Many thanks to Nash Montana for translating this essay from Politically Incorrect:
Are there still Swiss people in Switzerland?
Most Germans, including politicians, don’t know a thing about Switzerland. They think of rich people at Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse, a.k.a. the “Million-Dollar Mile” [That’s slang for the Bahnhofstrasse — translator]. They think of evil bankers with big fat bank vaults for German tax-evaders, they think of hillbilly “Alpöhi” [Heidi’s grandfather in the story “Heidi” — translator], they think of uneducated goat herders like Peter and naïve Heidis, they think of nasty “Schweizermacher”, immigration officials, [The word “Schweizermacher”, “Swissmakers”, is based on an infuriating propaganda “comedy” from 1978 that portrayed two particularly nasty government immigration officials harassing the poor Africans swarming into Switzerland in the ‘70s and ‘80s — translator], and they think of a quixotic population that voted for the ban on minarets.
A small portion of Germans dreams of Swiss citizen-ballot voting. But if only everything were just like that.
The reality is that Swiss banks have long practiced the self-abnegation crawl in front of tax collectors of foreign countries, and that they sell out their clients to blackmailing US administrations or SPD administrations.
The results of citizens’ voting ballots that are disliked are levered out by the elites in politics and justice, they grovel in front of other nations, and they are jubilant when an EU court or some UN organization has the last word. And also there’s no lack of rampaging leftists.
Meanwhile, half of the citizens in Switzerland are now foreigners. Tendency rising. Here’s a few quotations from an article of the WELTWOCHE from Jan 9, 2019:
At the beginning of data acquisition in the year 1926 almost 100% of the 200,000 migrants were reported to possess only Swiss citizenship. 2016 we see a completely different picture: of the 775,000 Swiss citizens who live in another country, 570,000 had one or more passports. That’s a share of about ¾.
Similarly steep is the share of passport holders inside Switzerland; actually it progressed extremely rapidly. In 1996 Switzerland counted 236,000 people with dual citizenship. twenty years later this number has risen to 900,000. This means that dual citizens are the fastest-growing part of the population.
The composition of the population living in Switzerland is therefore being downright plowed up, and even more so when you look at the growth in the numbers of asylum seekers and migrants.
1950 saw 285,000 asylum seekers in Switzerland; in 2016 the number increased to 2.1 million. The absolute number has increased sevenfold since the end of the war. The share of asylum seekers in Switzerland rose from 5% to 25%.
If you add the number of asylum seekers/migrants with dual citizenship (which also comprise 25%) together with the share of asylum seekers/migrants, it becomes painfully clear that the Swiss citizens with simple one-passport citizenship only make up 50% of the entire citizenry of Switzerland.
Germany is not quite there yet, but they are moving in that direction. How will Switzerland digest this development? Many of these asylum seekers/migrants are working. The social state is still able to whitewash these tears in the fabric. Still.
Aren’t most of the non-Swiss background people from neighbouring countries though? I wouldn’t call someone from northern Italy who moves into southern Switzerland a foreigner when they are from a very similar cultural group as the people they’re moving to .
There needs always to be a distinction made between related neighbouring people and people from entirely different cultures and backgrounds.
What should be highlighted here as elsewhere is the low birthrate figure of around 1.4 children per woman. That is a failing population. For first world countries the replacement threshold is 2.1 so a birthrate of 1.4 is well below that. The official statistic is around 1.5, but the native population is likely .1% less as that was the difference several years ago between native and total population rate.
“There needs always to be a distinction made between related neighbouring people and people from entirely different cultures and backgrounds.”
I could not agree more with this statement.
“I wouldn’t call someone from northern Italy who moves into southern Switzerland a foreigner when they are from a very similar cultural group”
Technically speaking it is not wrong to use “foreigner” to call each other people and it is not an offense. There are many cultural relations, between the people of different places within geographical europe (especially within the alpine region), but also many differences (language, culture, religion, ethnicity, etc). The use of “foreigner” is sometimes also used to call each other people within the same country.
I think Switzerland is the only positive example in Europe, of coexistence of different people/culture/religion within the same country. But I do not think the people within Switzerland are like one people, the three main groups are germans, frenchs and italians (which are quite dissimilar), the only thing they really share alltogether (apart from citizenship) is the mountain background and a broader concept of christianity.
When I lived in Switzerland, in the 1980’s, before we had any awareness of the Islamic threat, there were plenty of foreigners. They were a combination of highly paid professionals, low level workers mostly from Italy and Spain, and extremely wealthy refugees from various dictatorial regimes.
I do remember some ghetto areas near the train station in Geneva. The residents may have been from Bosnia, Albania, or North Africa. There were likely Muslim. Needless to say, it was not a safe place to be.
Most of these people are workers and students; like Luxemburg ? And most of the Swiss people married outside of their Nationality? I find it hard to believe Switzerland is completely Islamified. When I look at footage of the major cities, It seems to be “European” to my eyes. I guess that could be deceptively selective camera work…
One way to get a good impression is to take a virtual tour by means of google street view of various districts in various cities and look at the people.
Last time I was in Geneva, the city was full of people of distinctly non-European appearance.
While sitting on a terrace of an Italian restaurant I took notice of passers-by. I am sure, more than half of them were not white. Of course, among the whites there were quite a few Portuguese, Poles, Albanians, Ukrainians, etc. In a queue in a supermarket I was the only white person. The rest were a few Latin American women, a woman of Somalian appearance and an Indian (or Pakistani) man. In the next queue the only whites were two middle-aged Russian tourists.
It was near the railway station, so that might be not representative of the whole of Geneva. But everywhere in the city foreigners are very numerous. And even traditional crêperies have halal dishes on the menu.
Truth is though, Switzerland is also a popular choice for Europeans (and Westerners, in general) who wish to vastly increase their salary, even if it means a vastly higher cost of living. And with banks, Cern and various UN agencies baseed there, there’s lots of top jobs to choose from… but 25% asylum seekers is extremely high.
Totally wrong – there are 2700
Asylum seekers for the first 11 months who were accepted in the 8.5 million population
https://www.sem.admin.ch/dam/data/sem/publiservice/statistik/asylstatistik/2018/11/7-10-Mouv-demandes-d-entree-reexamens-a-f-2018-11.xlsx