Zurich - The United States is hardly alone in struggling with its immigration demons. Even Switzerland with its fabled multicultural, multilingual social structure is dealing with nativist fears of the"other." Oprah might have been told at a pricey boutique here recently that she could not afford an expensive handbag, but that clerk's reported ignorance underscores a larger threat to the national purse, too.
The simple truth is that Switzerland cannot compete and succeed in today's global economy without the workforce and entrepreneurial contributions of immigrants. The same can be emphatically said of the United States, Sweden, for example, which experienced its own share of destructiveness around racially and religiously charged immigration issues earlier this year, and most developed nations.
What's so concerning in Switzerland, however, where 1.8 million of eight million inhabitants are "foreigners," is that the view of outsiders is not what it used to be. Even in this highly civilized and welcoming nation, superficially not unlike Sweden in that sense, small but vocal pockets of far-right fringe groups exert disproportionate influence over the national dialogue on immigration. Sound familiar? They stoke primal fears of immigrants - chiefly those with dark skins and non-Christian faiths - that work directly against their own economic self-interests and wreak havoc with their national brands.
The successful effort by the populist, right-wing Swiss People's Party in 2009 to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland is one case in point. Another is to be found in Bremgarten, a town 20 kilometers west of Zurich, where legitimate asylum seekers have been banned from public accommodations such as public swimming pools. The Swiss Refugee Council told The Financial Times that the law is "intolerable in both legal and humanitarian terms."
An online poll by the Zurich-based, German-language tabloid Blick reports that 43 percent of respondents in this nation believe the Swiss are racist, though it's likely these results are inflated by the immediacy of Oprah's news. Still, this appears to be a different Switzerland than the 19th and 20th Century idyll we once knew - or thought we knew. Minimally, the tensions about immigration that have long simmered below the surface here have now percolated into the mainstream, abetted by social media and an around-the-clock news appetite.
The vast majority of cooler heads here know the facts, thankfully. The OECD's 2013 International Migration Outlook, for example, estimated that immigrants to Switzerland contributed net gains of nearly eight billion dollars to the national economy, almost two percent of Gross National Product. Yes, many of these immigrant workers are from EU nations, but the data nonetheless put a lie to claims by the Swiss People's Party and other xenophobes here and around the world that immigrants take more from the social welfare system than they contribute.
Furthermore, changing demographics find nations such as Italy, Russia, Japan and, yes, Switzerland getting older and in desperate need of young workers and consumers, as life expectancies grow and birth rates decline. Many nations have elevated concerns about aging populations to the level of national strategy, for who is going to fill technology jobs, build start-up companies, and purchase what they make?
Sure, the United States is getting older as the Baby Boomers enter their retirement years, however partial and delayed these retirements have become. What has separated us from many other nations economically threatened by aging populations, however, is that we have, until recently, accommodated if not invited younger, more diverse immigrant populations to build their lives and careers within our borders.
The simple truth is that Switzerland cannot compete and succeed in today's global economy without the workforce and entrepreneurial contributions of immigrants. The same can be emphatically said of the United States, Sweden, for example, which experienced its own share of destructiveness around racially and religiously charged immigration issues earlier this year, and most developed nations.
Competitive advantage will accrue to nations with immigration policies that purposefully balance the irrefutable economic and demographic benefits of immigration with reasonable efforts to modulate the number of immigrants and curb abuses. Societies that otherwise surrender to the forces of fear will sow the seeds of their own economic demise. So next time you hear such unfounded blather coming from anti-immigrant nativists and isolationists, take that $38,000 handbag Oprah couldn't buy and swing it over their heads.
Twitter @jessicamcwade