The best news I heard yesterday was that an odious campaign in Switzerland met with a resounding rejection.
The BBC World Service news on the hour said the vote against the Swiss People's Party was a "slap in the face." The Swiss People's Party—what in the US would immediately be interpreted as some leftie group—is a nationalist party. They had pushed for a vote that would make it more difficult for foreigners to become citizens by returning the citizenship approval process to a secret ballot and removing the appeals process.
Here's the written
BBC story and an excerpt:
Voters in Switzerland have rejected a move to make it even harder for foreigners to obtain citizenship.
In a referendum, they voted 64% against a bid to revive the practice of approving citizenship candidates by secret ballot and scrapping appeals.
Secret ballots were outlawed five years ago by the supreme court, which judged them to be discriminatory.
This push by the Swiss People's Party (they go by SVP) goes back a few years. In November 2003, the SVP, which previously was the smallest of four parties in the governing coalition, received the biggest share of votes, putting it in the majority in the Swiss parliament. Conventional wisdom attributed this to
concerns about their economy and the stress put on it by immigration.
Just a year before, a narrow majority kept a
anti-asylum policy from coming into law. As the BBC reported in November 2002, "A proposal by the right-wing Swiss People's Party for tougher rules to discourage economic migrants was rejected by a tiny majority of less than 3,000 votes. ... Under the People's Party proposals, refugees arriving at the Swiss border via another safe country would automatically have been refused asylum."
In July 2003, the
Swiss courts ruled that the practice of secret votes on granting citizenship was counter to Swiss laws. A number of communities had been deciding on citizenship by secret ballot for three years, which effectively opened the door for rejecting applications based on ethnicity. During the time that Emmen in Lucerne had been casting secret ballots, the 97 people who otherwise fulfilled Switzerland's stringent requirements for citizenship were rejected. Most of those people were from Yugoslavia.
Whether economic concerns had greater weight for voters in November 2003 than outright xenophobia or racial prejudice, the SVP got ruling power. Some
background on the SVP:
The SVP has risen rapidly in politics since the late 1990s. Asking for the will of the people in referendums is common in Switzerland’s direct democracy, and the SVP regularly leads initiatives on questions over asylum and against entry to the European Union.
“The SVP has harnessed Switzerland’s unusual political system of direct democracy to attract disgruntled voters to get their support, especially when it comes to topics regarding foreigners,” said Oscar Mazzoleni, a political scientist and lecturer at the University of Lausanne. “The SVP wants to remain at the center of the political agenda, to keep its voter base happy and possibly get new voters.”
The party has several other measures aimed at foreigners that will be voted on in coming referendums, including one that would allow the expulsion of entire families if one member committed a crime. Another measure calls for a ban on building minarets; foreigners make up a disproportionate large part of the country’s small Muslim community.
What the BBC radio report gave yesterday that I haven't found in any of the news stories was a compelling reason why the Swiss people, even though they voted in the SVP, voted against the referendum: They were made too uncomfortable by the openly inflammatory rhetoric the SVP used in campaigning for the repeal of the 2003 ruling. Basically, the the SVP went too far.
The SVP characterized people seeking Swiss citizenship as criminals and drug dealers. The posters for the referendum showed hands grabbing a Swiss passport.
I wonder what color those hands were. I'd lay bets that they were darker than the average Swiss's hands.
I deplore the American "debate" on immigration we're currently experiencing. Anti-immigration zealots use fear tactics and prey not only on xenophobia but also on racial prejudice. Ask someone on the street about what immigrants the zealots want to keep out of the US, and he's not going to say "the English."
I don't have a definitive answer about the immigration "problem." This is mostly because I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. Illegal immigrants from south of the border are here to work. Employers hire them because they'll work hard and they'll work cheap.
Yes, those illegal immigrants often have their families here, putting their American-citizen-by-birth children into mainstream society. Sometimes they cost the society money for some kind of support, but most often they don't and won't, any more than white Americans do. So I'm not sure what the fear of this immigration is based upon, since it's pretty well acknowledged that many industries would be hard pressed to function without those workers.
I'd like to see everyone get a fair wage for their work, but we have a society that pays its teachers and nurses pittances, so I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. Workers' pay doesn't seem to have much to do with the value they provide to society.
I'd also like to see, however, an acknowledgment that anti-immigration zealotry is based on the same thing that spurred the Swiss referendum defeated yesterday—prejudice.
