Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern!
And best wishes to birthday boy Roger Federer, a youthful 41 today. In other news and stories from Switzerland on Monday, we look at changes: changing official gender following the introduction of a simplified process, and changing demographics in Zurich as high-earning expats move to Switzerland’s largest city.
In the news: Several hundred people in Switzerland have changed their official gender since the introduction of a simplified registry process at the beginning of the year. In the big cities alone, 350 people have done so.
- Since January 1, anyone who wants to change their official gender no longer has to go to court in Switzerland. Transgender and intersex people can now change their first name and gender in the civil registry without bureaucratic complications. There are no longer any medical examinations or other prerequisites.
- Swiss Air-Rescue (Rega) flew 2,120 helicopter missions in July, the first time the organisation has recorded more than 2,000 flights in one month. Increased interest in hiking and mountaineering as a result of the Covid pandemic are a factor in the increase, it said, but it also pointed to the melting permafrost, which makes rockfalls more frequent.
- The Swiss Post’s e-voting system is opening itself to attacks by ethical hackers in an effort to weed out security flaws. The window for the test runs until September 2, during which time hackers will be able to launch attacks on the source code under realistic conditions. Despite decades of trials and initiatives, no e-voting system is currently available for use in Switzerland, much to the chagrin of the Swiss Abroad.
“The rich take over the city” is the headline in Zurich’s Tages-Anzeiger today. Switzerland’s largest city would be “scarcely recognisable for anyone returning home after some time abroad”, it says.
The newspaper analysed tax data between 2002 and 2018 and found that Zurich residents as a whole have become richer: almost a third more taxes are paid – but not because individuals have become wealthier, but because more high-income people have moved to the city. The number of people who pay tax on an annual income of more than CHF150,000 ($157,000) has more than doubledExternal link since 2002. According to Tages-Anzeiger, this boom came at the expense of the lower-middle class: the share of those paying tax on an income of CHF20,000-CHF60,000 dropped from 45% to 37%.
The proportion of foreigners in the population has remained constant at around 30%, but while fewer Tamils, Bosnians and Portuguese live in Zurich, people from relatively wealthy countries such as France, the US or China has grown significantly. “The majority of immigrants from these countries are probably expats who are well qualified for the local labour market. They don’t come to Zurich as refugees but because they have found a good job here. Today, Zurich residents without Swiss citizenship tend not to wash dishes in a restaurant but are programmers in an IT company,” the Tages-Anzeiger wrote.
“Someone from Zurich returning home after living abroad and walking down Europaallee [a redeveloped district, pictured] would remember the bleak future scenarios that the middle classes painted for the city, run by the political left, in the 1990s: only poor people, old people and foreigners (excluding expats) would feel comfortable there,” the paper said. “This person would look around and be amazed.”
Children of migrants generally achieve a higher level of education in Switzerland than their parents, according to a study. But there are differences depending on nationality.
The study compared the education level of migrant parents with that of their children who had been through the Swiss school system. Taking data from 24,000 parent-child couples from the nine largest immigrant nationalities (Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo), University of Geneva demographer Philippe Wanner found that intergenerational mobility was “much more likely to be upwards than downwards”. He also found that upward educational mobility was just as high among migrant families as among native families from the same social class.
However, the data showed that the proportion of children with a university-level qualification varied by nationality. So while 54% of second-generation migrants from Germany gained a degree or equivalent, only 20% of those from Kosovo achieved the same.
“We could speculate according to the length of time they have been in Switzerland – the Balkan communities arrived more recently – so they do not yet have all the tools, particularly linguistic ones, to guarantee their children’s success in school,” Wanner said. Another point is “possible discrimination in the school environment”.
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