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 including a cottage industry of professional empathizers that has been feeding off this sort of problem for years, with little tangible impact. "This is not about sex," one of them told Swiss national radio on the day after the story broke, "it's about power and humiliation." He had not talked to anyone involved, nor had access to police protocols.
According to official figures, foreigners commit roughly half of all serious crimes in Switzerland. The number, about constant since 1996, is startling but perhaps not surprising given the demographic make-up of the immigrant population - young, male, rather poor and ill-educated, and, following a wave of refugees from war-torn Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, sometimes traumatised and disoriented.
Most of them were quickly absorbed by a robust labour market, but their traditional family structures began to fray under the pressure of an unfamiliar environment and the need to work much more than the Swiss to make a living. Many youths fell into a void. Against that background, cultural |
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The xenophobic right, represented by Christoph Blocher (above) wants tougher immigration rules
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explanations - many troublemakers hail from the Balkans, and a good number of them are Muslim - seem grossly misleading.
Most Swiss, just as most Germans, distinguish between real and naturalised citizens, whom they simply call foreigners. They accept them as workers, perhaps even as fellow humans, but not as compatriots. This is not something that can be changed easily through ambitious government action, and the same holds for the other side of the bargain, the much-vaunted 'integration'.
The Swiss would do well to hold on to their tradition of quiet pragmatism: Switzerland's exemplary vocational training system and its strong labour market are much more likely to take care of the problem in the long run than are armies of psychologists and counselors employed in quasi-scientific programmes.
At the same time, asking immigrants to accept certain norms and rules is not culturally insensitive - it's a precondition of successful coexistence. But to think that it would stop the sort of depravity reported from Zurich would be a dangerous delusion. 
FIRST POSTED DECEMBER 4, 2006
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