Switzerland at 10 Million: What the Numbers Reveal about Demographic Change

On the 14^th of June, the Swiss population voted on whether to cap their population to 10 million by 2050 – the latest referendum in the Alpine country of 9.1 million in a decades-long debate on immigration.

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Switzerland at 10 Million: What the Numbers Reveal about Demographic Change

On the 14^th of June, the Swiss population voted on whether to cap their population to 10 million by 2050 – the latest referendum in the Alpine country of 9.1 million in a decades-long debate on immigration. One famous precedent is the June 1970 Schwarzenbach Initiative which aimed at capping the immigrants to 10% of the total population.

With the ‘Sustainability Initiative’, as the referendum was called, Switzerland would have been the first advanced economy to insert in its constitution a limitation to its population. Swiss voters rejected this population cap, but a significant  44% was in support of such a measure amid the higher-than-average turnout.

Across Europe, plunging fertility rates, the depopulation of rural areas, labour shortages, and the growing crisis of care highlight the speed at which demographic change is happening. Often, the basic message behind these stories is one of scarcity: there are not enough people to do these jobs, to care for older generations, sustain rural communities’ survival or keep essential sectors running.

The Swiss referendum, however, seemed to raise the opposite concern – too many people. The debate was linked especially to anti-immigration sentiment, housing pressures, infrastructure and land use. The population cap initiative translated demographic change into a question of excess: how much population growth can the country sustain?

In a world where reports on population trends warn of the consequences of the population ageing, the crisis of fertility and its decline, being it present, future, or accelerated, this highlights a fundamental problem of how demographic change is perceived by the public and how it enters the policy arena.

The seeds of discontent

Immigration

Votes on immigration and initiatives to restrict it are not new to Switzerland. With a foreign-born population of around 25-27%, the country  has a very high immigration rate. However, the development of its economy and the impact that the freedom of movement with the EU has had on it, are crucial factors to that trend.

Immigration rose by 10 percentage points between 1999 and 2010, and about two thirds of the new cross-border workers were highly educated. A study on the impact on Swiss firms and workers of lifting restrictions on immigration finds this helped firms rather than hurt Swiss workers.  Average native wages and employment did not fall significantly, while wages of highly educated Swiss natives rose by around 5%, alongside gains in firm productivity, R&D jobs, patents, product innovation, and the founding of new firms.

Like many other countries in Europe, Switzerland benefits from immigration, and relies heavily on it for sectors such as health, construction and hospitality.

Had the cap succeeded, the country would have been forced to review its relations and in particular the Freedom of Movement Agreements with the European Union, with potential consequences in its relation to its primary trading partner.

Housing

The current vacancy rate in Switzerland is around 1%, indicative of  a very  tight market. The housing crisis, an endemic issue also for other European countries, and for a good part of the EU capitals, can be linked to demographic change without being reduced to a population problem. Population growth may increase demand for housing, but whether that demand becomes a crisis depends on the organisation of the housing system: land-use rules, construction capacity, vacancy rates, speculation, public investment, transport planning, and the distribution of homes across regions and income groups. To frame housing scarcity simply as the result of “too many people” is therefore to turn a governance problem into a demographic problem.

In addition, several cities in Europe have been facing the opposite of a growth problem in the past few years: metropolitan areas have grown by 15% in OECD countries, in  countries whose growth rate was 6%. Larger metropolitan areas have grown more than mid-sized and smaller ones, and cities with  500.000 inhabitants have experienced population loss.  Looking at the World Bank’s annual urban population growth we can observe for Switzerland that the growth experienced between the 1990s and 2021 was around 2.5 % peaking to 3% in 2021 for then falling to 1.7% the following years and continuing at 1.6% in 2023-2024. Thus, revealing that the trend seems to be heading towards the slower growth.

Sustainability

Concerns from farmers over land use, and especially in the case in which these would be used for housing bridge the sustainability and land use argument with the housing crisis, which has been at the core of this initiative. However, if the issue is clearly linked to ecological concerns, land use and the Swiss passion for the preservation of the natural environment – a nod to green voters’ concerns – it did not mark a stark success among them.

What this argument does is precisely to walk into the conversation a neo-Malthusian logic. In 1798 Malthus warned that the population growth would bring to food scarcity. We can safely say that he was wrong. He had not accounted for that argument technological progress, change in habits but most of all he had made the hypothesis based on conditions staying the same and no other factor changing.

Resources scarcity

When finite resources and terms such as Dichterness ‘density stress’ are used as the framework for evaluating this initiative, two questions become unavoidable. First, what happens to sectors already perceived as being under pressure from immigration such as housing, infrastructure, care, and public services when many of the workers sustaining those same sectors, healthcare in particular, depend on foreign labour? Second, how does population ageing reshape demand for those resources, especially as older people live longer, remain healthier, and continue occupying housing for longer periods? In this sense, resource scarcity cannot be reduced to the number of people living in the country at a given moment. It is also about the age structure of the population, the distribution of labour, and the changing demand for services.

Beyond the Numbers: Governing Demographic Change

If the population debate is framed only around keeping numbers constant, it inevitably returns to migration, fertility, and mortality as the variables that most visibly affect totals. But this misses the deeper issue. The challenge is not simply whether the population grows or shrinks, but how demographic change transforms labour needs, service demand, housing use, and intergenerational dependency. We should therefore move away from treating population as a bare number, and away from seeing demographic change only through the lens of declining fertility. The more relevant question is how society adapts its resources, institutions, and services to a population whose composition is changing. The  Swiss vote does reveal a constituency that prioritizes  demographic  change and its consequences to be treated as a policy priority. In that sense, the referendum may be less an endpoint than a warning.

(Photo credit:  Allphoto-bangkok, Unsplash)