A bad teacher

The opinion polls did not get it wrong: 68% of Swiss voters as a whole (almost 80% in central Switzerland, a good deal less in French-speaking Switzerland) approved the new law on foreigners and the reform of the law on the right of asylum in last Sunday’s referendum. These laws were supported by the government and by the majority of Parliament, including the Demo-Christian Party (Pdc). Switzerland, due to the adoption of these new provisions, was severely judged by the press, especially within the European Union. “Switzerland has adopted one of the most restrictive legislations in the whole of Europe, and other countries could follow her example”: that’s the comment of the Un High Commissioner for Refugees, bearing in mind that asylum applications are now at their lowest level ever registered in the last twenty years in Switzerland. Amnesty International, for its part, spoke of a “black Sunday for the right of asylum in Switzerland”. With a participation higher than the usual average (48%), the Swiss have therefore voted unanimously in favour of the law on foreigners, which imposes stricter conditions on the entrance of immigrants from outside the European Community: henceforth they must be exclusively skilled workers, admitted to Switzerland only if required by the needs of the economy. As for the law on the right of asylum, which is intended to curb abuses and the admission of “false refugees”, it has especially a psychological function, to tell people that the government is taking steps. In the eyes of the associations that supported the referendum, it won’t be the false refugees, but the genuine ones, who will suffer from it! The Federation of the Protestant Churches of Switzerland (Fpcs), the Swiss Bishops’ Conference and the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (Sfjc), who had all opposed the laws proposed by the majority, take the view that they are inadequate to regulate the problems that are emerging, and even “contrary to the humanitarian tradition of Switzerland”. The national Churches and the Sfjc say they want to monitor the application of these laws “with an attentive and critical eye”. They will continue to campaign for the respect of human dignity and recall the promises made by the proponents of a tightening up of the legislation not to attack the humanitarian tradition of Switzerland and not to violate the Geneva Conventions on refugees. But the Churches and the Sfjc fear they will suffer the consequences of the law, which provides for severe sanctions against those who help immigrants deprived of residence permits (the sans-papiers ), even if they act on the basis of merely ethical and humanitarian considerations.There are some glimmers of hope in this atmosphere: last week, at Misery-Courtion, a little town in the Canton of Fribourg, the town council unanimously agreed to grant Swiss citizenship to two families from Kosovo.At the same time, the citizens of Misery-Courtion voted a few days later, with a percentage of 60%, in support of the two laws recommended by the ultra-nationalist Minister Christoph Blocher, head of the Federal Department for Justice and the Forces of Order…. So many Swiss citizens, when thy vote, see the foreigner as a danger, almost a kind of spectre. Yet, when they are brought into contact with him in daily life, on the workplace, at mass, in the street, they almost always see him as a colleague or a friend, not as a threat!