Oh no, Swiss commute from abroad and don't buy local!
Oh no, people keep moving to our towns and pushing property prices up!
Oh no, companies can't get enough staff and are outsourcing!
Oh no, I can't get a job because people don't visit our towns and support our businesses!
Oh no, I'm crap at what I do and can't compete! Oh shit. Err, I mean one of the above.
They certainly complain if the snow ploughs haven't gone round quick or often enough so they can get to work, so I would think that using the road system woudl be considered consuming a benefit.
Of course foreigners, often blinded by the allmighty frank, think they can work for lower wages than the Swiss, and sometimes this is also true, especially if the employer is a foreigner (attracted by a low taxcut), too.
Sure that frontaliers are only one group of many stakeholders who have their fingers in the pot (i.e. who massively profit from the actual situation), others are a scrooge Swiss foederalism, that prefers not to invest in locals but rather to enhance foreign educated manpower.
Traffic issues are only one side of many bad things that foreigners (and yes, there are also many Swiss frontaliers or commuters, many of them illegal) brought into Switzerland, i.e. at least to those who cannot afford to bypass negative side effects (like e.g. high real-estate prices and crappy infrastructure).
some self-service machines
instructions per display in German, Italian, Albanian and Turkish
First, very few are non-Italian, and most of those are dual Italian-Swiss.
Also, most work for Italian companies that moved here, workforce and all.
And they clog the roads.
Hell, I even know Italian frontaliers, who've been doing it for decades, complaining about the massive influx over the past decade!
Tom
But a lot is invested locally into the Professional education and into schools exactly by Cantons liike Geneva and Vaud and Basel and Zürich
The foreigners have to fill the gap left open by the retiring baby-boomers and the babypill-generation coming up now
They work for less than somebody living in CH, they get a fortune back home but it's a crappy country, health care - free but crap, you are feeding the bums and lazy folk who are sucking the government tit and don't want to work, you get to spend 4 hours a day in traffic in your car, you also live near the border where prices are higher than the rest of the country so what do you get? If you get sacked you don't get CH unemployment money 80% but you get the French one which will be substantially lower and inline with French wages. So in reality you can't buy a house etc because you have no security to pay your loan once you stop working in CH.
A very small portion of your tax goes to CH. You don't get C permit or citizenship. You can never integrate in CH.
French people REFUSE to live in GVA not because of expensive flats or difficult to find good homes but JUST BECAUSE they will get UNBELIEVABLE money compared to what they would get in France for the same job. They don't see more than their noses that this is not good for them or their family on the long run.
Anyway, if you like spending your mornings and evenings in your car listening to the traffic report fine by me
However,
giving this as a fact,
how come FC fail its forecast on numbers more than 1:10 (they wanted to make the Swiss believe that annual net growing is plus 8.000, which is simply ridiculous, with all its gaps in investment in infrastructure, which is very sad) and stupidly keep on repeating for years that salary dumping does not exist? I don't think this is normal.
And yes, this is a Swiss problem, of which frontaliers are only one part.
I suppose that the situation about the Grenzgänger/Frontaliers in Geneva, Basel and Zürich can be compared, at least to some extent. The differences of course matter in a way. The MCG in Geneva can be compared with the SVP in Zürich. While the situation in Ticino looks different , you can compare the Lega die Ticinesi with the Geneva MCG, again only to some extent.
Forecasts can only be rough estimates -- a lot of money is invested into the infrastructure -- just look at the expansion of VBZ/ZVV with the direct tunnel-link between HB and Oerlikon, the expanded HB with the Löwenstrasse side-station, the expanded Oerlikon-Station with additional rails and a Shopping mall below the railways, the Highway tunnel below the Uetliberg, dependence complexes of both ETH and Uni, ongoing Expansion programs of the hospitals, new Schools buildings -- example, the fairly new building of the Commercial School (KV) in Zürich
Trades Unionists complained for decades, at least since the 1960ies, about salary dumping ( a big topic in the media)
The frontaliers/Grenzgänger are primarily a needed solution to the problems created by the economic growth
And with a lower population density.
Tom
Makes sense. The MCG reflects the history of Geneva which only in 1815 joined CH as the least evil solution available
You have to take into account
- that 85% of the Swiss population live in areas below 800 meters above sealevel
- 50% of the country are Alpine mountains
- Areas like the Jura in Neuchâtel and Jura plus the Emmental (State of Bern) are only scarcely inhabited
All this means that the rest with states like Zürch and Basel (BS&BL) and Schaffhausen is rather densely populated. Suppose that the State of Zürich in regard to Population density is only beaten by the State of New York, and most likely comparable to Connecticut and Rhode Island