A week after the vote in Italy on the cut of parliamentarians will be held, Swiss citizens will also be called to express themselves on a referendum question. The appointment concerns us for two reasons. First, because the object of the consultation, promoted by the Democratic Union of the Center (UDC), is the restriction on movement in the Swiss country of EU workers - the so-called cross-border workers who are very often Italian - thus revising the free movement agreement signed in 1999 with the European Union (of which Switzerland is not a member). And then because the debate triggered by the referendum has given an answer to the age-old question: is it true that foreigners "steal" the work of the locals or in any case wage dumping, penalizing payrolls in this case of the Swiss? The answer was given by a study conducted by the prestigious American Ecinomic Review and it is even surprising.
In fact, if one could intuitively think that with the increase in the demand for labour, wages suffer downward pressure, the economists led by Andreas Beerli and Michael Siegenthaler have managed to demonstrate that in Switzerland this has not happened in recent years. And if anything, the opposite happened. The analysis takes into consideration the border areas, where cross-border commuters have more than doubled in the last 20 years, reaching 330.000 workers (in a country with a total population of 8,5 million). The numbers show that in these areas the employment and salaries of the local population have not decreased, indeed the more qualified Swiss have even benefited from the greater competition: their salaries have increased by 5% more than those of the internal regions, where there has not been a significant impact of foreign workers.
How was this possible? In the meantime, because it is not true that only cheap labor arrives from neighboring countries, including Italy. The liberalization of 1999 also paved the way for the arrival of skilled workers in knowledge-based sectorssuch as information technology or pharmaceuticals. Thus investments and research have progressively increased, with evident results: the companies closest to the borders have deposited more patents, and access to qualified personnel has also stimulated the creation of new businesses. And as companies grow or new ones spring up, more executives are needed, roles the Swiss often fill, according to the American Economic Review: that's why their salaries have increased. In short, more tolerant migration policies have allowed Swiss companies to find the employees they needed to make the leap in quality.
Indeed, according to the study, today two-thirds of commuters are highly skilled, i.e. graduates (50%) or with a para-university diploma. In 1980 less than 20% of immigrants had a university degree, while today only a fifth of immigrants have qualifications considered low. The situation has reversed on the one hand because the level of education in the countries of origin has increased, on the other because it is the same Swiss companies that ask foreign employees for increasingly higher qualifications. And what about the less skilled Swiss workers? The study in this case does not arrive at a certain conclusion, but from a statistical point of view it excludes that there have been negative effects on employment or wages.
