The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

I worked with a very Swiss Serbian before who told me how hard it is to find a job if your name ends with "-ic" here. I believed him, but found this article still quite surprising:
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/zuerich/...story/29657249

For those who do not know the Swiss voting system: You get long lists with the candidates of each party. You can simply make a cross at the top of the list to vote for one party. But you can also cumulate votes - ginving a candidate two votes - or strike through a name you do not like to not give him a vote. I counted votes in Germany in a very similar system before and I can tell you that it is a pain to count the votes of somebody who really wants to use all the possibilities he has... anyhow: In the Zurich cantonal elections of last weekend, all candidates with a foreign sounding name lost significantly. If enough people strike through your name you will get less votes than the ones below you on the list. At the end, every candidate gets his votes counted and if a party gets x seats in the parliament, the top x candidates by votes will get the seat. People with an immigration background were explicitedly "downvoted" from the lists while the parties apparently believed them to be competent enough to give them good starting positions. This would of course not surprise in the case of the SVP, but it was the case for every single party in Switzerland!

The frustrations of some who recognized that they have zero chance to make any political career here are so high that they consider to start a own party for people with an immigration background. They claim that the parties cash in on the votes of their minorities, but through the down voting do not need to give anything back to them...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Crude translation of that article into EN is here.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

So the conclusion is (according of what I understood) that beside the SVP supporters, it seems that it is a general opinion that foreigners aren't welcome in decision making and especially not having power to make some change in the country.

If this is the results for every party, it is sad indeed!

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

That was my first thought- that's sad- what a waste of talent, but really it's so much more than that.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

It's truely is sad.

But there's also the otherside. When you are a visible minority with a very Swiss last name, and make all sorts of plans over the phone and in email with an organization or persons with such archaic thinking, the look on their faces when they actually meet you, but have already committed to whatever, is priceless! :D

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

I know foreigners who have changed their names, when they got citizenship. I think that you can do the same in the US.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

The worst part is reading the comments following the article on the Tagesanzeiger website.

There is one "special" member of the swiss parliament Mr Lumengo. He was accused of cheating during some election and found guilty. The problem is that many other swiss politicians were accused in the past of cheating (one of them being Ch. Blocher) but the parliament did protect them by preserving the immunity. A coincidence?

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

That article is a bit simplistic.

1. Lumengo did break the law. He claims that he only wanted to "help" others to fill out their election forms, but I cannot believe him that a democratic politician did not have the slightest clue that this might be wrong...

2. Blocher aparently tried to vote twice in a Parliamentary vote, that's something a bit less drastic than filling out many voting forms.

3. Other politicians who did the same as Lumengo got a similar punishment.

4. Lumengo is a SP candidate. Social democrats value certain democratic rules a bit higher than other parties do - so yes, I find it completely ok that the party asked him to either step down or leave the party. That he decided to leave the party says a lot about his values...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Yes, that's exactly the point. Even on the left and extreme left the situation was the same! People who claim to be open and tolerant are systematically less so in a secret vote.

In the meantime: Switzerland slides down the list when it comes to the international "integration index": http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/...story/22405899

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

In the case of Blocher it was not voting twice (technically impossible by design) but he was pushing the button of his absent neighbour.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

To be fair - I am trying to think of a country where this wouldn't be the case. Minorities, and particularly recent-immigrant minorities, are famously underrepresented in politics.

Perhaps this really is more pronounced in Switzerland, or perhaps the Swiss voting system just makes it more apparent....


Ugh. Identity politics. :msnsick: If a party wants to "give something back" to me, I'll thank them to do so by upholding the views and positions that influenced me to vote for them - not by putting someone who looks/sounds a little like me in power and calling that good enough.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

"The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland"
The guy who proved that probably invented the wheel. Such a genius, such a singular observation!!

...
:msnsleepy:

That thread should be renamed:

"The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in anywhere in the world".

Prove the contrary.
Because the whites in French DOM TOM territories have same advantages than locals?
Because the one with foreign names in UK have the same advantage?
Because the non arabic names in Arabic countries have the same advantages?
Because the non asian names in Asia have the same advantages?
etc...


I hope they did not use public money to finance any research that "prove" that...
Those who proved that should be named head of CSI elite research team.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

To be fair: It is not at all the voting system or the parties! The voting system is perfectly fair and the parties are trying to integrate minorities in their lists - It is the VOTERS, the Swiss, that were discriminating. Yes, discriminating the most objective sence of the word. That's the deal - it is always easy to blame "the system", but it is really is the public opinion from left to right that people with foreign names make bad politicians... that's the worrying part of the news.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

The German health minister, most likely the next FDP party leader in Germany: Adopted as a baby from a third world country.

http://www.merkur-online.de/bilder/2...sler-fdp.9.jpg

Or Mr. Özdemir, currently one of the presidents of the German green party:
http://www.welt.de/multimedia/archiv...li_940831p.jpg

Honestly: I just linked an article with the 2011 results of a recurring integration study all over Europe and North America. Switzerland is scoring lower than a couple of years ago.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

2 persons to prove that there are no disadvantages of a foreign name in germany (as per your example).

Let me see that makes 2/82,400,000 as per 2011 figures: about 2.42718447 × 10-8 which should be something like:
0.000000000...002427...

Congratulations you have proven your point!
You should be elected "Head of the scientific research department" of the PSI (Proving Scene Investigation).
Your proofs are the most original finding in the last century and greatly contribute to the general knowledge of the human beings...

Well done once again.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

I guess this one's last name (and even more so his middle name) constitute pretty good proof:

http://recovering-republican.com/wp-...1/03/obama.jpg

But to be fair, it took many, many generations for this to happen in the US (not only accepting his unusual name, but simply being black). So I suspect it will take at least a few decades before we can stamp out this kind of discrimination. There has been a setback with Lumengo which is really too bad. But one day there will be foreign-named Swiss in the Federal Council.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Thank you Treverus for the informative article. What struck me from the article was not that politicians with a -ic or -gur ending in their last name have a hard time getting elected, but that students and apprentice applicants with those names have a hard time getting hired. Often, in Switzerland the discussion on integration has focused on how hard foreigners make it to integrate themselves into Swiss society because they are "lazy", "untrained" or display criminal behavior. However, how are such stigma's ever going to be overturned if such applicants cannot compete on a level playing field when it comes to job applications? In a way the integration problem is stuck in a catch 22: Employers do not want to hire people of particular foreign origin given their reputation and such applicants cannot overturn the given reputation because no one is willing to give them any employment prospects. In this case some sort of government initiative to spurn integration should be considered. Although the notion of discrimination is nothing new in Switzerland, the Tagesanzeiger deserves praise for shedding some light on the problem and starting some discourse on the topic.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

:eek:
Another genius!
1/311,103,000= 3.21436952 × 10-9
Something like 0.00000000..xxx00000003214

Yes pretty good proof that there is no proven disadvantage of a foreign name in the USA....


:omg: Humanity is saved!

How about you both team up to create a super elite research team to solve definitely racism and discrimination problems in the planet earth. No wait, maybe the whole galaxy?
...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

As an interesting sidenote/anecdote; one of the local SP politicians in our commune is a Portuguese-Swiss and has been on the local council for some years now. C-permit holders have been allowed to vote on a local level for the last 5 or 6 years. Notably, our commune is very cosmopolitan.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Thanks for that link, very interesting, and sadly and stupidly, not surprising. Mind you several people with very foreign names have been elected here- either because they are local doctors or sons/daughters of, 2nd generation immigrants, who have proven their worth. The US is full of immigrants from all over the world, including lots of my cousins whose grand-parents or parents left Switzerland in the 30s - who changed their names pretty promptly after getting there. Italians mainly just lost the 'i' at the end, so Palmieris became Palmers, and so on.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Nice try. The topic is the representation of immigrants in politics. The two examples are not average people: There are five parties in the German parliament. One has a leader with a migration background, the second one is likely to follow in a month. Switzerland has far more immigrants than Germany, but I do not believe that anything like this would be possible here.

Germany is not heaven for immigrants either. No place is. But it is more immigration friendly than Switzerland for sure: You can immigrate easier, you can vote on your local level if you are an EU national, you can become German within a few years... and people aparently are more open to different looking politicians by now.

But dont get my argument into your way of cheap polemics.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

According to Chancellor Angela Merkel "multiculturalism has failed." The problem is that immigrants today want to come to more industrialized nations not to "integrate" but to take advantage of the higher quality of life while all the time creating their communities, not learning their host countries language, and basically leading separate lives. If they want to become politicians etc...then they have to prove that they understand the host countries way of life and want to "really" be part of it, not to get into office and then grant "their people" special rights and privileges.

For example if a person from India wants to get into Swiss politics. There's nothing wrong with that as long as he wants to respect the Swiss way of life and not try to turn Switzerland into India. Many times when immigrants have enough people from their country it does create power, and political power at that. So the host country should be careful about who they allow to make major decisions in their country.

Switzerland has the most immigrants out of all the European countries. You can check the statistics on that. It's just that Switzerland calls the shots, and immigrants are not going to come in and tell them how to run their country. No place is perfect, we all know that, and Switzerland no less so. And that's what makes countries unique. They have their own ways of doing things from language to eating. It makes it nice to visit different lands. I don't want to go to Italy and feel like I'm in Africa. Not to be PC here, but immigrants leave their countries, but their countries don't leave them. Which it shouldn't to a certain extent, but they should respect their host country. This is why multiculturalism is failing in industrialized nations. France is having problems too, Australia is on the way. Italy doesn't want more immigrants and want the rest of the EU to take on some of the weight because of the situation in Libya.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Oh! I can proudly stand up and say that Canada has a LOT of foreign names in every politic party.

French, english, italians, irish, arabic, native american, south american, german, asian, name it, you'll find one and more!

And with 32 millions of people in the entire country, it should bring the % enough high to please Mister Corsebou.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

According to an increasing number of Germans is the one who actually failed Angela Merkel...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Yes, those two countries are so similar, it's eerie...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

I don't quite get what you're trying to say. He was a liability to the SP so they had to get rid of him. You can't possibly get any positive spin out of what he did. Besides which, some of his other contributions weren't too well though through either, such as trying to ban Red Bull.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

And we still end up with a Stephen Harper as our Prime Minister who couldn't hold parliament together if he used all the duct tape in the world. Which country could we blame for that I wonder?

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

What makes you think that having a guy called Özdemir elected proves that integration has worked? Maybe it's the opposite. How many people of Turkish origin do you think voted for him because he was perceived as being one of them? (ie, opposite of proof of integration)

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Yes, but what percentage of African Americans voted for him? I heard it was well over 80%. So people do still vote according to colour. A Black being elected doesn't prove that integration is working. It proves that the racial mix of the country is changing. I'll only believe that integration works when I see a member of a very small minority elected.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

As far as I remembered the SP gave him a choice:
- accept the verdict of the first instance, step down as a MP and stay in the SP
- get lost

If I remeber correctly he kept his seat in parliament and left the SP. I do not excuse him at all, the opposite actually. Not sure why this is not clear...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Wow - slowly, you are really jumping to conclusions here. How can you know that the 80% voted for him because of his color? I am not black, but if the choice is Obama or McCain, I would vote for the black guy. Obamas policies are from so many angles better for the average demographics of the African American part of the society that there are countless of other reasons to vote for him than his skin color. Health insurance, education,... you name it.

(If he kept all the promises he made is another question... )

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Don't get me start on him....

Now if Amogles and Corsebou could make a check list of all the points needed to fit their criterias, we might go somewhere. But right now, no matter who says what, it doesn't satisfied them. What's the point to debate if they are making up their own criterias and don't share them with us?

:confused:

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

You said "That he decided to leave the party says a lot about his values..." and I was just wondering what you can infer from his values over his decison to quit the party and remain an MP.

Basically he could have stayed in the party but stepped down as an MP and maybe over a period of time rebuilt trust and eventually be re-elected.

He chose to hang on to power but will certainly not be elected again when his term finishes.

So her chose short term gain at the cost of long term ruin rather than vice-versa, but what does this teach us about his values?

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

I don't know if I find some statistics, but Özdemir continuously clashes with big parts of the less well integrated Turkish community in Germany. he is green, remember? From openly critizising Erdogan or conservative Islam to fighting for women's rights: He stands for pretty much the opposite of the values many Turks in Germany have - that's exactly the point which makes him "integrated" for me.

If there is a Turkish politician fighting for a Minarett - not necessarily a sign of integration.
If there is a Turkish politician saying that forced marriage of your German raised daughters is wrong - very likely a sign of integration.

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Well, they did also massively support him in the primaries vs Clinton. I don't think Clinton's performance would have been worse than Obamas on average.

The proof of the test would be to set up a Black guy as a conservative Republican and pit him against a white guy as a left-of-centre Democrat and see how that would have turned out. Unfortunately you can't re-run history. Would be nice to see though :)

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

But do the people who voted for him knew that?
What if they only voted for him "just for his name" (a bit the same like the Swiss who allegedly don't vote for someone with a foreigner's name in Switzerland)....:rolleyes:

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

But does the average Turk on the streets of Stuttgart percieve him that way? I don't now. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of voting habits along ethnic lines.

Have you ever wondered why Turkey always gets so many votes from Germany in the Eurovison song contest? :) (okay, before you grill me for comparing that to a political election, the last remark was in jest)

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

You take people for more stupid than they really are...

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Well apparently people would not vote for someone because his name sounds from foreigner origins. Why other people would not vote for someone because his name sounds from similar origin?

It does not works both ways?

Re: The proven disadvantage of a foreign name in Switzerland...
 

Trust me: He is annoying loud enough that people get the general idea.