Immigration to Switzerland slows down
Immigration to Switzerland slowed down last year. More foreign nationals left Switzerland, while fewer people moved to the Alpine country than in 2024.
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Some 83,000 foreign nationals resident in Switzerland left Switzerland in 2025, the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) wrote on Monday based on provisional figures. This is around 5% more than in the previous year.
At the same time, around 165,000 foreign nationals arrived in Switzerland, around 3% fewer than in 2024, according to the SEM, meaning that net immigration of foreign nationals fell for the second time in a row. For 2025, it was 75,000 people, 10% lower than in 2024.
Around 5% fewer people moved to Switzerland from EU and EFTA states than in 2024. For most of them, the reason for this was a job. Around 20% fewer new immigrants came from third countries. At the end of 2025, around 2.4 million foreigners were living in Switzerland, which has a total population of 9.1 million.
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Adapted from German by AI/ts
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