewers if not for the low pay.
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No no, they would have totally done it if the immigrants didn’t suppress the wages and the pay was %15 higher. Now they need to do some office jobs for 5 times the pay since the unemployment rate is %3. There are no Swiss sitting around and not cleaning the sewers because the pay was too low, it will have to fetch workers from other industries.
Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do.
The solution there is the same solution as the US. If the US introduced a (for example) 4x median salary fine for every year an employer employed someone not legally eligible to work the problem would fix itself. If they did not keep records assume 5 years or whenever the person's visa expired, since that is the most common case of illegal immigration.
But the businesses WANT a class of people they can underpay who can't gain access easily to legal services when the employer screws them over.
If the people are employed legally and are being paid the minimum wage, then your complaint is with the government and you should elect people that will raise the minimum wage.
I agree with your argument but this particular case is for the legal workers, just like UK significant portion of the Swiss population don’t want legal workers from the rest of Europe. They attempted to limit the legal rights of the EU citizens that currently have.
>Immigrants do not suppress wages, business owners do.
Of course business owners suppress wages. By using immigrants as leverage to tilt the supply/demand of labor in their favor. Duh.
Businesses seldom set the immigration policy. They just try to get value for money like everyone else.
>Businesses seldom set the immigration policy
Why are you putting words in my month? I never said they did, but they do lobby the government to set an immigration policy that favors business and assets over labor, d'uh!
>They just try to get value for money like everyone else.
No, they're not like "everybody else". If corporations want cheaper tabor, they just tell the government and they open the immigration taps. But if workers want higher wages they can't have the government deport excess labor. It's a power asymmetry.
This kind of argument is the same as "guns don't kill people". Yes they do.
Explain in detail
Little Pete can't shoot himself in the head by mistake with daddy's glock if there isn't a glock in the house and daddy has to deposit his guns at the armory. Switzerland fixed its gun suicide epidemic by requiring this, by the way.
Not an anecdotal fact: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-...
This is the best argument in the thread against allowing immigration. That sounds awful. Better to avoid by keeping them out
Why not vote to legalize slavery again instead if you want to take the worst possible take on the argument.
The higher paying water systems jobs are in fact filled by the children of the elite in both Switzerland and the US; it is a very impressive green job that they tend to get pushed to leave for more conservatively stable jobs.
I grew up at the border. A friend, who wasn't the brightest of the bunch, found a job to flip burgers at McDonalds after highschool. He was paid a salary higher than the French median wage. Not all Swiss are "elite", far from it.
Switzerland has onlite elite kids? What do all the Swiss with <80 IQ do for a living? They're probably not gonna get a job at ABB, Google, UBS or ETH.