Switzerland and the Two Faces of Integration

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, awareness of the socio-economic costs of immigrants’ marginalisation and exclusion has led Swiss policymakers to promote integration. However, the biographical interviews with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (MRAs) who arrived in Switzerland between 2014 and 2019 tell a different story. MRAs consider themselves not well integrated, while the labour market outcomes of certain migrant groups are diverging. Particularly migrant women run the risk of being left behind. This chapter sheds light on these aspects. It also argues that policymaking can only be effective if it considers all structural and agential factors in their interdependence. The chapter illuminates a discrepancy between, on one hand, structural changes that do not always shape aspirations of Swiss policy actors for successful and promising policy implementation and, on the other, the realities of the migrants’ lives. Their experiences of deskilling and a consequent feeling of not being welcome lead to the development of negative epiphanic views on the inability to access gainful employment. The illuminated synergistic relationship between structural and agential factors are very instructive for policymaking: leaving agential considerations outside the scope of structural reforms can expose migrants to further risks and vulnerabilities, and exacerbate inequalities within host societies.