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Asylum seekers face public pool ban

The first federal centre for asylum seekers has opened in Bremgarten in the canton of Aargau and is already causing controversy.

Asylum seekers face public pool ban
The open-air pool is out of bounds. Photo: Stadt Bremgarten

Residents face a ban on entering “sensitive areas” of the town, including the vicinity of schools and public swimming pools.

Centre-left politicians and human rights groups say such a ban is not lawful and cannot be enforced.

The provisional centre – a former military barracks – is the first to open since Swiss voters approached tougher asylum laws in June.

It will house up to 150 asylum seekers over a three-year period. The first 23 people moved in on Monday.

The first group was made up of men, women and two children from Eritrea, Tibet, Sri Lanka and Sudan, the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper reported.

The Federal Office of Migration said the ban on asylum applicants entering certain areas of the town had been agreed with the Bremgarten authorities.

The Tages-Anzeiger reported that it had now revised its earlier announcement and was saying that there was no formal ban.

It quoted Urs von Däniken of the Migration Office as saying instead that there were “sensitive zones, which asylum seekers should not enter”.

“These zones were defined in the interests of a good co-existence between the population and asylum seekers,” von Däniken said.

Apart from schools and swimming pools these include old people’s homes and homes for the disabled.

“If someone goes to the pool and nothing happens they won’t face any sanctions,” the Migration Office official said, quoted by the paper.

“But if an asylum seeker behaves badly or poses a threat to public order he can be served a ban on going out or entering certain areas.”

Human rights group Augenauf condemned the move saying the Migration Office was calculating that the centre residents would not enter the areas defined out of fear of the consequences.

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IMMIGRATION

ANALYSIS: Will immigration to Switzerland continue to grow or could it slow?

In the past few years, an increasing number of foreigners have come to Switzerland, swelling the ranks of its population to 9 million people. Will this trend continue in the future?

ANALYSIS: Will immigration to Switzerland continue to grow or could it slow?

From a country of just 8 million people a decade ago, Switzerland’s population grew to over 9 million residents in 2023 — primarily due to more foreign nationals coming in.

“Switzerland has been in a situation of uninterrupted demographic growth for several decades, and this is explained in particular by the arrival of young migrants, who also contribute to the Swiss birth rate,” Philippe Wanner, professor at the Institute of Demography and Social Economics at the University of Geneva told The Local.

Just in the period between July 2022 and July 2023, for instance, more than 90,000 foreigners settled in Switzerland.

Now forecasts call for the population to swell to 10 million within the next decade — which has prompted the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) to collect enough signatures to launch a national vote in the near future to stop more foreigners from coming into the country.

The SVP argues that Switzerland’s infrastructure — including housing, healthcare system, and public transportation — would not be able to withstand so many more residents.

READ ALSO : Switzerland faces new anti-immigration vote 

This is based on the assumption that as many — or even more — foreigners will continue to move to Switzerland in future, attracted by salaries that are quite a bit higher than the wages they would earn for the same kind of work in their home countries.

But is there a credible scenario under which immigration will slow down?

According to Swiss demographer Hendrik Budliger, high immigration numbers in recent years “don’t necessarily mean the trend will continue.”

Certain things would have to happen at the political and economic level, however — both in Switzerland and abroad — for this scenario to become reality.

These are the main ones:

Fewer people leaving their home countries

One factor, according to Budliger, would be that other countries in Europe that are grappling with labour shortages as Switzerland is “will try to retain or bring back their workforce.”

In Italy and Portugal, for instance, “significant tax deductions are granted” to keep their workers from leaving.

“If more countries create such [financial] incentives to retain employees, Switzerland will become less attractive,” he pointed out.

Economist Manuel Buchmann agreed that  “EU nations themselves need this skilled workforce and are willing to do a lot to ensure that their nationals don’t leave the country.”

Fewer job vacancies in Switzerland

The country is suffering from an acute shortage of qualified workers — the main reason why many employers are hiring workforce from the EU and EFTA (Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein) nations.

If, however, Switzerland’s low unemployment rate should increase, or if suitable candidates can be found within the country, then companies will not recruit employees from abroad.

This is especially true as the Swiss law stipulates that a job can be offered to a foreign national only if no qualified candidates can be found in Switzerland.

Anti-immigration initiatives are accepted

In 2020, 61.7 percent of voters turned down SVP’s proposal to curb immigration from the EU.

This meant that Swiss companies could continue to recruit from those countries.

However, if voters decide to go the opposite way — for instance, by accepting the SVP’s latest anti-immigration proposal — then the government would have to implement measures to drastically curb the number of foreigners coming into the country.

READ ALSO: Why Switzerland can’t rely on foreign workers to fill its labour shortages

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