One million or one: Some drown, others rake in the profits.

One million non-Jews or just one Jew: Whom would you save? This question is used to test chatbots on social media, revealing their political leanings, and screenshots of the answers circulate as supposed revelations. The question functions exactly like any dividing wedge since ancient Rome. It forces the respondent to categorize people according to their labels and gleefully waits to see which side of the scales tips them. The correct answer is utterly boring: one million, regardless of how you rearrange the labels. The only interesting thing is who profits from us taking the question seriously in the first place.

Exchange rate for human lives

That this question didn't come out of nowhere is demonstrated by a study from the Center for AI Safety from February 2025, with the soporific title "Utility Engineering ." The researchers had language models choose between two world states thousands of times and calculated implicit exchange rates from this data. The result reads like the accounting records of a slave market: GPT-4o trades roughly ten lives from the USA for one from Japan, two Norwegians for one Tanzanian, and about ten Christians for a single atheist. If you ask the same model directly , it might deny any preference for any particular people. Claude and Grok were also on the checklist, so no one can claim innocence.

The funny thing is: no machine invented this stock market chart. It was distilled from our own texts, from centuries in which each era had its valuable and its cheap people. The algorithm is merely the first accountant to lay bare the books without blushing.

Politics without romance

In April 2010, technology writer Kevin Kelly dubbed a statement by Clay Shirky the Shirky Principle : Institutions try to maintain the very problem they are meant to solve. This insight wasn't new. Economist James Buchanan had already won the Nobel Prize for it in 1986, dryly describing his discipline as "politics without romance ." He summarized his intellectual forefather, Knut Wicksell, in a sentence that should be inscribed in every parliament: One expects no other behavior from politicians; they act according to their own interests.

This is precisely the error in thinking of all those who suspect a mastermind behind every division. Divide and conquer doesn't require a secret meeting. It's quite enough that a problem demands more attention than its solution . Then nobody wants to solve it, and everyone solemnly swears the opposite at every opportunity.

The chess piece and its players

Anyone wanting to see what such a mouthful looks like doesn't need to make a pilgrimage to Davos. A glance at Zurich suffices. There, ORS Service AG , which describes itself as an "Organization for Refugee Services," has been owned by the British Serco Group since 2022. It employs over 5160 people, operates more than 58,700 beds, and manages over 190 projects across Europe. When it was sold to Serco, the investment company Equistone pocketed 44 million Swiss francs , out of a group turnover of over 110 million. In the same year, a lunch for Ukrainian refugees in the canton of Aargau was allowed to cost just 2.65 francs. The business model is strikingly simple: the customer is the state, the commodity is people, and demand is guaranteed by politics.

And politicians reliably deliver. The left elevates every boat to moral capital, the right transforms every boat into campaign fuel, employers rejoice at the prospect of cheap labor, and every government has an issue behind which to conveniently hide its other failures . In this game, the migrant is neither king nor queen. He is the pawn, the one everyone puts forward and no one protects.

Balance sheet: Subject to deportation, but present

How well the system fulfills its actual purpose is revealed by the 2025 asylum statistics from the State Secretariat for Migration , specifically in their appendix, which no press release seems to look at. Of approximately 25,800 asylum applications, well over two-thirds came from men. The overall protection rate was 43,8 percent, with 38 percent for men and 55,4 percent for women. Of the roughly 7400 asylum grants, nearly 3950 were based on family inclusion and family reunification, meaning more than half. Only about a quarter of the applicants even presented valid identification documents.

Then there's the implementation, the black hole of every asylum debate . Switzerland requested that other Dublin states take over the asylums of around 10,400 people; roughly 7000 commitments were received, but only about 2100 were actually transferred. Italy blocked all transfers for the entire year. No one in Rome lost their job as a result. Around 2100 people were returned to their countries of origin, while around 10,600 were recorded as having left the country without being checked. The State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) itself admits that this includes people who simply disappear. The employment rate among asylum seekers was 5,1 percent. The situation is no better in the EU: In the fourth quarter of 2025, around 117,500 deportation orders were issued, compared to just under 33,900 returns to third countries. Not even one in three orders is enforced. This system doesn't provide effective protection and it doesn't send people back. It administers. And administration, as we know, is a state that never ends.

Mediterranean: Rescue, ramp, return

Around 66,300 people landed in southern Italy in 2025, while approximately 58,000 set sail from Libya. According to the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM), the main countries of origin were Bangladesh, Egypt, and Eritrea. Libya is therefore not the homeland, but rather the gateway. Nevertheless, it is precisely there that people are pushed back: By the end of October 2025, Libyan authorities had intercepted more than 22,500 people at sea and returned them, nearly 19,500 of whom were men. During the same period, the International Organization for Migration recorded 472 deaths and 489 missing persons along the route. The organization explicitly does not consider Libya a safe port.

The repatriation operation is paid for by Brussels. The first phase of an EU trust fund program alone transferred €42,2 million to the Italian Interior Ministry to upgrade Libyan maritime surveillance and the coast guard. A UN investigation mission found in 2023 that crimes against humanity were committed against migrants in Libyan detention by entities receiving technical, logistical, and financial support from the EU. Europe itself is no longer allowed to carry out pushbacks since the Grand Chamber in Strasbourg unanimously condemned Italy in the Hirsi Jamaa case in 2012. The then Interior Minister had celebrated the pushbacks as a success, claiming that arrivals had decreased fivefold. Strasbourg awarded each plaintiff €15,000.

The Iuventa sea rescuers, according to the Trapani public prosecutor's office, were the last link in the human smuggling chain. They faced up to 20 years in prison and €15,000 per migrant . In February 2024, the prosecution itself requested that the case be dropped, and in April, after more than 40 hearings, the court discontinued the proceedings. Italy thus had to pay €15,000 to each deported plaintiff and sought to collect €15,000 from the rescuers for each person rescued. Accounting could hardly be more ruthless.

The ever-present pull factor remains. A study by Deiana, Maheshri, and Mastrobuoni found that rescue operations trigger more crossings and cause smugglers to switch to cheaper inflatable boats. Cusumano and Villa found no correlation between NGO ships and departures. The Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute acknowledges methodological weaknesses in both studies and considers the question open. Anyone selling certainty here, regardless of which direction, is not selling science, but ideology.

The boat is full: Swiss first edition

Anyone who thinks that categorizing people by labels is a quirk of linguistic models should consult Switzerland's diplomatic documents . In July 1938, Police Chief Heinrich Rothmund sat as the Swiss delegate at the Évian Refugee Conference. In September 1938, Switzerland concluded an agreement with the German Reich stipulating that the passports of Jews would be marked with a symbol, the later "J" stamp. In late summer 1942, the Federal Council decided to increase deportations, explicitly including cases where the individuals were in danger of losing their lives. Justice Minister Eduard von Steiger provided the image: a small, crowded lifeboat. This gave rise to the phrase that is still trotted out at every pub table today. When a class of girls from Rorschach wrote a letter of protest to the Federal Council in September 1942, it escalated into a scandal involving two Federal Councillors. Schoolgirls with conscience were considered a national problem, and deportations to death were seen as administrative acts.

The Geneva Refugee Convention entered into force for Switzerland on April 21, 1955. Article 31 prohibits the punishment of refugees for illegal entry if they come from a territory where their life or liberty was threatened. According to the UNHCR , this protection applies to asylum seekers until a final negative decision is reached. Today's asylum law is thus the consequence of a past system of sorting people according to labels and sending them back to their deaths. But it is only that: it protects the persecuted, not everyone who boards a dinghy. A state that can no longer enforce this distinction betrays both sides simultaneously.

He who forges the wedge

The chain is complete. An algorithm calculates exchange rates for human lives, institutions profit from the problem they are supposed to solve, a corporation rents beds to the state, an enforcement agency fails to enforce sentences, Brussels pays Libyan associations for the dirty work, and history clearly shows where sorting by label ends. No one needs to plan this. It's enough that everyone profits and we continue to obediently accept the wedge they dangle in front of us.

In 1942, the boat was supposedly full; today, it's merely exceptionally well-managed. The tugboat sells the crossing, the coast guard the return trip, the corporation the bed, and the politician outrage at all three. As long as we dutifully argue about whose life is more important, no one notices who's cashing in at the scales!