How Well Do Municipalities Cope with Immigration – System Capacity Versus Cultural Reclusiveness

Switzerland is a country with a relatively high rate of immigration.  This puts the municipalities under considerable pressure when it comes to measures to integrate the non-Swiss residents. In about 40 per cent of the municipalities top level officials claim that their municipality encounters difficulties to cope with integration problems. On the grounds of our regular surveys among all Swiss municipalities we are not only able to show, which types of municipalities are more successful in integrating residents from other countries, whether this depends, for example, on the size and on the financial situation of the municipality (system capacity, Dahl and Tufte 1973), and to what extent this depends on cultural and political differences between the municipalities. We can also show how the perceived difficulties to integrate foreigners developed over time and to what extent the countries the immigrants come from render integration more difficult. We expect problems to integrate foreigners to be higher in larger municipalities especially if they are short of financial resources, we believe that municipalities with a more liberal and more left wing oriented voting behavior encounter less problems , and finally it is the percentage of immigrants and their cultural distance which also play an important role.