Xenophobia.

You can be born here, of a Swiss mother; be native in one national language, and conversant in another; perform well in the national education system; learn skiing and mountaineering, and all the names of the local peaks, rivers, and communes; learn the history; present yourself for military service; befriend your neighbours, get a job, pay your taxes, play Jass, buy and eat the local specialties, drink the local wine, sing by heart the Cé Qu’è Lainô (I was born Genevois), sing by heart the Cantique, be politically active at every level of democracy, and make pilgrimage to the Rütli on August 1st.

Then, after a lifetime of living, learning and working alongside those you considered your countryfolk, go ask one of your neighbours to attest to an evident truth on your behalf in a legal matter.

Or let your befreckled girlfriend’s mother, from the next village over, have one glass of wine too many.

And get told none of that matters; that you are foreign to the bone and always will be no matter where you were born, how you grew up, or what your official papers say; that you should put up and shut up, and that « vous devriez être reconnaissants qu’on vous aient laissés vivre parmis nous. »

“You should be grateful that we let you live among us.” After fifty years and two native generations, we remained not us.

Chère Jacqueline, si la Suisse est parfaite, pourquoi accepter la présence de nous autres sales étrangers? Sans leur contribution, y compris la nôtre, la Suisse serait restée pour la plupart pauvre et paumée dans les montagnes, avec quelques ville-états prospères éparpillées au dessous. Même la culture du ski et des stations de « l’Or Blanc » n’est pas indigène, le ski n’étant qu’un moyen de transport avant que le tourisme aristocratique Anglais en fasse un loisir, adieu! Quelle attitude à prendre lorsque la richesse Suisse dépend en majorité de son ouverture au grand monde.

I note this was for a family of palefaced Christian capitalists who look just like most of the indigenous Swiss. It’s troubling to think of what my more visibly international friends must have gone through.

The rules of paradise are never nice. I now live in Australia, land of many capable misfits, and the rules there aren’t that nice either. Living there often confronts me with the fact that I’m most adapted to a culture that doesn’t consider I belong to it in return.

But when Aussies give me a hard time, it’s for being a sh!tc\/nt, not because my grandparents immigrated years before my birth. The Aussies don’t need you to be exactly like them to value and accept you.

The Swiss do. I have undying love for the place and its people, but no amount of passport renewals or cultural imitation will ever make me one of them.

Then again, I’ve never heard any Swiss go as far as the Florentine Italians, who say you must have been in the city for, at minimum, seven generations to call yourself a local… so I suppose it could be worse.

14/08/2025 EDIT: nice surprise that this resonated with >1.1K people! Which makes it worth addressing a few comments along the lines of, “how is this even a dark side? Lots of places have some degree of xenophobic prejudice, and what you faced doesn’t sound so bad.” It’s a fair remark, and if just being told, “remember you are not really from here,” semi-regularly was the extent of it, I might not have bothered writing this - but, at least once, in the case of that legal matter I referred to, it weighed a little heavier than that.

Half my lifetime ago, my aging blood relatives applied to pave a 50 meter access road to our little chalet-home, so they could drive the car straight to the entrance instead of struggling to carry their week’s shopping up an uneven dirt trail. This would also have given our neighbours the same ease of access, so they were prima facie supportive.

Despite many assurances from paid local experts that our request complied with all pertinent regulations, the application was summarily rejected again and again, for years.

Later at one of the summer barbecues we’d organise for the neighbourhood to show a bit of face and share a little joy, we brought this up in passing. An Area Drunk Bloke we didn’t know well blurted out, in front of a dozen attendees, that we would never get anything like that done unless we first paid him a large sum of money. When we followed up with him a few days later, he soberly reaffirmed his position.

He turned out to be a local property developer, who had his own designs on our neighbourhood, along with connections in the commune government. We didn’t like being treated like this, so we went to the police and hired a lawyer.

Neither could or would do anything, because not one of the neighbours at that barbecue - most of whom had relationships with said blood-relatives that pre-dated my birth - would attest to the property developer’s outburst.

Their reasons? Variations of, “On vous aime bien, mais on ne va pas déranger l’ordre social pour des gens pas d’ici.”

We like you well enough, but we won’t upset the social order for people who aren’t from here.

Most showed every sign of actively disliking the developer’s loud and abrasive character; however, he was local and we were not, and that appeared to trump all feeling and legality.

Unable to live safely with the dirt path, my now elderly relatives soon left their community of forty years to live in a small apartment in a city 100km away, brokenhearted and feeling like strangers in the land where they thought their labours had earned a small place.

This is why I point to xenophobia as a dark side of Switzerland: because I witnessed “seniority of national community membership” overcoming sense, affection, justice, and law. I’m certain the majority of Swiss are not like this - the commenters pointing out that these issues arise mostly from the mostly rural ~30% of the population that votes UDC are right to do so. But that 30% was enough to destroy any feeling of “being at home among equals” built up over the decades, and replace it with, “you’re foreign at heart, so shut up and pay.” We still love the place, and always will, but we have no illusions about ever belonging there.

Like I said, it could be worse - my mother and her friends told me disturbing things about the enhanced sexism she faced as a first-generation Swiss citizen, which other commenters have also alluded to. But that’s not my story to tell.

13/10/2025 edit re charming and insightful remarks in the genre “the Swiss are fine, and you were treated justly in proportion to your poor character”: the prompt question asks about Switzerland’s dark side, not mine, but yes, I had considered the terrifying prospect of bearing some responsibility for my experience there. We can, if not in much else, at least be united in hopes that growing up Swiss made a less mediocre fellow of me than I’d have become elsewhere ;)