Demographics

Keeping, attracting, passing on

Everything so far converges here. If the AI transformation opens a territorial window, and if Valais holds the assets to position itself within it, then the question that decides everything is demographic. Not aggregate demography, the kind counted in inhabitants and raw statistics, which the canton handles reasonably well and which is evolving rather favourably, as chapter 3 showed, but qualified demography: the kind that asks who stays, who leaves, who arrives, and with what commitment. That is the central stake of the next ten years. And it cannot be addressed by any single family of instruments taken in isolation (economic, planning-related, cultural): it calls for a joined-up approach.

Keeping, attracting, passing on. These three verbs name less three distinct audiences than three complementary movements within a single piece of territorial work, and they follow an order: retention is what makes attraction credible, and attraction is what gives transmission its recipients. Failing at the first movement makes the other two nearly impossible. That is where one has to start.

The demographic wager of the competitive shift

The AI transformation has, first of all, changed the very terms of the demographic question. The preceding chapters established that the competitive shift only triggers where a critical mass of seniors capable of architecting and orchestrating exists. The consequence for cantonal demographic policy follows directly: it changes the target.

The demographic policy of a mountain canton, as conventionally conceived, aims to retain young people trained within the canton and to attract families of child-bearing age, so as to repopulate the valleys and sustain school services. That aim remains sound; it is now incomplete. The new economic equation brings into view another target, a complementary one: workers in mid-career, experienced in their trade, who bring the canton not only their presence and their children but, above all, their capacity to orchestrate. They are the ones who unlock the potential for a shift within Valais's economic structures (firms, businesses, institutions), and they will make up, ten years from now, the critical mass that decides whether the canton captures this new momentum or not.

This target is not exclusive. Valais needs both young families and experienced workers, and needs them, in fact, working together, because the former nourish the local fabric that the latter come looking for when they settle. But recognising the centrality of mid-career workers changes how one designs attraction and retention policy. What must be offered to a young graduate fresh out of school differs profoundly from what must be offered to a forty-five-year-old executive deciding to relocate a family. The levers to pull (housing quality, school quality, transport links to urban hubs, cultural life, taxation, the possibility of community roots) carry different weight depending on the profile. And the canton that knows how to think through these levers in step with the profiles it wants to attract gains an edge over those that stick to a generic demographic policy.

Retention: what those who leave are looking for

Young, qualified people from Valais leave. Not all of them, not always for good, not to the same destinations, but in a proportion large enough to weigh on the canton, demographically and symbolically. That proportion is hard to measure precisely, because it blends into the flow of students: someone who leaves at twenty to study in Lausanne, Zurich or Bern does not immediately leave the canton, but sets out on a path that keeps them away from Valais for five, ten, sometimes fifteen years. At the end of that path, some come back. Many do not. And those, on average, are among the most qualified.

Before asking how to retain them, or more precisely how to bring them back, one first has to understand why they leave and what they find elsewhere that is missing at home. The answer has little to do, or at least not mainly, with economics: Valais offers wages comparable to the Swiss average for many qualified trades, reasonable taxation, a cost of living that stays moderate next to Geneva or Zurich. The answer is thinner and, at the same time, more structural, and it plays out along three distinct dimensions.

The density of peers, first. A young engineer, a lawyer, a researcher, an entrepreneur just starting out look for an environment where they regularly meet others doing the same trade or a neighbouring one. That density produces fast learning, professional opportunities, encounters that open unexpected paths. Urban hubs supply it abundantly; Valais's medium-sized towns (Sion, Sierre, Martigny) supply it partially; the valleys, barely at all. It is this density that is missing, and the shortfall is offset neither by wages nor by scenery. Acknowledging it is the condition for being able to respond to it.

Then comes the depth of possible career paths. A young graduate settling in Zurich can picture, over thirty years of a career, a succession of employers, specialisations, levels of responsibility, changes of direction. In Sion, the range of paths stays narrower. That is a fact, and it weighs on individual decisions. The canton cannot, on its own, widen that range to Zurich's level; that is structurally impossible. It can do two things: deepen the paths available in the fields where it holds genuine expertise, and make legible the paths possible between Valais and the rest of Switzerland, for those who would combine the two.

What remains is the quality of daily life outside work. A young worker does not judge a territory solely by its professional opportunities; they judge it by the quality of transport, by cultural diversity, by how lively weeknights are, by the ease of urban living, by access to services. On these fronts, Valais's towns have made notable progress over the past twenty years, Sion especially, but they still fall short of what Swiss cities offer. And it is precisely by this yardstick that young people with a choice judge them.

How to actually retain people

Retention policies that claim to offset these three shortfalls head-on nearly always fail. No Alpine canton has turned Sion into Zurich, or Brig into Bern. What works is playing a different game altogether: less one of imitation than one of complementarity.

Creating the conditions for a return within ten years, first. A young person from Valais who leaves at twenty to study is not lost to the canton; they open a long parenthesis that may or may not lead to a return. The territories that capture these returns are those that keep an active link with their qualified diaspora, not through symbolic gestures (newsletters, annual events, alumni associations) that reach few people, but through concrete arrangements: information on professional opportunities within the canton, personalised support for return projects, help with professional resettlement, coordination with the local housing market. This means treating young Valais expatriates as suspended rather than gone, and building a public service specifically dedicated to supporting them if their path brings them back to the canton at thirty, thirty-five, forty. That moment, often tied to starting a family, is statistically when territorial decisions get made. One has to be present at that moment.

And it is precisely at that moment that the competitive shift now operates. Someone from Valais who has spent fifteen years in Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne or Paris, who has built up there the architectural and orchestrating experience that urban hubs are worth, and who returns in their forties for family reasons or for the setting, can now produce here a significant share of the value they used to produce there. Ten years ago, this kind of return would have meant a partial professional sacrifice (lower density of peers, scarcer opportunities, a lower career ceiling); today it represents a viable path, even an attractive one for anyone who knows how to orchestrate their tools. A canton aware of this can activate the levers that turn the possibility into reality.

Deepening, next, the professional milieus in the canton's areas of specialisation. Since it cannot offer every trade — an impossibility — the canton can build real depth in the fields where it has legitimacy: mountain health care, hydropower and renewable energy, life sciences around Upper Valais's pharmaceutical industry and the Idiap, alpine agronomy, tourism, wealth management, regional professional services. For each of these fields, it can build a critical mass of peers: through research institutions, rooted businesses, professional events, partnerships with neighbouring higher-education institutions. A young energy engineer has, in Valais, a better chance of finding a stimulating professional environment than a young engineer in finance would, and that fits the canton's strengths. What remains is to own this specialisation, and deepen it.

Finally, letting hybrid ways of working emerge, ones that the AI transformation is only now making practicable: the consultant who spends two days a week in Geneva or Zurich and works the other three from Sierre, the doctor who splits time between the cantonal hospital and a valley practice, or the academic who divides their time between a post at EPFL and occasional work for a Valais institution. Marginal ten years ago, these arrangements have become both possible and desirable for many qualified workers. The canton that makes them easier (transport links to urban hubs, still imperfect but improving, shared workspaces, taxation, administrative flexibility) captures a disproportionate share of the career paths that would otherwise go fully urban.

These three levers will not, on their own, be enough to reverse a structural trend. They can bend it appreciably, and that is probably all one can expect from a realistic policy. Rebalancing is enough.

Attracting: who, how, and on what terms

Alongside retention comes attraction. The canton already attracts people, as we have seen: more than five thousand net arrivals in 2024, the large majority from Vaud and Geneva, and this momentum continues⁴⁵. The movement exists; what remains open is its direction, so that it serves the trajectory this essay is arguing for.

Not all newcomers contribute in the same way to the canton's fabric, and this needs saying plainly. A well-off retiree with a second home (a few months a year, no schooling, no involvement in associations, not necessarily tax domicile here) brings the territory a fraction of what a forty-year-old worker brings who settles year-round, sends children to school in the canton, takes on community commitments, and produces exportable value here. That difference is a matter of territorial policy, not individual merit: everyone lives their life as they see fit. The canton has every reason to steer its welcoming arrangements toward the profiles that contribute most to its long-term vitality.

To this familiar distinction between profiles, the competitive shift adds a new dimension. The workers with the most to offer the canton, in the new economy now taking shape, are precisely those whose architectural and orchestrating experience is most fully developed — that is, workers in mid-career and beyond. These people have already held salaried positions in large organisations, and have often finished that chapter; they are looking for a setting in which to continue their work with newfound autonomy: consulting for Swiss or international clients, running a local small or medium-sized business, investing in an existing structure, launching an entrepreneurial project built on their network and experience. Valuable profiles for the canton, because rather than consuming local jobs, they create new ones. And profiles that make this decision, precisely, in mid-career, at the age when quality of life and roots start to weigh more heavily in the balance.

The first lever is the legibility of what the canton offers. An executive weighing whether to leave Lausanne for an Alpine canton needs to be able to quickly compare, on criteria that matter to them, what the different options offer: housing, taxation, good schooling for the children, access to healthcare, transport to the urban hubs where they keep some activities, cultural life, professional community. This information exists, scattered; to my knowledge, it is not presented coherently or with a view to the decision to settle. Building a clear information and support service, aligned with the criteria of the audiences one wants to attract, is probably the simplest and cheapest lever a canton can pull. Several European Alpine regions have done this, with measurable results.

Housing, for its part, is the issue that tips individual decisions one way or the other, in Valais as elsewhere. Workers settling down look for well-located family houses, at prices that stay within reach of professional middle-class households, in communes offering the expected services — neither the luxury second home nor the resort studio. Yet this kind of housing, in certain valleys and certain Valais resorts, is becoming hard to find: property pressure has pushed prices beyond what many young families can bear, even at comfortable salary levels. Without an active housing policy, including specific arrangements for permanent residents in Alpine zones (something the Lex Weber allows without guaranteeing), attracting qualified workers runs into a material wall.

Integration is the point where one has to be most precise and most demanding. Someone settling in Valais can, depending on the commune and the circumstances, be absorbed into local life within a few months, or remain on the margins for years. The difference does not lie only with the newcomer; it lies in what the commune, its associations, its institutions, its bourgeoisies (the traditional Valais civic corporations that manage collective land and resources) do or fail to do to make that absorption possible. Valais's communes are not equal on this score, and certain observable practices (structured welcome, informal mentoring, local societies opening up to newcomers, symbolic translation of cultural codes) produce measurable results. These practices can be documented and shared. They cannot be legislated into being, only encouraged.

That leaves the language question. For a French-speaking worker settling in French-speaking Valais, it does not arise. For a German-speaking worker settling in Upper Valais, it arises a little (Walliserdeutsch is a dialect that takes time to get used to), but stays manageable. For a French speaker settling in Upper Valais, or a German speaker in French-speaking Valais, the friction is real. Bilingual Valais is a distinctive feature that also translates into a practical challenge for attractiveness, one that HEP-VS, the schools and cantonal services can address with tailored arrangements. A French-speaking family settling in Brig for a job in Visp cannot be left to fend for itself on the question of schooling.

Passing on: the dimension people forget

Retention and attraction are not enough. One also has to pass things on, and that is probably the hardest dimension of this chapter to pin down. Pass on what? To whom?

The short answer is this: pass on the canton as it is, in its institutional, cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, to those who live there and will go on living there. This calls for two complementary movements.

The first is intergenerational transmission in the classic sense. Young people from Valais, whether they stay in the canton or leave it, need to know where they come from: the history of their valleys, how their bourgeoisies work, what a consortage (the traditional cooperative that manages shared irrigation rights) is, what bisses (the historic hand-built irrigation channels that carry meltwater to the valleys) are for, where bilingualism comes from, what lies behind this or that institutional quirk. This transmission runs through schools, families, associations, regional media, and through the bourgeoisies themselves when they keep an active link with their young people. It does not happen on its own; it has to be sustained. And this legacy, at the point we have now reached, carries a new stake: that young people from Valais who will make heavy use of AI tools in daily life know that these tools do not, by default, carry their cultural and linguistic heritage. That it has to be carried consciously, or it risks eroding away. This awareness is probably the most valuable thing to be handed down today.

The second movement is transmission to newcomers. It is less obvious, because it does not sit within a family or community lineage: it happens through voluntary commitment to a territory one chooses to adopt. It is just as necessary. Without it, newcomers end up forming a layer superimposed on the native population, one that shares none of the same reference points, takes no part in the same institutions, carries none of the same commitments. In certain Valais resorts, this risk has stopped being theoretical. It is visible.

An active policy of transmission toward newcomers can take several forms: structured welcome programmes run at commune level, presenting local institutions and history; mentoring arrangements; the gradual opening of local societies and associations; language instruction in Walliserdeutsch or in patois where relevant; days devoted to discovering bisses, alpine pastures, patronal festivals. Nothing revolutionary here, and some of these actions already exist in certain communes. What is missing is cantonal coherence: the idea that cultural integration of newcomers is a legitimate public policy, one worth dedicating resources to and evaluating.

The tax question

A demographic policy that failed to address taxation would be missing one of its most direct levers. The subject is delicate to handle in a forward-looking essay, because tax rules change quickly and figures date fast, but the terms of the question, as they stand today for the decade ahead, can at least be laid out⁴⁴.

At the intercantonal level, Valais occupies a middle position on the Swiss landscape: neither aggressively low taxation in the manner of Zug, Schwyz or Nidwalden, nor a heavy tax burden as in Geneva or the canton of Vaud. This middle position, far from being a shortcoming, is probably even an asset for the demographic target this essay is arguing for. Mid-career workers considering an Alpine relocation are mostly looking for a balance between reasonable taxation, quality of life and solid public services, rather than extreme optimisation. On this combination, Valais has a coherent hand to play, provided it owns that hand rather than trying to compete with the lowest-tax cantons on their own ground, where it would lose for certain.

At the international level, the situation is more mixed. The canton hosts international residents, some under lump-sum taxation, mostly in upmarket resorts. This presence is a resource for hospitality, the high-end property market, certain businesses; the long-term commitment that a coherent demographic policy is looking for, though, comes from elsewhere. Attracting capital, which lump-sum arrangements do, and attracting qualified, resident human capital, which this essay argues for, are two distinct choices, and the distinction is a political one: it has to be owned as such. The two can coexist within the same canton, but they do not draw on the same instruments and do not call for the same trade-offs.

Valais is not a border canton in the way Geneva, Basel or Ticino are. Yet part of its newcomers come from France or Italy, sometimes keeping up an international activity, and the tax status of these transitional situations is far from trivial. Remote work changes the picture: a worker who settles in Valais while working for a French or Italian employer ends up in tax configurations that cantonal administrations and international agreements had not anticipated at this scale. The canton would do well to develop, in cooperation with the Confederation, a clear doctrine for these transitional situations, rather than treating them case by case, as is largely the practice today.

What remains, across all these fronts, is the question of public legibility. What matters less is the level of taxation than a qualified worker's ability to quickly and precisely understand what their tax situation would be if they settled in one Valais commune rather than another. This information exists, but it is scattered across cantonal taxation, communal coefficients, specific deductions, one-off incentive schemes. Building a clear tax simulation and comparison service, accessible online, calibrated to the typical situations of qualified workers resettling, would be a concrete and inexpensive lever for differentiation; it follows the same logic as the legibility of the canton's offer discussed above. Taxation, like the rest of attraction policy, gains more from being legible than from being aggressive.

The question of unqualified people from Valais

There is a demographic category that the AI transformation exposes even more than others, and one this chapter has not yet said enough about: young people from Valais with little or no qualification. Those who trained for trades that AI is going to affect (labourers, administrative staff, low-value-added services) and who lack the cultural and economic capital to pivot easily toward other paths.

If this category has not been at the centre of this essay, it is because it falls largely under federal and intercantonal social and employment policy: unemployment insurance, retraining, labour law. But it exists, it is numerous, and the transformation this essay describes will not spontaneously favour it.

Worse: the competitive shift this essay otherwise celebrates will work against these people. The tasks that get automated first are often the very ones that occupy these workers today: data entry, coding, standardised processing, basic customer-service work. The new jobs the AI transformation creates are, in their large majority, qualified jobs, requiring training these workers do not have and that is hard to acquire mid-career without dedicated schemes.

This tension runs through every European society facing the same transformation; there is nothing distinctly Valais about it, but it takes on a particular colour here. Valais needs the democratic support of all its workers to carry through the policies this essay outlines; it cannot afford a social rift that would pit the beneficiaries of the transformation against those left behind. In several neighbouring countries, that rift has become fertile ground for political movements that ended up blocking the transformations themselves.

The canton therefore has a direct interest, on top of a moral obligation, in bringing unqualified workers into the transition. This runs through the alpine campus discussed in the previous chapter, which absolutely must include a component dedicated to these groups and fold them into its three-track architecture. It also runs through dedicated retraining schemes, active dialogue with employment services, and support for sectors capable of absorbing these transitions: personal care services, caregiving trades, quality craftwork, experiential tourism, specialised agriculture. None of these sectors will be entirely shielded from the transformation, but all offer retraining possibilities that would benefit from being organised rather than left to the chance of individual paths.

This is, to my mind, the most demanding test of the whole programme's coherence. A transformation policy that succeeds for qualified seniors and mid-career workers, but leaves unqualified people from Valais on the margins, will not hold up politically, nor probably be morally legitimate.

A joined-up demographic policy

A joined-up cantonal demographic policy for the ten years ahead would come down to a handful of undertakings.

Building a cantonal service to support life paths, covering retention and attraction symmetrically: an active scheme to maintain ties with young expatriates from Valais, and a scheme offering legibility and settlement support for qualified workers from outside the canton, particularly those in mid-career. Both can be housed within a single light-touch structure, at the crossing point of economic development, housing, education and continuing training.

Running an active housing policy, aimed at permanent residents and long stays, in every commune of the canton but especially in the valleys under tourist pressure. This policy requires choices on planning and communal taxation that are not easy, but that are decisive for the canton's actual demographic trajectory.

Making the integration of newcomers an explicit public policy, funded and evaluated. This means owning the subject publicly, which is not always politically comfortable, and accepting that integration is not something the passage of time delivers automatically.

Embedding cultural and linguistic transmission within cantonal school, association and media policy. Nostalgia has no part in this: in the age of large language models, conscious transmission becomes the only defence against silent erosion.

Giving the canton a legible tax framework, with an accessible simulation and comparison service, calibrated to qualified workers resettling. Valais will not win the race to the lowest taxation, and would be wrong to run it; the race for the clearest taxation, best matched to a defensible quality of life, is open to it.

Finally, not forgetting unqualified people from Valais, whose retraining demands just as much seriousness as that of already-qualified workers. This, too, and perhaps above all, is a question of social cohesion and democratic support for the transformations under way.

None of these strands is revolutionary. Taken together, and pursued patiently over ten years, they would produce a joined-up demographic policy that the canton does not have today. It is not beyond reach. It requires a decision, coordination, and the recognition that the demographic fate of Valais will be decided less by aggregate population figures than by the quality of the reciprocal commitment between the territory and those who live there.

That quality of commitment points back to the grammar this essay has placed at its core. A bisse irrigates durably only because those entitled to it collectively see to its upkeep, share out its use under transparent rules, and pass its governance from one generation to the next. What holds for material water holds for the cognitive resource: capture is not enough; the community that receives it must also know how to maintain, share and transmit it. A joined-up demographic policy is, in the age of AI, the contemporary form of that work: making sure the resource reaches those who use it, that they have the means to make use of it, and that they take on the responsibility for it over time. That is where the success or failure of everything that precedes will be measured, ten years from now.