In 1961, the Swiss government set up a federal research commission to study the so-called ‘problem of the foreign workers.’ 1 Since 1948, hundreds of thousands of mostly Italian seasonal and annual workers had come to Switzerland to work in factories and workshops, in hotels and restaurants, in fields and on construction sites (Holenstein et al. 2018). Like in other European countries after World War II, foreign workers who were not supposed to settle or bring their families fuelled the economic growth throughout a nearly three-decade-long boom (Tanner 2015, p. 333; Chin 2017). In historical perspective, the work of the federal research commission marks an important turning point towards what was called an ‘active’ assimilation policy, respectively, a policy of Eingliederung (incorporation) for foreigners living in Switzerland. The final report published in 1964 reframed assimilation—a key notion in Swiss immigration debates since the early twentieth century—as a societal (and not merely individual) process, involving both the foreigners and to a lesser degree the host population. 2 This new ‘sociologic’ (Piñeiro 2015) of immigration emerging in the 1960s affected civil as well as governmental projects and practices. It reconfigured the field of action, knowledge, and power in which orders of national belonging, participation, citizenship, and the according lines of inclusion and exclusion were negotiated between different social actors. In this paper, I will focus on the role of social research in establishing the epistemic coordinate system of this Swiss sociologic of immigration. The overall aim is to develop a new angle on the historical genealogy of the current ambiguous state of Switzerland as a ‘non-immigration immigration country’ in an international context (Hoffmann-Nowotny 1995).
After World War I, the liberal laissez faire approach of the Swiss state since the nineteenth century had been replaced by a legal and administrative regime to restrict immigration and naturalisation. This transformation was based on a new ethnicised notion of the Swiss nation state that resonated with similar tendencies of closure in other countries in the interwar period (Kury 2003; Kury et al. 2005; Argast 2007; McKeown 2008). The corresponding ideology of so-called Überfremdung (overforeignisation) was embodied in new state institutions like the Fremdenpolizei (Federal Foreigners’ Police). The need for ‘foreign labour’ that surged again with the end of World War II, similar to other European countries was regulated by the Bundesgesetz über Aufenthalt und Niederlassung der Ausländer (Federal Act on the Residence and Permanent Settlement of Foreign Nationals—ANAG), which was introduced in the 1930s. This law limited the number of people entering the country, the duration of their stay, and the possibility of permanent residence. Yet the so-called rotational model based on a seasonal and annual foreign workforce came under pressure from various sides in the late 1950s. Multiple factors indicated that it would be rational to keep the foreign workers within the country: the growing competition in the European labour market and the dwindling reservoir of workers from southern European countries despite the continued economic boom; the influence of international norms for the improvement of the living and working conditions of migrant workers and their families; the inefficient frictional losses of a rotating workforce in Swiss companies; and last but not least the unforeseen and unplanned social reality of foreign workers settling in the country (Willi 1970, pp. 83–84, 132; Niederberger 2004; Gees 2006). It was against this backdrop that a heated debate on long-term immigration and incorporation evolved and the federal research commission started its work in the early 1960s. From the viewpoint of the Federal Foreigners’ Police, which had suggested to have the commission, assimilation was crucial to prevent what they perceived as an ‘overforeignisation’ of the Swiss population. In contrast to the initial intention to control and contain the alien elements in Swiss society, the work of the research commission opened the doors to all sorts of epistemic and political claims with regard to the incorporation of foreigners.
There are three basic narrative frameworks in which the shift in the Swiss immigration debates since the 1960s has been put into historical perspective. The first narrative is a history of exclusion focusing on the rise of anti-immigration discourses, restrictive immigration quotas, a culture of policing foreigners, and right-wing populism in the course of these new political debates on immigration, assimilation, and overforeignisation since the 1960s (Buomberger 2004; Skenderovic and D’Amato 2008). In a second narrative framework, the shift marks an important step towards the transformation of Switzerland into an immigration society (Niederberger 2004; Piguet 2006). This story of inclusion has two sides: the efforts of the host society on the one hand and the agency and struggles of immigrant actors for recognition, rights, and participation on the other hand (Maiolino 2011; Skenderovic 2015). In the third, more recent framework, the new ‘sociologic’ of assimilation in Switzerland has been interpreted as a shift in governance based on new knowledge-based practices (Piñeiro 2015). The Swiss expert debates on overforeignisation in the early twentieth century had been centred on the issue of naturalisation. They drew on legal and ‘arithmetic’ statistical knowledge (Kury 2003) rather than social research like, for example, had been the practice in Germany and the USA (Zimmerman 2010; Gabbacia 2015). The fact that a research commission in the early 1960s assigned, for the first time in Switzerland, a sociologist to write the chapter on assimilation of its final report highlights the historical emergence of a new sociologic of immigration. 3
One major challenge in writing the history of Switzerland turning into an immigration country ‘à contre cœur’ (Wimmer 2013, p. 114) in the second half of the twentieth century is to take into account all three of these frameworks and the according interplay of the heterogeneous dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and governance. The final report of the federal research commission, for example, was in fact polyphonic. Due to the various interests involved in its creation, elements of different frameworks were juxtaposed, from open xenophobia to liberal thoughts on introducing an ius soli . So far, these historical threads have been followed mostly in separate ways, with a strong focus on political history. The notion of ‘postmigrant societies,’ however, which has emerged in German-speaking social research in recent years (Foroutan 2016; Espahangizi 2018), provides an overarching non-teleological framework that departs from the simultaneity of conflicting processes. Postmigrant approaches aim at European countries that on the one hand have experienced deep demographic, political, social, and cultural transformations due to various forms of immigration after World War II (Chin 2017), and which on the other hand struggle to acknowledge, recognise, and incorporate the new social realities that have emerged from immigration. The according reconfigurations of orders of national and ethnic belonging and their lines of inclusion and exclusion take place in an expansive as much as ‘obsessive’ discourse on migration and integration (Espahangizi 2018). This public as well as expert discourse—and the institutions it is rooted in—embody, feed, and perpetuate the ambiguous and contradictory state of non-immigration immigration countries like Switzerland. As indicated by the case of the research commission of the Swiss state in the 1960s, the production and circulation of knowledge on migration and integration plays an important role in the development of this discourse on migration and integration. From a history of knowledge perspective, it is important to analyse how certain epistemic claims turned into powerful assets and strategies for different political agendas and projects of immigrant inclusion/exclusion/governance, and others not. At the same time, focussing on the history of knowledge highlights the historicity even of basic notions at play like ‘migration’ and ‘integration.’ The historical emergence and usage of these epistemic figurations in different contexts has to be taken into account in order to avoid the ‘migrantological’ pitfall of migration studies (Bojadzijev and Römhild 2014; Dahinden 2016). Hence, I will combine the postmigrant focus on societal transformation with a history of knowledge approach that raises the awareness for the historicity of the analytical categories.
In this article, I will take a closer look at the history of the landmark studies by two migration scholars—a Swiss native and a Zurich based German with Polish roots. Both studies were conducted in the aftermath of the research commission of the early 1960s and played a major role in shaping the epistemic coordinate system of the discourse on migration and integration in Switzerland: Rudolf Braun’s study on Sociocultural Problems of Incorporation of Italian Foreign Workers in Switzerland published in 1970 ...