From what I've read of it, a lot of it is cultural as well. Outside a few liberal, cosmopolitan parts of society (whether left-liberal or right-liberal), many S

From what I've read of it, a lot of it is cultural as well. Outside a few liberal, cosmopolitan parts of society (whether left-liberal or right-liberal), many Swiss just don't want more than a handful of immigrants, and like maintaining a closed, stable Nation of people whose great-great-grandfathers were Swiss. This even (perhaps especially) extends to negative sentiment directed at German immigrants by Swiss-Germans. One paper I ran across (via Wikipedia) suggested that negative sentiment directed at Germans might be due to their similarity: if the objective cultural difference between two groups is not huge, then an influx of immigration is particularly threatening, because it might erase the fragile boundary: http://img2.tapuz.co.il/CommunaFiles/44893554.pdf http://img2.tapuz.co.il/CommunaFiles/44893554.pdf