The International Health Labor Migration to Switzerland: Key Challenges for Its Governance

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the governance of migration of health professionals in Switzerland. Owing to a lack of health workers, the growing needs of healthcare, and the limited number of recent graduates, the Swiss health institutions are dependent upon international healthcare professionals. After an analysis of the need for healthcare professionals, this article examines the laws regulating the migration flows, before considering the challenges related to the governance of international migration and recruitment of health professionals in Switzerland. This article confirms Switzerland’s longstanding health workforce shortage, its chronic dependence upon the health professionals from EU neighboring countries, and its difficulty to achieve self-sufficiency against the backdrop of increasing health and demographic challenges, a need to maintain its welfare state, and to strengthen its international competitiveness by attracting talents, and the threat caused by rising restrictionist and anti-migrant political rhetoric, thereby resulting in difficult compromises regarding its migration policy outcomes.