Everybody Go Home!

Except for its dollars, pounds and francs, the rest of the world has never really been good enough for the Swiss, who for 300 years have looked down their Alpine noses at the other people on earth. Until now, the foreign civil servants at Geneva's Palais des Nations, the businessmen taking tax shelter in Zurich and Zug, and the hordes of common laborers from Italy and Spain have been grudgingly tolerated. No more. With 15% of the nation's 5.9 million people holding foreign passports, the sensitive Swiss have suddenly come down with an acute case of xenophobia.

"Uberfretndung [foreign saturation] is treason to our youth and the heritage of our forebears," rants a pamphlet trying to drum up a national referendum to oust the Auslaender. A secret organization that calls itself the Delta Group has threatened "subversive action with methods borrowed from the Fascists" to rid Switzerland of "undesirable foreign elements." Last week Genevois were being exhorted to vote against a "monstrous" city-council housing project for the personnel at the old League of Nations building, which "would lead to unbridled proliferation of foreign functionaries and their privileges."

Rome's Mercy. Everything from late trains to overloaded telephone lines is blamed on the foreigners. A Swiss housewife who returns a faulty appliance is likely to be told: "Madame, 'Made in Switzerland' no longer means it's made by Swiss." However snide, the comment is correct: 38% of Swiss industrial labor is now foreign, and it soars to 85% in the Swiss construction industry, 90% in the canning factories. Advertisements of rooms for rent often assert "Swiss only"--or, more precisely, "No Mediterraneans."

The result has been that foreign workers, whose families are often back home in the Mezzogiorno or Andalusia, are jammed into old army barracks or cheap rooms, sometimes even sleep in unfinished apartments on their construction jobs. Unable to integrate with Swiss life, they have their own ghettos, complete with trattorie and Italian movie houses. Swiss industry shudders at what would happen if their countries were to recall the workers abruptly. "Our economic life is at the mercy of Rome and Madrid," moans one official.

Last week Bern decreed that at least 10% of all foreign residents must evacuate Switzerland by the middle of next year. Moreover, the annual quota of seasonal migrant workers was cut from 206,000 to 145,000. Not only the poorer Mediterraneans are affected; some 30 wealthy foreign inhabitants in Geneva's lakeside-villa set have been given six months' notice because they are not "economically useful," though police have carefully left alone celebrities like Charlie Chaplin so far.

The Dirty Work. Many responsible Swiss and most of the nation's press deplore the new inhospitality. "Telling Europeans to go back to Europe is the best proof that we are still living in the world of the past," says one Geneva businessman ruefully. The Gazette de Lausanne pointed out that the foreigners are in Switzerland in large part because the Swiss want somebody else to do the "servile or dirty work, and prefer white-collar and clean-hand jobs," and, if the foreigners are expelled, the Swiss will be the first to suffer. Syndicalisme blasted the ousters as "Helvetic Goldwaterism."

Despite such calls for moderation, the government feels compelled to go at least part way with the nation's rising tide of intolerance. "We must be able to show results to the nation this summer," says Immigration Chief Dr. Elmar Mader, "or things might get out of control."

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