Swiss Told to Integrate With Foreigners Because ‘Mass Migration Can’t be Stopped’

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FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images
Virginia Hale

Swiss people need to take classes on integrating with foreigners in order to get used to “becoming a minority” in their own country, a sociologist has said.

Ganga Jey Aratnam, who migrated to Switzerland 25 years ago, told an interview with Tages-Anzeiger that mass migration to the Swiss nation “is a one-way street, there is no going back”.

Switzerland’s native people should let go of the country’s historic customs and traditions as its population is replaced and come to recognise “hyper-diversity” as the national culture, the Sri Lankan academic said, arguing that “Swiss culture is not lost, it is developing”.

Asked whether he recognised that such a transition might be “overwhelming” for naive Swiss people, Aratnam responded: “That’s why I think there should be integration courses for locals.”

“We already have integration courses for immigrants. That is a good thing. Such courses are also necessary for locals because they are slowly becoming a minority.”

It is “in [Swiss people’s] interest” to get more familiarised with migrants, according to the sociologist, who asserted that “if the locals do not adapt, they will become losers in their own country”.

Illustrating such ‘losers’, he pointed to the example of elderly people who might “struggle” with foreigners then become “frustrated” when they are housed in a retirement home where 90 per cent of the staff comes from abroad.

Questioned by the Swiss-German language daily on whether mass migration could at least be “slowed”, the University of Basel scholar was insistent that once the door is opened to population transfers from the third world, it cannot be closed.

“Once diversity is achieved, there is no stopping it,” he said, noting that family reunification and other ‘human rights’-related policy means migration from the Global South will continue to rise no matter what national laws a government tries to put in place.

In addition, Aratnam noted that migrant women have “on average more [children] than Swiss women”.

“Immigration can no longer be stopped even with new laws [because this would be] in opposition to human rights, European integration and our economic structure,” he claimed.

However, Aratnam acknowledged in the interview that Japan was an example of a country that “has achieved a great deal of prosperity without migration”.

Upon Tages-Anzeiger pointing out that ‘around 90 percent of asylum seekers receive social assistance’’, and how ‘the majority of Eritreans in Switzerland do not work, even after years’, the former athlete merely insisted that “more efforts are needed”, alleging that “there is considerable untapped potential here”.

Breitbart London has previously reported on the dismal economic performance of many migrant groups in Switzerland, with figures revealing many have welfare dependency rates of more than 50 per cent.

Data gathered and published by the Federal Statistical Office and the State Secretariat for Migration revealed that 83.7 per cent of Somalis in Switzerland rely on state income, compared to 2.3 per cent of Swiss people and just 0.6 per cent of Japanese nationals.

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