Due to a drop in asylum applications in Switzerland, 108 employees of the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) will lose their jobs next year.
Most of these employees had been temporarily assigned to SEM to clear a backlog of asylum applications.
As this particular task will be completed within the next several months, these positions will be eliminated.
At the end of March, the State Secretariat for Migration wrote: “Personnel resources in the asylum sector are generally based on the number of asylum applications received”.
There were fewer of these in 2025 and the number of applications received in 2026 is also set to fall.
Some permanent employees will lose their jobs as well, however,
Following budget cuts implemented by the Federal Council and Parliament, these positions will be abolished starting in 2027.
After these redundancies, approximately 1,280 full-time employees will remain at SEM.
Aren’t government employees protected against layoffs?
It is true that federal employment legislation protects civil servants against arbitrary dismissal.
However, government agencies and state-owned companies do slash jobs occasionally, due to budget constraints, restructuring, or for other reasons.
SEM, for instance, had already eliminated 83 positions by the beginning of 2026 – as did other government-owned agencies.
They include the Federal Statistical Office (FSO), which will slash around 40 full-time positions over the coming years, in order to save 13 million francs annually by 2028.
And Swiss Post – owned wholly by the federal government – will lay off around 60 full-time IT employees.
READ MORE: The companies in Switzerland that are cutting jobs in 2026
