Swiss reject laws to help migrants after far-right campaign

Nearly a year after the far-right Swiss People's Party topped the polls in a general election, voters have again endorsed its anti-immigration stance.

Despite having two ministers in the coalition cabinet, including the billionaire industrialist Christoph Blocher, its populist leader, the party vehemently opposed two government-backed proposals to make it easier for second and third-generation immigrants to become Swiss citizens. Both proposals were defeated in yesterday's referendum. Switzerland's tough and controversial naturalisation regulations will therefore remain unchanged.

Many voters appear to have been persuaded by some rabidly xenophobic propaganda from the "no" campaign.

The youth section of the Swiss People's Party in the canton of Valais weighed in with a much-criticised poster featuring Osama bin Laden on a Swiss identity card and the caption, "Don't let yourself be bullied". Ironically, one of the al-Qa'ida leader's half-brothers, Yeslam, does live in Switzerland and holds a Swiss passport.

An advertisement that appeared in newspapers across the country caused even greater offence. Under the banner headline "Will Muslims soon be in the majority?", it warned that "the birth rate in Islamic families is substantially higher than in other families". Predicting that Muslims would outnumber Christians within 20 years, it claimed that "Muslims place their religion above our laws".

Switzerland's Federal Office for Statistics felt constrained to point out that the advertisement's predictions had no demographic basis, and that, according to the cited figures, the Muslim share of the Swiss population would amount to an impossible 144 per cent by 2050. A People's Party spokesman denied the party had paid for the advertisement, but described its content as "positive".

The two proposed changes to the law were far from radical. They would merely have made Swiss citizenship easier to attain for young, second-generation immigrants and automatic for third-generation foreigners born in Switzerland. Various conditions would still have applied, including fluency in at least one Swiss language and a clean criminal record. Switzerland has a large foreign population (20.2 per cent) relative to most European countries. This is partly because the naturalisation process is daunting and expensive. More than half of its 1.5 million "foreigners" were actually born in Switzerland, or have lived in the country for more than a decade, but they are barred from voting and from some public-sector jobs.

One anti-People's Party website observed that "children born in Switzerland, whose grandparents moved here many years ago, are Swiss. That's clear to everybody except the Swiss People's Party." Campaigners in favour of the new laws argued that thousands of otherwise well-integrated young people are being needlessly alienated by the difficulty of obtaining a red passport.

Naturalisation procedures are complicated by the considerable autonomy at cantonal and district level under the federal system. The Federal Court has been wrestling with the tradition in some areas of ballots on whether individual "foreigners" should be granted citizenship. Denounced by critics as degrading "beauty contests" - weighted by prejudice against candidates with Balkan-sounding names - such votes are defended by their supporters as an essential and emblematic element of Switzerland's direct democracy.