11/30/2009
In Switzerland, voters in local elections get a chance to approve or disapprove of individual immigrants, and I remember how this horrified Raoul Lowery Contreras — Steve Sailer wrote in 2000 —
Immigration: If novelist Vladimir Nabokov wanted to live for decades in a hotel in Montreux, he was more than welcome. If the hotel wanted to hire Maltese "guest workers" to deliver the great man’s room service, it could (within limits). But neither Nabokov nor the bellhops could realistically expect to ever participate in Swiss political life.
A fascinating feature of Swiss naturalization policy is that localities can veto applicants for citizenship. For example, the voters of Emmen recently approved the naturalization of eight Italian immigrants, while rejecting 48 other applicants, almost all of them Bosnians. This exercise in democracy caused syndicated columnist Raoul Lowery Contreras to cry out in anguish, "What kind of society would we have in the United States if each individual city in it could decide who was an American citizen? We would have a society like Switzerland." [The Rise Of Unamerican Know-Nothings By Raoul Lowery Contreras, CalNews.com, March 23, 2000] The Horror! The Horror!
[Multilingualism and Democracy: The Swiss Exception, 08/14/00]
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