Anti-migration politics are advancing across the rich world at very different levels of foreign population. Japan has a foreign-resident share just above 3%, while Switzerland’s foreign-born share is near 30%. Yet both have recently experienced a surge in nationalist politics centred on migration, suggesting that the scale of immigration alone cannot explain the backlash. This column argues that neither economic nor demographic pressures provide a sufficient explanation. Evidence from the Swiss vote of June 2026 and Japan’s elections in 2025–26 points to a generational dimension: support for migration restriction is strong among the old but also younger voters, while attitudes toward immigration appear less changed than its political salience.
What the Swiss vote reveals
In June 2026, Swiss voters came within five points of adopting the Sustainability Initiative (the "10-million initiative"), which would have capped the country's resident population below ten million before 2050; it was rejected on 14 June 2026 by 54.8% to 45.2%, with a turnout close to 60% (Note 2). The government, every mainstream party, business associations, and unions all opposed the measure. The geography of the result is the first clue that this was not a simple reaction to crowding (Figure 1): the most densely populated areas rejected the cap most strongly – core cities by about 70%, agglomerations by about 55% – while the strongest support came from sparsely populated rural cantons, among them Unteriberg in the canton of Schwyz (91% in favour) and Appenzell Innerrhoden (two-thirds in favour). The places with the most immigrants, and the most visible congestion, were the least hostile to immigration.
The demographic pattern is even more telling. Official voter surveys show older cohorts, especially those aged 60–69, voting narrowly in favour. But an exit poll by Tages-Anzeiger (2026) found an even higher share of 35–49-year-olds doing the same – an age group not usually associated with nativist politics. The most plausible reading is that this is the cohort most exposed to Switzerland's housing crunch – forming families, unable to afford homes where they grew up, and unlikely to inherit one soon. Support for restriction was also higher among men, lower-income and less-educated voters. The backlash, in other words, tracks exposure to tight housing and labour markets, not exposure to immigrants.
What Japan adds
Japan looks different on the surface – very low direct exposure – but points the same way. In the July 2025 Upper House election, Sanseito expanded from one to fourteen seats on a "Japanese First" platform (Upper House election results, July 2025). The Okubo-NIRA panel survey, run quarterly for five years, finds 38–55% of respondents giving neutral answers on coexistence with foreign workers while only 19% of employed respondents work alongside foreigners daily. This is ambivalence, not hostility, and Okubo (2021) found almost no relationship between attitudes and actual labour-market or residential exposure to foreigners using 2017 data. Yet salience has risen sharply: foreign-national policy ranked among the top five voting issues for 48% of Sanseito voters and 70% of Japan Conservative Party voters, against 25% of the electorate overall (Okubo-NIRA survey). Support for restricting foreign purchases of Japanese housing has risen markedly, despite no clear evidence that such purchases are driving Tokyo's housing costs (Weder di Mauro et al. 2026). Attitudes have not hardened; the topic has simply become a vehicle for other anxieties.
Why not economics, why not demographics
Both economies need the migrants they are debating. Swiss employers and every major party opposed the population cap; the economy depends heavily on foreign labour in hospitality and healthcare, and strongly in many other sectors. Japan is expanding recruitment because manufacturing, agriculture and care cannot fill vacancies, and the country lost 899,000 citizens to deaths and low births in the year to January 2026 alone – a decline cushioned only by 328,000 additional foreign residents. In both countries, the demographic and economic arithmetic points towards more migration, not less – yet only 18% of Japanese respondents think more foreign workers would help offset population decline (Okubo-NIRA survey).
Salience, not sentiment
What has changed in both countries is not so much how people feel about immigration as how much weight the issue carries (i.e. its salience) (Schrijver et al. 2026): a long-standing anxiety has acquired a political price. In Switzerland, record-low housing vacancy rates (1.0% nationally and just 0.06% in Zurich in mid-2025) hit hardest those trying to enter the housing market. In Japan, stagnant real wages and a generation shaped by the long post-bubble slump played a similar role. In both cases, immigration offers a visible target for frustrations whose real causes (planning restrictions, construction costs, monetary policy, weak productivity growth) are far harder to see. A changed information environment compounds the effect. Sanseito built its base largely on YouTube, bypassing Japan's regulated broadcast media, and the same platforms let migration-sceptic narratives travel between countries that otherwise have little in common.
Conclusion
Switzerland and Japan sit at opposite ends of the migration scale yet produced the same political signal within a year of each other. That convergence is hard to square with a story about the number of foreigners, and easier to square with one about generational exposure to expensive housing and tight labour markets, amplified by a media environment that moves grievances across borders faster than it used to. If the underlying pressures persist as global demographic divergence widens, the backlash these two very different countries are experiencing now may not fade as today's cohorts age – it may simply grow with them.
This article first appeared on VoxEU on October 15, 2026. Reproduced with permission.
