Switzerland had a referendum yesterday on whether to place a limit of 10 million on the total population of the country by 2050, and the result was no, with 54% voting against the measure.

The referendum was closely watched in Brussels. A “yes” vote would have set Switzerland on a collision course with the EU, jeopardizing the country’s free-movement agreement with the bloc. Sixty percent of Swiss goods are sold to the EU, but that trade depends on their mutual pact.
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The referendum was proposed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which argued it would help relieve pressures on the country’s environment and public services. The party has a long history of campaigning against immigration.

The “no” campaign focused on how restricting immigration might impact sectors like health care, where foreign-born workers are overrepresented. It also highlighted the risks for Switzerland’s relations with the EU, and the hazards of isolation more broadly in an unstable geopolitical environment.

Switzerland currently has a population of 9.1 million, which is set to rise above 10 million in the early 2040s. Some 28 percent of the current Swiss population was born abroad.

The details of how the plan would have worked are a bit complicated and would require the introduction of two main measures.

The first, triggered as soon as Switzerland exceeds 9.5 million inhabitants, would lead to restrictions in the areas of asylum and family reunification. If the population surpasses ten million for two consecutive years, the second measure would kick in, requiring the termination of the Free Movement of Persons agreement, which allows citizens of the European Union to work, study, and live in Switzerland (and vice versa). This move would rupture Switzerland’s relations with the E.U., its closest partner in trade and security. “The whole package of bilateral agreements would be at stake,” Michael Siegenthaler, a labor economist at the public university E.T.H. Zurich, said. “It’s quite likely that the European Union would cancel all of them.” A population ceiling is more or less unprecedented; the closest comparison might be conservation laws that limit human settlement in ecologically fragile places like the Galápagos Islands.
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The government’s highest estimates for population growth put Switzerland on track to reach ten million people by 2033. The cap would then impose an effective net-zero immigration flow—one person out (or deceased), one person in. “Imagine a society in which a Swiss citizen is permitted to live with their foreign partner in Switzerland only when another person leaves the country,” Economiesuisse, an influential business federation, has said, calling the cap the “Chaos Initiative.”
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A multilingual, politically idiosyncratic country bordering five other nations, Switzerland can feel at once culturally hermetic and geographically porous. “The percentage of foreigners in Switzerland is very high,” Raedler acknowledged. But, he argued, “there’s also huge assimilation with Swiss values like politeness, or our calm politics.” Raedler, whose mother is British, is a dual citizen, making him among the one in five Swiss who hold two passports. “That’s what in a way makes me sad about this initiative,” he said. “It attacks something that works well.”

It is not clear what the problem is that the measure seeks to address, other than a vague feeling that immigrants were somehow changing the nature of the country.

Switzerland is among the most cosmopolitan nations in Europe. More than thirty per cent of its permanent residents were born abroad. The working-age population is increasing, owing to consistent employment growth and a steady flow of migrants who are often highly skilled and actively recruited, and tend to come from bordering countries that have significant cultural and linguistic overlaps with Switzerland. In 2002, these people gained the right to work and study in the country without a visa, and since then the nation’s population has swelled by nearly two million. Globally, Switzerland now has the sixth-highest G.D.P. per capita, according to the World Bank. (The United States ranks twelfth.) “Most countries in Europe are concerned about the other issue—depopulation,” Emilio Zagheni, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, told me.

Most developed countries are struggling with an aging and decreasing depopulation and needing to find ways to increase the number of people in the workforce. The most obvious sources are immigrants from the developing world but they tend to be people of color and this can arouse nativist sentiments.