Migrants as Workers and Dealing with Intersectionality: Direct Democracy and Expert Committees in the Public Finance of Swiss Immigration Policy.

Yuta Kakegai, Ibaraki University

This study summarizes the history of Swiss immigration policy from the perspective of public finance. The authors have critically examined the tendency in economics and public finance to focus only on the question of "how immigration has a positive or negative impact on the economy, public finance, and the labor market. Rather, I have argued that the focus should be on how immigrants are positioned within social security, education, and democracy. However, even in Switzerland, where about 25% of the population is foreign, there have been some cases of restrictions on foreign workers, for example, with the passage of the "Initiative against Mass Immigration" in 2014. In particular, until the 1960s, the Swiss federal government had a policy of allowing foreign labor to act as a buffer in the economy. The research question of this paper is how it is possible to avoid positioning immigrants as a labor force only. In other words, this paper will focus on how Switzerland responded to the parallel progression of rights expansion and exclusion in the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of right-wing and nationalist parties in the 2000s and beyond. Specifically, by tracing the history of developments in the administrative bodies and expert committees with jurisdiction over immigration policy, we will show that the focus and budget size of immigration policy have shifted. Furthermore, we will show that the form of direct democracy, which at first glance appears to be easily joined with populism, has not been straight-forwardly anti-immigration. Through this examination, we will reconsider the role of immigration and public finance, which used to be viewed simply as a labor force, even though it has in fact been integrated into fiscal regimes.

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 Presented in Session 190. Disciplining Laborers Through Migration Policy