The Swiss decisively rejected a plan to reduce foreigners in their country to 18 per cent of the population, according to early returns from a nationwide referendum yesterday.
Swiss radio said projections showed about 63 per cent of the country's voters opposing the measure. Non-Swiss are currently 19.3 per cent of the population.
Early results from four of 26 cantons - Lucerne, Appenzell/Inner-Rhodes, Glarus, and Basel City - showed a clear "No".
Areas with more "Yes" votes were those with a large number of residents from former Yugoslavia, Swiss radio said.
Most polling stations closed at noon (10 a.m. Irish time).
The real estate developer, Mr Philipp Muller, who drafted the initiative, denied his plan was racist, arguing that Switzerland's immigration policy relative to its population was much more liberal than that of the United States.
Some support was expected from Swiss women who allegedly were tired of being molested on the streets by rude foreign men.
But one Zurich voter, Sibylle (28), who declined to give her last name and said she voted against the plan, saw a quota as "a typically masculine argument supported by numbers" while under the surface "it has to do with a purely emotional issue".
The percentage of nearly one foreigner out of five in Switzerland is high even by European standards. That compares with one in nine in Sweden, and about the same in Austria.
There are about 1.4 million foreigners in the country, out of a population of 7.2 million.
Those in favour of the initiative cited worries about schools being overrun by foreign children.
But the weekend Swiss media devoted more attention to plans calling for English to be the first foreign language taught in Swiss primary schools instead of the German, French or Italian spoken in various regions of the country.
Swiss voting against the initiative said they feared a "Yes" would have isolated them as a nation of xenophobes.
The Swiss cabinet urged voters to reject the plan, saying in the last 30 years five similar initiatives were turned down. A voters' pamphlet said "the `foreigner question' cannot be solved with rigid limitations".
Mr Muller lacked support from his own political party, the pro-business Radical Democrats.