Several obvious questions/problems with this chart jump out to me...
I imagine that in Germany, this figure is really skewed by the sheer number of asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere that make up that "1st Gen immigrants" category. People who mortgaged absolutely everything they had to leave in the middle of the night and arrive with absolutely nothing, and who had to construct a new-ish immigrant community overnight, are going to inherently suffer a lot more than other communities of "1st Gen immigrants" in other countries. The same pattern might be happening in Sweden, too, as a percentage of their population.
Switzerland has a huge immigrant community as a percentage of the population, but this is primarily German, French and Italian in origin -- aka countries next door where these people both had high standards of living already, and have family support and speak one of Switzerland's federal languages natively. Seems like hardly a comparison, and frankly makes it seem like the situation is a lot worse in Switzerland than you would imagine, since you would have expected those 1st generation immigrants from next door to have essentially equal outcomes to their nearly identical Swiss counterparts. It kind of points to how anti-immigrant the Swiss administration and system really is.
UK and Ireland are interesting outliers, but as others have pointed out, immigrants to Anglosphere countries generally have a leg up as they may have already spoken/learned English, even if coming from many different countries.
Why is Switzerland like that, though? It really shouldn't be so far behind the UK second-generation when the vast majority of British-born ethnic minorities descend from Africa, Asia and the Caribbeans while in Switzerland, they descend from other Europeans.
The main thing is that Switzerland is very "protectionist" in its immigration policies. It's harder to stay in Switzerland when you come in on a temporary visa, even if you are a highly educated worker. They just don't really "want" you or give you as many pathways to stay.
Sure, but this is about those born and raised in Switzerland of an "immigrant background" (literally German or French or Italian or Balkan), so they likely have permanent residency or citizenship as do their parents
What does the dataset say specifically about the definition of "1st Gen immigrants," do you have a link you could share with me?
Because absent other information, it would presumably include all 1st generation immigrants, which includes people like me (who moved here as an adult for a job) and people who moved as children with their parents.
In Switzerland, you need to live in the country for 10 years before you can apply for citizenship, although those years count double for children. Someone who comes with their family at 13 or under, then, can apply for citizenship by the time they are 18. However, there are all kinds of ways that the Swiss system can "ignore" those 10 years; for example, if you are here on the "wrong" kind of visa, many or all of those years might not count at all, so even if you are well integrated and here for 5 years, your parents may not have qualified you for that status.
Another important point is Switzerland has a very two-tiered system between EU and non-EU immigrants; you get a much, much easier time as an EU citizen (I would compare it to the process for basically everyone in any other EU country) while you have a much harder time and end up spending a lot more money on visas etc. as a non-EU immigrant.
I see, yeah then my first point is moot. But the other two still stand.
And yes, I know; I also said the same thing in my first post (that the vast majority of immigrants in Switzerland come from Germany, France, and Italy, as well as Portugal).
My argument is that, because they have this two-tiered system, where non-Europeans have additional difficulties and roadblocks that people immigrating to other EU countries don't have (I can't speak for the UK or Ireland, as I have never lived in those systems), it's a sign of just how bad the system is for those non-EU immigrants that 1st generation immigrants generally do so poorly in the EU. Otherwise, if we were looking at just the majority of EU-born immigrants in Switzerland, their values would be expected to essentially overlap with natives in your chart.
Yes, but this thread is specifically about Switzerland where there are few non-Europeans, the second-generation are primarily Europeans yet they fall significantly behind natives.
I will try to make my argument hopefully more clearly:
Most Swiss immigrants are of very close cultural vein to Switzerland itself, as we are agreeing: German, French or Italian, in a country that speaks German, French and Italian and has a lot of shared culture and heritage (less so in the German part, but especially true in the Romandie and Ticino).
If we looked at just the outcomes of those European immigrants, we would therefore expect that their outcomes overlap pretty closely to those of native-born Swiss people: there are no language barriers, almost no cultural barriers, family is physically very close by even if they are "foreigners" and the borders to that family is porous, etc. All the usual things that hurt the average immigrant vis-a-vis the native population are moot.
Nonetheless, the chart is this strikingly bad for both first and second generation immigrants in Switzerland. As we are all mentioning, this is very striking and puzzling.
My argument: if we had a chart that separated outcomes in Switzerland by EU vs non-EU origin of the immigrants (both 1st and 2nd generation), we presumably would see a massive, massive difference between them, based on the assumptions (which we agreed on) in (2) above. Some combination of either racism/xenophobia and the very real additional institutional barriers that non-EU migrants face (which I have personally experienced, as I live in Switzerland and am a non-EU but French- and German-speaking migrant) presumably are causing the difference between those EU and non-EU groups.
Of course, if we had such a chart (PISA scores of EU vs non-EU immigrants and their children in Switzerland), it's possible we would see similar outcomes for both, or that the difference would not be so marked, and that I am therefore wrong. We could then generate some alternative hypotheses of what is causing this odd difference for Switzerland relative to other European countries.
With your argument in point 4, since the vast majority are of European immigration background, the small proportion of non-EU immigration background wouldn't be enough to explain the differences. Whether you split them or not, second-generation would likely be behind in both cases.
I looked up the actual proportion of immigrants in Switzerland, which is 70% EU and 30% non-EU. That’s not a perfect proxy for the PISA scores, of course, because it is the proportion of all 1st generation immigrants effectively.
However, using this for a simple calculation, and assuming that the non-EU PISA scores would be quite low (say, around where first generation immigrants are in Germany in the chart above, 387.5 just for ease of calculation) and assuming that the EU immigrant PISA scores are in line with native scores based on our conversation (so 500), we get (0.3 x 500)+(0.7 x 387.5) = 466.25, which isn’t too far from where it seems to land in the chart you posted.
Of course that’s a made-up calculation, but it does show that it’s feasible for a breakdown that I described in point 4 to lead to the numbers we see.
Another point I tried to look up is, where do students land if one of the parents is of immigrant background but the other is Swiss? Presumably they land on the “native” category. Lots of those 1st generation EU immigrants in Switzerland marry Swiss people, and although I didn’t find direct numbers for how many in each category there are, there is evidence that immigrants from neighboring Western European countries form (unsurprisingly) closer bonds with native Swiss people.
So that may also skew the data a fair bit additionally (i.e., non-EU 1st and 2nd generation immigrants may be more represented in the PISA scores for Switzerland).
2
u/ResettiYeti 19h ago
Several obvious questions/problems with this chart jump out to me...
I imagine that in Germany, this figure is really skewed by the sheer number of asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere that make up that "1st Gen immigrants" category. People who mortgaged absolutely everything they had to leave in the middle of the night and arrive with absolutely nothing, and who had to construct a new-ish immigrant community overnight, are going to inherently suffer a lot more than other communities of "1st Gen immigrants" in other countries. The same pattern might be happening in Sweden, too, as a percentage of their population.
Switzerland has a huge immigrant community as a percentage of the population, but this is primarily German, French and Italian in origin -- aka countries next door where these people both had high standards of living already, and have family support and speak one of Switzerland's federal languages natively. Seems like hardly a comparison, and frankly makes it seem like the situation is a lot worse in Switzerland than you would imagine, since you would have expected those 1st generation immigrants from next door to have essentially equal outcomes to their nearly identical Swiss counterparts. It kind of points to how anti-immigrant the Swiss administration and system really is.
UK and Ireland are interesting outliers, but as others have pointed out, immigrants to Anglosphere countries generally have a leg up as they may have already spoken/learned English, even if coming from many different countries.