Ukrainian refugees can benefit Swiss economy, says expert

Most of the refugees are women and children. If Switzerland is to benefit from the women's skills in the workplace, it will have to solve a shortage of childcare places. Keystone / Peter Schneider

Switzerland can cope with a large number of Ukrainian refugees, and their skills can benefit the economy, says migration expert Thomas Kessler.

“The Ukrainian women will provide new impetus in this country,” he told the SonntagsBlick newspaper. “Especially in the IT sector, the Ukrainians are more advanced than Switzerland. In addition, it is normal in Ukraine for women to study natural sciences.”

Some 23,000 Ukrainian refugees are now registered in Switzerland and are eligible for a special “S” permit that allows them to work. Most are women and children, since men aged 18-60 are required to stay and fight the Russian invasion.  

Kessler says the fact that there are many women and children will also “force Switzerland to finally ensure affordable childcare”. “The city of Bern has shown with day-care vouchers that this can be done without any problems,” he continued, adding that such models were now needed urgently in the rest of the country.

This echoes the concerns of Christine Schraner Burgener, head of the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM). In an interview with Le Temps on Saturday, she stressed the need to tackle a shortage of childcare places so as to get Ukrainian women refugees to work in Switzerland.

‘Plenty of space’

According to Kessler, Switzerland can accommodate a large number of refugees without any problems. “We have the structures and the goodwill to take in the Ukrainians,” he told SonntagsBlick. “With a little improvisation we will succeed, so long as bureaucracy does not get in our way.”

For example, he says there are many well-equipped multi-purpose rooms and schools, which should now be used creatively and made available at weekends for training. Accommodation should not be a problem either, he continues, saying that there are many under-occupied hotels and houses, and 70,000 new apartments that are empty.

Switzerland showed that it was good at integrating refugees from the Balkan wars in the 1990s, and can do so again, says Kessler. “It would be good for ‘rich Switzerland’ to be able to help refugees.”