The new face of Swiss immigration: Ruth's tiny body is hunkered down and her lips are moving, but I can't hear a word. Her young daughter, born in Sudan when Ruth was 16, plays quietly on the floor. After a few tries, I make sense of the whispers coming from Ruth's dry lips. "I do not know what I feel here. I feel sad," Ruth says. "Always sad.".
| Auteur | Schindall, Julie |
| Fonction | POLITICS - Cover story |
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Ruth is one of thousands of 'new' Swiss immigrants, people from Africa, Asia and South America who are challenging Europeans to rethink their ideas about diversity and racial and religious boundaries. This spring, Swiss News sat down with dozens of immigrants and refugees in Geneva who are trying to integrate into this Alpine country.
Two women, one challenge
Ruth and I are sitting in the home study room of the Agora Centre, an ecumenical centre for asylum seekers and refugees, run by Protestant and Catholic churches since 1987. Ruth is on a break from her French class, which is taught by a young Swiss man doing his mandatory civil service.
During the course of our whispered conversation, I can't help thinking back to the warmth of Serweh, a young Kurdish refugee who welcomed me into her single-room apartment and who smiled with pink cheeks while leaning over her swollen belly of a mother-to-be.
Ruth and Serweh are two women from different continents, who lived through different wars, who are now trying to make a new life in Switzerland. Their faces personify one of the biggest debates in Switzerland today: the question of immigration.
The debate focuses specifically on non-white, non-Christian immigration, which has been seized upon by far-right parties, like the Swiss People's Party (SVP/UDC) campaigns against foreigners who commit crimes, the construction of minarets and more generous asylum laws.
Unlike the white faces and Christian practices of traditional Swiss immigrants, who came from Italy and Spain, Ruth's cocoa skin colour and Serweh's dark Kurdish eyes present a visible challenge to the historic state of Swiss diversity. For hundreds of years, the Swiss Confederation included all types of white, Christian Europeans. People from outside Europe rarely came to the Swiss Alps to stay.
A new wave of immigrants
Switzerland has a long relationship with immigrants. Imported labourers from European countries such as Italy and Spain fuelled Switzerland's great economic growth in the post-WWII era.
During the 1980s and 1990s, a new kind of immigrant started arriving: the non-white, non-Christian immigrant. Today, one out of every five people residing in Switzerland is a foreigner. For all of Switzerland's historic, linguistic and religious diversity, all native Swiss people are racially white and of the Christian religion.
The first waves of non-European migrants included people from the former Yugoslavia fleeing violence, as well as ethnic Turks and Kurds from Turkey, many of who came for economic reasons, or, in the case of the Kurds, due to persecution in Turkey.
In the following years, rises and declines in immigration from certain countries could be linked to historic events. Kurds came during the Persian Gulf War and Saddam Hussein's regime; Congolese started arriving in higher numbers in the 1990s as the war in the...
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