SWISS voters decisively shunned a proposal to curb immigration drastically in a referendum on November 30th, by

74% to 26%

. But some interpretations of that result smack of wishful thinking. A European Union spokesperson said the vote "shows that the Swiss people agree with the EU that restricting free movement of people would endanger growth." A Freudian might term that "projection". While some Swiss (like the protesters pictured above) may welcome immigrants, the referendum's result owed much to the weaknesses of the specific proposals, and Swiss opposition to immigration has certainly not gone away.

The initiative was launched by Ecopop, a civic group blending green-left and chauvinist-right thinking, which fears that immigration will lead to unsustainable population growth and send concrete high-rises soaring over Switzerland’s Alpine vistas. The group's proposal would have capped immigration at 0.2% of the population. That would have cut annual immigration from 80,000 at present to about 16,000, insufficient for an economy that depends heavily on imported skills.

Voters also threw out two other initiatives that would have dimmed Switzerland’s allure for foreigners. One would have dropped the lump-sum tax privileges that some Swiss cantons allow wealthy foreigners. A second would have required the Swiss National Bank to buy tons of gold to bring it up to 20% of the country’s currency reserves, a bizarre idea that would have been ruinous for the country's monetary policy.

Business leaders admit the result of Sunday’s vote was better than they had dared to hope. They and union leaders had warned that Ecopop’s proposed cap on immigration would have helped to choke off economic growth. It would also have breached labour accords with the EU. Relations with the rest of Europe have already been damaged by an earlier referendum in February, when voters narrowly approved less draconian immigration curbs.

But the failure of the latest referendum proposals is not evidence of a more relaxed overall attitude towards immigrants, says Lucas Golder, an analyst at gfs.bern, a Swiss social research firm. On the contrary, in Switzerland, as in many other parts of Europe, public concern over immigration is rising.

One reason Ecopop’s proposal failed was its lack of support from the populist right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the biggest in Switzerland’s federal assembly. The SVP was the architect of the successful immigration referendum in February. Analysts say Swiss voters, having approved the earlier limits, rejected Ecopop’s idea as too extreme, preferring to leave government and business leaders flexibility to negotiate curbs with the EU.

One proposal gaining ground in business circles calls for Swiss authorities to set the acceptable level of immigration, allowing “free” access to foreign workers up to that amount. What that amount should be could be a topic of debate in the next elections in October 2015.

In the meantime, business leaders like Rudolf Minsch, chief economist of the Swiss Business Federation, illustrate how the ground has shifted. In the run-up to February’s vote he argued strongly against the SVP’s call for immigration curbs. Now, he says, “it’s absolutely obvious that sometime in the future there will be some limitation on net immigration.” No sign there of a vision shared by the EU.