Ah, the soft bigotry of lowered expectation for everyone else.
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At the risk of generalizing about others, that lines up with my limited experience there, during a visit in early 2007. We were staying near Basel. Our host - an affable curmudgeon - was quite worked up about the right-wing candidates. I gather he normally leaned conservative, but his disdain for the right-wing candidates was clear. His wife was an immigrant; when they lived in a different suburb the neighbors wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence (their new neighborhood was more, well, neighborly).
In hindsight, Switzerland in 2007 (and later e.g. the prohibition of building a minaret) was a sign of things to come elsewhere.
EDIT: I should’ve qualified my statement. I don’t agree that ”they are a very religious and racist bunch." Although this segment certainly exists, my own anecdote about our host and the new neighbors should indicate that it isn’t everybody. More that I agreed about the ”wave of Swiss nationalism in 2007."
I won’t claim that things were suddenly different in 2007- IIRC a Turkish family could live and work in Germany for years without gaining citizenship. Same is still true in the Gulf countries for example. What’s different, I believe, is that after WW2, most countries at least paid lip service to things like basic human rights. For example, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More recently there seem to be increased numbers who say “fuck that, we don’t think it works and don’t like it anyway” and, not only are they not shouted down, but they’re actually elected.
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Obligs:
Are you terribly disappointed?
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From Aldi, perhaps?
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“Yer kind ain’t welcome here, Aldi shopper…”
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Apart from the whole “not giving women the right to vote until the 1990s” thing.
But the Swiss are a remarkably conservative and closed society and have been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Personally I think this approach to granting citizenship is wrong but they don’t care about my opinion. I do feel bad for the woman involved, though, and I suspect that there was an underlying racist cause to her denial
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Unless you have equal expectations about immigration policy for a poor authoritarian regime in the developing world that’s dealing with constant incursions, I’ll assume that’s a joke.
I certainly don’t deny that they are flexible enough to serve a variety of less savory purposes(nor would I seriously argue that this is anything but a major part of their appeal); but I suspect that the enthusiasm for oddball questions arises in part from the fact that knowledge and practice can be quite different things; and most bodies of knowledge small enough to be practical test material aren’t particularly hard to cram.
If you take the position that citizenship entails more than bare adherence to a few rules when you know someone is looking; attempting to choose citizens by asking some history questions and calling for the recitiation of constitutional amendments would be sort of like choosing a board of directors by quizzing them on Sarbanes-Oxley: the ones that can’t pass the test aren’t good news; but ability to pass the test and likihood of being involved in a sordid accounting scandal are pretty much unrelated(if anything; it’s the dangerous smart ones who would find doing both to be particularly trivial).
This isn’t to say I’m impressed by the likely efficacy of the “Let the neigbhors vote on it; with some open ended questions to provide cover for whatever they feel like doing” approach: but if you are attempting to select for an ethos; a factual exam is hardly the tool you want.
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Of course not, but that’s not really the point.
The point being that the decision to dismantle legalized racism in the USA was made by citizens of the USA, acting through their elected representatives. Not by citizens of Germany or China or Switzerland or New Zealand.
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That issue is easily addressed by requiring a few personal character references who’ll be interviewed to confirm the practise matches the theory. No family members, no convicted felons, they must be locals and, just to be safe, let’s say they have to have at least one grandparent and one parent who was born a citizen. That’s good enough shorthand for “local who appreciates the benefits of citizenship and is familiar with the applicant and her views.”
That kind of local input about whether the applicant buys into core values makes a lot more sense than having local randos who might not have interacted with the candidate before ask subjective questions about favourite sports and shopping choices.
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I think a lot of this static is coming from open borders folks. If you don’t want to abide by Swiss rules, you can go literally anywhere else. I have been frustrated with Japan’s citizenship rules, but such is life. Many nice places only remain so because of selective immigration laws. In Japan, race is the major factor. But if a tiny country like Switzerland has decided that they want to limit immigration to people who are super enthusiastic about Swiss culture, that really does not substantially limit the choices for the rest of us.
The source article mentions that her motivation to apply was based on a desire to vote on local political issues. I did read her interview. When they asked her about Swiss cultural aspects, she said climbing the alps and chocolate. The only mountain she could think of is the Matterhorn. Maybe it would be easier to try for citizenship in Zurich, which is a short drive away, and might be more receptive to people who prefer urban interests, instead of learning all the local folk dances or whatever.
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That wasn’t his point at all, as I read it.
Not initially, no. There were decades of tearing down structures in order to build new ones that were actually fair and just. We had grown adults harassing children. We had the 101st Airborne escorting children into schools. We had people murdered for daring to register people to vote. The major work of ending Jim crow was through the courts, not through legislation, much of the legislation came well after the major supreme court decisions that made them possible.
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I say that about the English/Scottish border community where my family have lived for generations [Edited], yet had a range of attitudes from violent abuse to indifference to that violent abuse happening to me. I eventually had to leave the area in very real fear of my life. I like and miss many things from that area, but the community is not one of them.
It is possible to believe that insular communities are a bad thing and not be an elitist. In my experience it tends to be the community itself who are elitist, but they’d never recognise it themselves.
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This. Thank you.
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One thing that China is notable for is having many laws that have no practical effect, since they are not enforced or are directly contrary to policy and ignored completely. The right for labor to organize, for example is clearly legal, but independent labor movements are routinely nipped in the bud.
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Wouldn’t want to. And as someone who loves mountains I sympathise with the content-where-I-am attitude, but the lack of humility or willingness to contemplate, that not everything might be perfect in that land of the free, makes exchanges with Swiss nationals often painful. I have yet to meet a foreign national living in Switzerland, who hasn’t felt excluded and at times ostracised by the Swiss community they were living in.
And it is not just about being mountain people. I often spend time in the mountains in Italy, and that feels very different. I think it is mountains and an unexpected, very sudden, incredible growth in wealth post WWII.
I think my real beef is that “Eigentum verpflichtet”, there are obligations which come with wealth! And the Swiss seem to be very busy liberating themselves from any obligation to contribute (e.g. by welcoming their Aldi shopping Turkish neighbours–whose family has generated wealth for 3 decades). and instead insist with the zealousy of a religious fanatic–that their wealth is all down to hard work and singularly deserved. Not a good look. And Calvinism also has a lot to answer for. An honest historical discussion of how the sudden Swiss wealth emerged would be a good start.
EDIT in attempt to formulate complete sentences while multitasking.
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Not actually relevant to the argument about citizenship law, likely confounded by China not being an attractive place to naturalise to since citizenship doesn’t give you a ton of benefits. The original poster used the idea of an ethnic test (which he later elaborated with some made up bullshit about Uighurs) in China to justify the jury method in Switzerland, but numbers or whatever, such things plain do not exist in the law. If we were complaining about low numbers of immigration in Switzerland, then things would be different.
In addition, that presents no evidence that it would be easier for ‘ethnically’ Chinese to naturalise. The law only assists near relatives of Chinese nationals - the child of two ‘ethnically Chinese’ who renounced their Chinese citizenship would have no help.
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flunked her on the citizenship test because she “lives in a small world…”
In fact the neighbours’ complaint seemed to be that she lives in an insufficiently small world. They could at least be honest about it.
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