Word: swiss
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...party charges on its website that more than half of all citizenship requests - in 2006, approximately 50,000 were granted in this country of 7.5 million - go to immigrants from the Balkans and Turkey. The SVP claims those immigrants commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes and abuse Swiss social and welfare benefits. Some official statistics do attribute the rise in serious infractions to resident foreigners, but the numbers are not clear. For example, official statistics show that in 2007 nearly 70% of all prisoners in Switzerland were foreigners, but some experts say that is because foreigners are considered...
...message is not lost on Nesim, whose dream of becoming a Swiss citizen is turning into a nightmare. Although he has fulfilled all the criteria necessary for naturalization - a 12-year residency requirement, fluent language skills, solid employment record as a mason, and good cultural integration - "I feel ostracized," he says. "I wonder whether I'll ever be 'good enough' to become Swiss...
...controversial initiative was forced by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), which put up the poster that unsettled Nesim and has collected the obligatory 100,000 signatures required under Swiss law to put a constitutional amendment to a national vote. It seeks to overturn a 2003 Federal Court ruling that deemed ballot box votes on naturalization an infringement on the rights of would-be citizens. The decision was handed down after residents of the town of Emmen in central Switzerland repeatedly voted to reject citizenship applications from non-Western European nationals living in their midst...
...says Christian Girard, a 19-year-old high school senior who is the vice-president of SVP's youth section in Geneva and supports the initiative. "Direct democracy has been a Swiss tradition for 150 years and we know how to vote responsibly," he says. "Naturalization must be a political, not an administrative process. And in a political process, people should be the ones to decide...
...Girard insists that he - and his party - is not against granting citizenship to foreigners who are assimilated. "But we should be more selective in this process, rather than just handing out Swiss passports like candy to anyone who asks...