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> The fact that you describe Switzerland as “mostly homogeneous” really undermines the credibility of your argument. I'd love to hear an argument about how Swi
by brightlancer 3y ago
> The fact that you describe Switzerland as “mostly homogeneous” really undermines the credibility of your argument.
I'd love to hear an argument about how Switzerland is heterogeneous, but here's what I found:
Switzerland is a country of ~8.5M, or the same population as New York City, or 2/3 the population of the rest of New York State, or less than the population of Virginia and 11 other states.
And Switzerland is ~40k km², a bit less than New York State.
What I'm saying is it's very small compared to the US, with 330M people across 9M km² of land.
As for homogeneity, Switzerland doesn't have birthright citizenship (where the US does), so foreign nationals may remain foreign for multiple generations; it's also part of the Schengen, permitting EU members to travel and reside without a visa or other permission. All of this makes an apples to apples comparison with the US much harder.
Switzerland is ~75% Swiss nationals, with ~25% foreign nationals, but ~85% of those are from the Schengen area.
About 15% of the US population is foreign born, but almost half of those are naturalized citizens -- there's also 10M+ foreign nationals in the US illegally (more than the pop of Switzerland), though any children they have in the US will be natural-born citizens (unlike in Switzerland). If we include the first US-born generation, it jumps to 28% of the US population. And when we look at where those immigrants come from, two of the top three origins are in Asia (India and China).
Again, I don't know how to make an apples to apples comparison. It's likely that Switzerland is more heterogeneous than some places in the US, while less so than others. But if I had to make a broad statement, yeah, Switzerland is much more homogeneous than the US, and I'd love to hear an argument against it.