My partner has dual British-Swiss citizenship*, and her brother lives in Zurich with his (English) wife. I understand that about 20% of the population of Switzerland are not Swiss. How many of them have Swiss citizenship, I don't know.
none of them have swiss citizenship (it's 22% by now), or they would not be counted as not Swiss
That's pretty much it, switzerland has a pretty high inflow of foreigners (according to
nationmaster after Luxembourg the highest in europe, nearly twice as high as that in the UK.
This, IMHO, is the main contributor to the high foreign population here (sure, naturalization laws play their part as well).
Every foreigner in NL can vote, after living here for 5 years, during local government elections.
IIRC, this is the case in most EU-countries.
Thanks for clearing that up, I have to admit I'm pretty ignorant on this subject outside of switzerland. Does that count on the national level as well? There are some communes in Switzerland (According to some research, the city of délémont was the first city in europe to have a foreign mayor) that allow foreigners to vote too, not on cantonal or federal level, though.
Switzerland will always be special to me because of
this.
yup, Top Secret Drum Corps are pretty awesome to behold and listen to
Hmm. Thanks for commenting. It would be nice to see some solid stats on this, though it's the sort of area where you wouldn't expect countries to be terribly keen to publish the info, and certainly it's unlikely that different countries will count this stat in the same way.
Indeed, it's not exactly easy to find any stats
I found some of the swiss bureau for statistics, but they don't have the figures I seek.
However, the strong impression remains with me that Geneva, more so than any other European city I've been in (including London), has a significant disenfranchised underclass, who are allowed to live and work there to attend to the lowly paid jobs, but can never aspire to having equal rights and say in the city's affairs.
well, yes and not
I would say especially in Geneva a large part of the foreign population is made up of Germans, French and Brits, that come here mainly for high-paying jobs, so I wouldn't really count them as the underclass...Though you are right, of course, on average a foreigner earns less than the average swiss, since many work in low-wage jobs (especially if they don't yet master the local language).
I'm not a expert on Geneva though, so I'll anser for Basel, which, in many ways is similar to Geneva (after geneva it's the city with the second highest percentage of foreigners (around 30%). There certainly is a large group of foreign people living here, but I can't really say that they appear to be disenfranchised, though there are certainly groups that are.
Indeed. Well, to me, that makes Geneva an extreme example of what I'm getting at, but not a bad example. But perhaps it
is atypical - as I say, I only have passing visits and conversations with residents, while you've clearly got a far more immediate experience of the country.
Zürich would probably be a better example, as Geneva really IS atypical. Though the same things do exist in Zürich too, but a less pronounced, IMHO.
And I may have more experience, but sometimes it's easier to see things from the outside (I don't know the english equivalent but in german there's a saying fo not seeing the forest because of all the trees.... )
Just to be clear, I do love Geneva, and have thoroughly enjoyed each of my visits (even when I was hospitalised with food poisoning after eating at a restaurant in the old town). The fact that it's quite so pleasant must make it an attractive place to live and work, regardless of whether you are entitled to a vote or not.
You didn't eat fish, did you?
