Steel, textiles and iron used to dominate the industry. Today it’s chips, data and robots. The engine of this inevitable change is immigrants.
Who else wants to work like that? Employees of the mechanical engineering company Rieter in Winterthur and foreign engineers have made a significant contribution to Switzerland’s industrial progress.
Str / Photopress-Archiv
The Dutch city of Eindhoven currently needs more cricket pitches. It’s not that this team sport has replaced football as the most popular game – it’s just that there are more and more Indian workers living in Eindhoven who play this sport.
These are highly qualified experts who work in the booming semiconductor industry – along with thousands of specialists who come from all over the world. Although some of the city’s residents view immigration with suspicion, the majority of the population seems to have come to terms with it. She is aware that Eindhoven cannot achieve industrial change without foreign skilled workers. This one is not easy. Immigration leads to tensions in the housing market. But the city is taking on this challenge, perhaps as an urban development opportunity.
From the light bulb to the semiconductor
Many people in Europe see migration in a one-sided light. They are perceived as a danger because supposedly many criminal migrants come to Europe who – another prejudice – do not want to integrate, but instead make themselves comfortable in the “social hammock”.
In Eindhoven, the majority of the population and the city government have a different view of the emotionally discussed topic.
Eindhoven’s fate used to depend on Philips. The conglomerate, founded in 1891, experienced many ups and downs. He started out making light bulbs and later also made radios, televisions and almost every household appliance that has a plug. Philips also developed the Compact Disc with Sony.
But then Philips got into trouble, and the prosperity of the locals was also jeopardized. When it comes to electrical appliances, Asian manufacturers overtook Philips and the company had to realign itself. It now focuses on health technology, such as the production of computer tomographs and ventilators. However, it employs far fewer people than in its heyday.
Better to go into administration than into the private sector
Eindhoven’s industrial base would have collapsed if something new had not emerged there. This is the semiconductor industry around the chip machine manufacturer ASML. It is part of a global production chain that stretches from California to Europe to Taiwan.
However, anyone who wants to work in this sector needs different qualifications than the former Philips workers. They couldn’t simply be retrained, so ASML and its suppliers are dependent on foreign workers.
Some of them are so specialized that they are difficult to find even in Europe. The labor market is too tight, also because quite a few Europeans have apparently come to the conclusion when planning their lives that public administration is a safer employer than the private sector. So they move there, foreigners fill the gap in the companies.
Will Zurich remain a financial center forever?
In Eindhoven, no one would think of regulating migration with strict quotas or administrative allocations, as certain circles in Switzerland apparently have in mind. Instead, the region has set up an expat center. It also looks after the partners of the newcomers – knowing that they also have to feel comfortable in Eindhoven so that the specialists stay.
Eindhoven’s administration is approaching structural change pragmatically and is even competing for skilled workers. That is also correct. Because the economy is a dynamic entity, no forecaster can predict where it is going. Will Zurich still be a financial center in ten years, and will Basel still live as comfortably off the pharmaceutical sector as it does today? Nobody knows. But if changes come, they will only be possible with immigration.
