Is Switzerland Tired of Immigrants?

Thoughts in the aftermath of Switzerland’s big immigration cap debate

St. Gallen on a sunny summer day feels like an invitation no one can refuse. Today, the clear blue skies and soft cooling breeze, gently rustling the vibrant green of trees that lined our neighbourhood street, lured me out for a run.

As I treaded my usual jogging path, I came across some people along the way, mostly old Swiss couples enjoying their daily Spaziergang (walk), fellow joggers, dog walkers, and parents with baby strollers in tow. I noticed myself uttering a friendly “Grüezi” to each of them as we crossed paths. “Grüezi” is a Swiss greeting you say to random people on the street; for the Swiss a traditional nicety, for immigrants like me a show of how well-integrated I have become in Swiss community.

I don’t always say the expected “Grüezi” when I come across people on the street. But today was a special day. Today was the immediate aftermath of a nationwide vote in Switzerland that decided whether to cap its population at 10 million by 2050, a referendum last June 14th that raised the immigration debate in the country to a fever pitch.

The Referendum

Proposed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the initiative pointed to massive immigration as the mother of societal ills, such as increasing crime rates, rising housing costs, worsening traffic and overcrowded trains, the diminishing quality of life due to the urbanization of natural landscapes, and the sinking quality of education due to a high number of foreign-speaking pupils in schools.

A campaign poster urging people to vote Yes to the population cap initiative. Roughly translated from German, the text reads: “Protect Switzerland. No to a Switzerland with 10 Million: YES.” [Image by Kecko, CC BY 4.0, via Flickr / cropped from original]

The initiative, known as the “Keine 10-Millionen-Schweiz! (Nachhaltigkeitsinitiative)” (No to a Switzerland with 10 million! [Sustainability Initiative]), sought to limit the population by such measures as stopping the granting of residence permits to temporarily admitted asylum seekers as well as to family members of non-Swiss residents.

Should these initial measures prove unsuccessful in quelling the population growth, the initiative also proposed breaking free from bilateral agreements with the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) that currently make it easy for EU/EFTA citizens to work and live in Switzerland. Hence, the initiative was nicknamed by some as the “Swiss Brexit”.

The initiative was ultimately rejected by a majority of the Swiss voters. Almost 55% voted No, while around 45% voted Yes to the initiative. Because of the direct democracy system in Switzerland, these votes were not from parliament members or political representatives. These were cast by the Swiss populace itself, regular people like you and me.

Interestingly, the parts of the country that had larger immigrant communities and were supposedly suffering from high-density living tended to reject the initiative, while rural areas with lower migrant proportions tended to vote in favour of it.

The vote may be over and the matter decided (at least for now), but the whole ordeal has left me with a lot to think about. Even though I am not a Swiss citizen and therefore cannot vote, the heated debates and delirious campaigning from both sides of the initiative gripped me as an immigrant living in Switzerland.

Ever since campaigning for the vote started — which was reportedly one of the most massively funded in Swiss history — I had religiously followed the public discourse, reading just about every piece of journalism on the topic I came across and scrolling the comments section attached to it. I was intensely curious about what the Swiss really thought and felt about immigrants, and this was plenty revealed by the open debate that ensued during the run-up to the vote.

But one didn’t need to deliberately follow the debate to be aware of it. Streets were lined with big signs depicting the initiative’s title along with either “JA” (yes) or “NEIN” (no) splashed across it in bold letters. In public transportation, ads for either side of the debate ran alongside projected stops and timetables.

A campaign poster urging people to vote No to the population cap initiative. Roughly translated from French, the text reads: “Isolate ourselves from Europe? Certainly not now! The 14th of June: NO! to the SVP’s Chaos-Initiative.” [Image by Bricetofly, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Even in online news articles unrelated to the issue, such as in a report of the fatal stabbing of a Filipina by her Swiss husband in their family home in Aargau, the comments section was peppered with opinions and arguments related to the population cap debate. Some people somehow found it important to argue that the husband is only a “Papierli-Schwiizer” (“Swiss on paper”, a term used by some to refer to naturalized Swiss citizens to differentiate them from those who are Swiss by blood) and others retorting that he is half-Swiss by blood.

Conversations about how the incident should drive the fortification of resources for women and campaigns against domestic abuse were somehow less visible than discussions about which nationality the involved people had. All of a sudden, no matter the issue, it became more important to first ask, “But is he really one of us?”, that is, to first draw the line between us and them.

Us vs. Them

The Us vs. Them narrative was one of the main themes that recurred in the debate. There is an Us (that is, the Swiss, sometimes further restricted to mean those who are Swiss by blood), whose quality of life and comforts are now apparently being threatened by the ever-expanding presence of a Them (that is, immigrants, or more specifically, certain types of immigrants).

In light of the challenges of a rapidly changing world, the reasoning behind this view is completely understandable to me. Every country endeavours to primarily protect and safeguard the interest of its own citizens. Switzerland is a small country that has seen one of the biggest immigrant-driven population booms in Europe in the last 50 years. At the same time, the Swiss in general impress me as a people that takes care to maintain their traditions and preserve their inherent Swiss-ness in an increasingly globalized landscape. In the voting booklet every voter receives in the mail, authors of the initiative campaigned for the population cap by writing, “Many increasingly feel like strangers in their own country”. So if the vote had swung Yes, accepting the initiative to limit immigration, it would not have surprised me one bit and I would have understood the sentiment behind it.

Official voting booklet containing essential information about the referendum. [Photo by author.]

I have lived in Switzerland for about four years now, moving here from the Philippines to live with my husband. I have personally never received hate or open discrimination in this country. The Swiss have always been incredibly polite and friendly to me. When they wanted to ask where I was from or what I was doing in the country, I could sense that many chose their words very carefully. At times, they phrased simple questions in such a complex way so as to be politically correct and extra polite, that they went way over my head, given my limited German in my first months of living here. Case in point, someone once posed a question to the effect of “You had a very respectable and probably well-paid job in your home country. What were the factors that led you to seek residence and livelihood here instead?” instead of just asking me, “Why are you here?” (For the record, the latter would not have offended me.)

The politeness and political correctness of the Swiss notwithstanding, it is not the most open of cultures to try to integrate into, and the invisible barriers are palpable in more subtle ways. I look unmistakably Asian. When I walk in rural towns or on trains, I still get stared at, especially by the very old or the very young.

When this happens, I run through a list in my head as to the reasons for this stare: 1) I have dirt or food on my face, 2) I forgot to fill in my eyebrows again, 3) they are trying to determine where I’m from (or for the very young, why I look different than Mami and Papi), 4) they are wondering why I’m here or how long I’m here for, and so on. Most times, I try very hard not to make eye contact, because I don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable by confronting their stare. But on days when I feel rather cheeky, I look them straight in the eye and smile slightly. The young usually smile back. The old tend look away and pretend they were not looking in the first place.

Othering

It is in moments like these when I feel the most foreign in this country, somehow marked by the locals as Not-One-of-Us. I don’t feel this is inherently bad. I do not come away from these interactions feeling uncomfortable or resentful, because I know I do look different. It is also entirely possible that I was just imagining these stares, coloured by my own perceptions about what it means to be Asian in Switzerland.

The designation of certain people as Not-One-of-Us, that is, as Others, is in a sense a natural offshoot of attempts to define social identity and group belonging. That a person is part of a group depends on the fact that there are qualities present in them that are lacking in others. In other words, for a group to exist as such, there must be others necessarily outside of it.

Problems arise when this first step of categorizing people as Others is coupled with the assumption that because they are not one of us, they must be inferior, less worthy, or wrong in some way. This process, known as *Othering, designates the in-group as possessing desirable characteristics that are lacking in the out-group, and attributes negative characteristics to the out-group that are lacking in the in-group. The heated discussions triggered by the initiative “No to a Switzerland with 10 million!*” were rife with comments that echoed these notions: locals contribute to social order, immigrants contribute to social disorder.

The Preferred Immigrant: How to Be One of “Us”

Nevertheless, the initiative’s proponents insisted that they were not against immigration in general, but rather the lack of proper regulations around it. Switzerland, as with any free state, has the right to define these rules and restrictions for itself. And because there is not enough of Switzerland to go around for everybody who supposedly wants a piece of it, these restrictions must be tightened.

To this end, there often emerges a picture of the preferred immigrant: highly educated and/or professionally skilled (ideally specialized in fields with local worker shortage), non-Muslim (there is a ban on the construction of new minarets, the wearing of burqas, and in one canton, the wearing of Muslim headscarves for female teachers), and preferably, in good financial standing (read: rich enough to abstain from cashing in on social assistance).

Those like me who come from “third states”, that is, countries not part of the EU/EFTA, should also ideally be linguistically gifted, as learning and proving competence in one of the four national languages of the country (German, Italian, French, and Romansh) are primary requirements of our continued residence here.

So in the first few months of my living here, it became quickly apparent that if I were to be welcomed into the fold of the Us, or at least be allowed to coexist alongside them, I needed to put in the work to integrate myself into Swiss society. Integration is a buzzword you hear quite often as an immigrant living here. By integration, they basically mean: learn the language, find a job or train for a craft that will land you a job, separate and recycle your trash, say “Grüezi” to people you meet on the street while you jog.

Integrating was relatively easy for me. Growing up in the Philippines, I was honed for this sort of task. See, when you grow up in a country in which no matter how much you kick and scream to try to change a rotten system, the system never changes, you learn to change yourself. You become very skilled at reshaping yourself in a way that helps you adapt in whatever system you are in. Within a year of moving here, I not only learned the language; I leaned in on it and started a career teaching it to refugees and immigrants. Mastering the complex trash sorting and disposal system took a bit longer than that, but eventually I managed it, too.

However, it is not lost on me that my ability to integrate here quickly was largely due to the fact that I am married to a Swiss citizen. I had a direct and constant link to the Swiss way of doing things, someone to show me the way in the labyrinth of bureaucracies and responsibilities of residing here, and someone who could provide for my living here while I learned the language and looked for work.

Moreover, his family and friends welcomed me into their circle and graciously supported me at every turn. Interacting with them and having them in my life was like being handed an answer key to the Swiss integration questionnaire. With their help, I could become what people called “the well-integrated immigrant”.

Nevertheless, the public discussions triggered by the recent population cap initiative roused in me feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.

When the far-right blamed immigration for overcrowded trains, I wondered whether I should give up my seat to standing locals whenever I rode the overfilled 8 AM train on my way to university (even when my going to university is a recommended way to integrate in Swiss society). When the left-wing politicians argued that immigrants are essential to address labour shortages in the healthcare sector, I considered going back to being a nurse to personify this image of the invaluable immigrant. Whether it was the initiative’s intended message or not, I had the impression that unless I adequately proved my worth to the Swiss and/or fully assimilated to eventually become one of the Us, I was skating on thin ice.

Maybe such feelings of anxiety, inferiority, and inadequacy do inherently belong to the state of being an immigrant. Because as an immigrant one cannot just be, one has to constantly do and perform and prove worthiness in ways not required of a local. Immigrants who complain about this are often told, “If you do not like it here, you are free to leave / go back to your own country” — advice which might be an option for some, but probably not for those who are in the country because they’d fled war and persecution in their own homeland.

In any case, there is a power imbalance naturally embedded in a society peopled by locals and immigrants, in particular when immigrants move to a country richer and whiter than their own. As an immigrant, one is always the minority, living in a constant state of lesser power.

Us + Them: On “Kapwa”, our Shared Identity

As I try to make sense of the tensions triggered by the population cap initiative, both among the Swiss and within myself as an immigrant, I am drawn to reflect on a concept in my own culture known as kapwa.

In Filipino psychology, *kapwa pertains to shared identity and is considered to be at the core of Filipino social values. Without delving too much into this concept as defined by psychologists, the different meanings of the word itself as commonly used by Filipinos provide a good clue as to its nature and significance. In addition to meaning “fellowman”, kapwa can mean either “other” or “both*”.

In saying that someone is my kapwa, I recognize that they are an Other (that is, Not-Self, separate from me), but in the same breath I name our sameness, our inherent connectedness as being both human.

So while at the peak of the population cap debate, the line between an Us and a Them was emphasized and at times even weaponized by some to justify spreading hate, I try to remember that at the end of the day, what connects us will always be more than what divides us.

At their core, the fear of extinction and will to survive that push refugees to seek asylum in a safer country are probably related to the same basic instincts that trigger the far-right to push for measures to protect themselves and their own from perceived threats. The love that pushed me to move to a different country to be with my husband probably comes from the same place that drives some to exclude others in order to make sure there is enough for those they love.

That our common drives now so often lead to actions and attitudes that strongly divide us poses the great challenge of our time: how to see the Us that is in Them, and how to somehow trust that they can and will do the same for us. In Filipino psychology, this forms the basis of the deepest level of interaction known as pakikiisa, which means “being one with”. Here the line between Us and Them disappears.

Now, I’m not sure whether my uttering the occassional “Grüezi” to people on the street makes even a dent towards this cause, but maybe at least it doesn’t hurt. Maybe I get to meet these same people on the train next time, and maybe this time they wouldn’t stare. They would smile. ♦

[This piece is Part 5 of 10 of my ongoing series *Immigrant Diaries: Integrating in Switzerland*.]