For 50 years, Walter Nef has carved toys and cheese boards from maple trees that grow near his quiet village outside Zurich, which seems louder to him by the day. There are more cars, more construction cranes, more people, and not just in this valley. Switzerland, Mr. Nef says, seems just about full.
That is why Mr. Nef says he supports a nationwide initiative, in an election this Sunday, to cap the resident population at 10 million. The measure aims to drastically reduce immigration as the country approaches that level, which it could reach in the next decade. But Mr. Nef, like many supporters, describes the measure less in terms of migrants than in terms of infrastructure, ecology and density.
“It is simply not good when an organism grows so fast,” Mr. Nef, 79, told me at his workshop this week.
The election on Sunday is a product of Switzerland’s form of direct democracy, which allows groups that can gather 100,000 signatures to send major policy questions to voters with relative ease, in a way that echoes states like California. Polls suggest a tight contest that could go either way.
It is the latest chapter in Europe’s backlash against migration, which has helped right-wing parties surge across the continent, including in Switzerland, a country with four official languages that has been shaped by migrants for nearly two and a half centuries.
But this chapter comes with several twists, starting with its sales pitch.
The measure was put to voters by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which has sent other anti-migration measures to the ballot in the past, including a successful effort to ban the construction of mosque minarets. This time, it has spent much of the campaign appealing to centrist voters’ concerns about traffic jams, crowded trains and high housing costs. It calls the measure a “sustainability initiative.”
That branding has helped appeal to more moderate voters, said Stefanie Bailer, a political scientist at the University of Basel, in an interview. In the past, the party, known by its German initials of S.V.P., “worked a lot with fear,” she said.
Only recently has the party returned to its familiar fear-stoking messages. In the main Zurich railway station this week, I saw an S.V.P. billboard that inflated the proportion of asylum seekers accused of rape.
That is the second twist of the election: Switzerland has far fewer asylum seekers than some European neighbors. The debate is effectively about keeping out the French, Germans and Italians — including doctors, entrepreneurs and engineerswho have helped to keep Switzerland one of the richest countries in the world.
Previous waves of migrants have sparked backlashes in Switzerland, including an influx of Italian guest workers in the aftermath of World War II, refugees from the war-torn former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and a brief burst of Syrian asylum seekers in 2015.
This century, the Swiss population has grown by more than a quarter, to 9.1 million people. Because birthrates are low, most of that increase came from European migrants lured by available jobs and high pay. They include doctors, chemists and engineers. As of 2024, only about 89,000 Swiss migrants were recognized refugees with asylum status. That compared to nearly two million permanent foreign residents from Europe.
Economists warn that limiting incoming workers would create a labor shortage just as much of the country’s work force hits retirement age. Business groups say that could cripple the country’s business model.
“Swiss courage, coupled with international expertise, creates Swiss prosperity,” David Allemann, a founder of the Swiss sports shoe brand On, wrote in an opinion article opposing the initiative. “If you close the window, innovation dies.”
I visited On’s Zurich headquarters last week, as part of several days of interviews with supporters and opponents of the initiative across Switzerland. The company’s 17-floor main tower is an illustration of the benefits migration has brought to the Swiss economy.
The more than 1,200 workers there have over 100 different nationalities. The technology for what the company calls its most innovative production facilities came from a German; the engineer who gave me a tour of its Zurich location was French. The lingua franca of the company cantina is heavily accented English.
That cantina sells large protein shakes for about $15 each, the sort of pricing that Swiss people say they are struggling with on a daily basis. The struggle is helping to animate the population initiative, with supporters contending migrants have driven prices up.
Restaurant and housing costs, in particular, have soared. Finding apartments is difficult in cities like Basel and Zurich. Supply is struggling to keep pace. You see cranes everywhere — in city centers, but also in the countryside, from the windows of Switzerland’s efficient, but often crowded, trains.
For centrist supporters of the population cap, those factors add up to a sense that Switzerland needs to slow migration or risk crushing its quality of life. It is, in some ways, a different sort of migration debate than Germany or other European nations are experiencing.
“The costs of the railway expansion, the costs of the road expansion, the costs of housing — that is the big problem,” Heidi Z’graggen, a Swiss senator from the Center party, and a supporter of the initiative, told me in Bern.
“I want to emphasize, it is not against immigration, per se,” she added. “We must somehow restore this balance in the system.”
Mr. Nef, the wood worker, who has been member of the S.V.P. for decades, said something similar in his workshop in the village of Bauma. He praised one of his employees, an immigrant from Albania, and expressed pride in the number of languages spoken in Switzerland. But he said he worried that recent growth was straining Swiss infrastructure and society.
“Is bigger always better than small?” Mr. Nef asked me. “I don’t think so.”
Opponents of the measure say there are more targeted ways to deal with affordability and crowding concerns — and that those messages disguise the initiative’s real aims, including blocking migrants from Africa and the Middle East who are not white, and backing away from the rest of Europe.
In Bern, some officials worry the S.V.P. is trying to derail an effort to strengthen Switzerland’s ties with the European Union. Switzerland is not a member, but it has close trade and migration links, which it has sought to tighten in the face of uncertainty over its relationship with the United States, including tariffs imposed last year by President Trump.
If the referendum measure passes into the Swiss Constitution, it would instruct lawmakers to take restrictive steps as the population approaches 10 million. Eventually, that would include pulling out of an agreement that lets Swiss people live and work in E.U. countries — including its neighbors France, Germany and Italy — and vice versa.
Andrea Caroni, a senator from the centrist Free Democrats who opposes the initiative, told me it was a “Trojan horse” for opponents of that European migration agreement.
Among migrant communities, the measure is stoking fear and frustration, said Mustafa Atici, a Turkish-born state politician in Basel. “It is harmful, of course, when a part of the political sphere constantly causes people who really do so much for our country and make positive contributions to question their place in Switzerland,” he said.
As the campaign winds toward a close, the S.V.P. has darkened its rhetoric. An ad in the Sunday newspaper Blick warned of asylum seekers with the image of a raised fist.
Opponents have responded with warnings of their own. In Basel, a street poster urged a no vote with the slogan, “Now, of all times, a break with Europe?”
Three presidents’ faces stared ominously from beneath the letters: Vladimir V. Putin of Russia; Xi Jinping of China; and, smiling in black-and-white at the center, Mr. Trump.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Basel, Switzerland, and Adina Renner from London.
