Inländervorrang often does not apply in practice to EU/EFTA citizens

The EU and EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) provide a great advantage to EU/EFTA citizens who want to move and live in Switzerland. This is thanks to the EU-Swiss bilateral and the EFTA agreements, which ensures that EU/EFTA citizens can benefit from the same rights as Swiss citizens when it comes to employment and residence law in most cases. This means that EU/EFTA passport holders often don’t have to worry about one of the main points of contention with immigration – Inländervorrang – or priority of existing residents.

The Inländervorrang only applies to a small list of professions and roles in which there is actually a high unemployment rate in Switzerland. Current residents of Switzerland are only given legally mandated preference over EU/EFTA citizens and non-resident non-EU/EFTA citizens in those specific job roles. For all other roles, there is no such legally mandated preference.

There is no Inländervorrang for most techies like software developers

It should not really surprise anyone, but it is often incorrectly stated in Internet forums: EU/EFTA citizens (except Croatians) do not have a legal disadvantage of finding employment in Switzerland. Such a rule would also not make much sense since there is quite a big lack of specialists in many fields in Switzerland, including software developers.

Who does Inländervorrang apply to then?

As of 2023, there is a relatively short list of job roles to which Inländervorrang applies. All of these have in common that there is already an unemployment rate of over 5% in those among current residents of Switzerland. Thus the restrictions, to basically control unemployment in these areas. Some of those job roles with the highest current unemployment rates are:

• Actors,
• Call center employees,
• Concrete and construction workers, so construction professionals who work with the material of concrete, preparing surfaces and pouring and finishing concrete floors, walls, structural elements, and other components.
• Temporary workers in the areas of mining, construction, transporting and manufacturing goods, waste disposal and a few related areas.

The list above is not complete, but should give you a feeling to whom the dreaded Inländervorrang, the priority of current residents in Switzerland really applies to. You can find even more details as well as the full list at arbeit.swiss.

Work permit quotas apply to non EU/EFTA citizens

The only other group who faces more restrictions are non-EU/EFTA-citizens since there are quotas in this case that limit how many expats in that category can legally move to Switzerland and that make it harder for a potential employer to sponsor a work permit for you. But even in this case, it is often not as difficult as many people think. Both potential expats as well as employers often overestimate the difficulty of getting a work permit for highly sought experts in Switzerland. After all, there is a lack of talented software developers and other techies in Switzerland just like in most countries in the world.

But the Swiss always want to hire other Swiss people, right?

Not that much anymore. No matter what EU/EFTA country you come from, Swiss employers are generally not necessarily biased towards hiring Swiss citizens over new immigrants. While there is a legally mandated preference for existing residents in certain job roles with high unemployment rate, EU/EFTA citizens have the same rights as Swiss citizens when it comes to applying for jobs in most other fields. And Swiss employers are of course aware that many specialist tech roles can not be filled with Swiss people nor with current residents alone. This is why the Inländervorrang rarely affects EU/EFTA citizens, particularly those with valuable skillsets that are in high demand within Switzerland.

One exception: Croatian citizens

So when I wrote EU above, there is one amendment to make. Since 2023, there is a quota on Croatian citizens to get a residence and work permit for Switzerland. As of 2023, Croatians are the only EU citizens for which there is such an exception.