Federal Council rejects SVP initiative on border protection

The Federal Council asked Parliament on Friday to reject the Swiss People's Party's popular initiative "Stop abuse in the asylum system", also known as the "border protection initiative". The Government proposes rejecting it without presenting either a direct or an indirect counter-proposal.

According to the Executive, the SVP's text would cause very high costs, undermine wellbeing in Switzerland, weaken internal security and call into question the country's humanitarian tradition. The Federal Council also considers it difficult to implement and unsuited to curbing irregular migration and cross-border crime.

What the initiative demands

The text calls for systematic checks on everyone entering the country and full staffing of border crossings. People who do not meet entry conditions would have to be turned away. Switzerland would no longer be able to grant asylum to more than 5,000 people a year. For people staying in the country irregularly, the initiative would introduce a duty for authorities to report their presence, void their employment contracts, exclude them from social and health insurance, and require them to leave Switzerland within 90 days.

The Federal Council estimates about 2.2 million border crossings take place every day, including by hundreds of thousands of cross-border commuters. Permanent, systematic checks would place a heavy burden on the economy and commuter traffic in border areas, including Ticino, generating billions of francs in congestion costs. Higher spending on additional border protection staff would add to this.

The Government also believes systematic checks would not be a suitable tool for curbing secondary migration: today's customs checks, based on the situation and risk assessment, are already effective and could be intensified further.

Introducing systematic border checks would jeopardise Switzerland's participation in the Schengen/Dublin system. Leaving that system would mean the Confederation loses access to European search databases, weakening internal security. A Federal Council report published on Friday puts the annual cost of abandoning Schengen/Dublin at between 5.8 and 16.1 billion francs.

The Executive also notes that a cap of 5,000 asylum grants a year would not exempt Switzerland from examining every application individually. People fleeing conflict zones would no longer receive provisional admission, which would call the country's humanitarian tradition into question.

Despite its negative opinion, the Federal Council acknowledges the need to act on migration. Secondary migration movements within the Schengen area should be curbed through measures under the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, in which Switzerland also takes part. The Federal Department of Justice and Police is also preparing, together with the cantons, legal changes to ease the burden on the asylum system and improve security in this area.