In 2015, the mayor of Oberwil-Lieli at that time, Andreas Glarner, announced that the village would not agree to house its allocation of 10 asylum seekers and instead pay a CHF 290,000 annual compensation. He said that it was not clear if the asylum seekers would be refugees from Syria or economic migrants, as the majority of asylum seekers in Switzerland were from Eritrea. After intense debate, the village accepted to host a family of Syrian refugees and paid a donation of CHF 50,000 to a private organization helping refugees in Greece and Turkey.