Friday, April 20, 2012

Blog #13: A Swiss-E.U. Battle Over (European) Immigrants

In a recent report, the Swiss Federal Council announced that it has decided to impose quota starting May 1 on certain categories of residence permits for citizens of 8 EU member states including Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. The council says that the government is acting in order to promote better integration and to prevent labor abuses in the labor market, after the numbers of people arriving have tripled from those countries over the past year. The European is angered by this situation and states that it would raise concerns with Swiss directly at a meeting set for June this year. Due to the low employment and high migration, the government has been considering setting a migration cap. The government also states that since May of 2011, immigrants with visas have averaged around 6k were as before it used to average about 2k per year. Another concern with Swiss officials is that the immigrants coming from poorer countries are causing pressures to be put on minimum wages and they are trying to make sure companies comply with minimum wage laws. On top of that, out of all the people in Switzerland, 1 in 5 residents are foreign born, which is relatively low.
In this instance, the Swiss government doesn’t seem to be trying to necessarily be discriminatory towards the issue by doing what they say they want to do as the EU complains. However, this can cause some issues between the EU nations and Switzerland’s international ties. This is a common theme that many countries are trying to do is stop the massive flows of migration because each country feels as if it is damaging their economy. If undocumented immigrants come into the country as well as refugees, many countries can see a deficit in their economy and start to experience difficulties providing resources and services to these people, they just don’t have enough money to support them. In my opinion, I think that immigrants can always help and hurt the economy. Its just how countries deal with them, how much they invest in the visa applications, how they run the system, etc, as to how immigrants will affect their economies. I think with investing money in the system, they can hire people to work in the government, processing applications and dealing with immigrant affairs, thus helping their economy and helping to reinvest in their economy. Because making a system flow smoothly and planning accordingly, they can invest in the future of the country by allowing people come into the country and work, start businesses and get educated, allowing them to help their economy in the international system. 


http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/a-swiss-e-u-battle-over-eastern-european-immigrants/ 

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