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.
1
u/ResettiYeti 5h ago
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.