Cynics Unlimited

Switzerland is known for a number of things, like the St. Bernard dog, the cuckoo clock, the Swiss army knife, and my all-time favourite the Brown Swiss cow. Now the country is making news for another reason: a proposed law that would deport immigrant families if their child were convicted of a violent crime, drug offence, or benefits fraud (see story). The bill is being presented by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party. If the party collects enough signatures in its favour, a referendum will be held on the bill and it could become law.

The proposal has, not surprisingly, been described as racist. First off was the campaign poster showing three white sheep kicking out a black sheep over the words, in German, “For security.” While the term “black sheep” as in “black sheep of the family” generally does not have any racial connotations, critics charge that this particular sheep conjures up images of dark-skinned criminals. In 2004 the Swiss People’s Party used a poster depicting black hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports in a – successful – bid to restrict immigration to the country. The party has also proposed a ban on the construction of minaret towers alongside mosques. On the other hand, it is difficult to tell whether the group is racist per se, that is, in the sense of believing that Whites are superior to members of other races and should receive preferential treatment. For example, the party has called for the cancellation of Swiss aid to Eastern Europe, a region where nearly all the inhabitants are White.

Ueli Maurer, president of the Swiss People’s Party, does not seem too perturbed by this criticism. He reports that there have been “no complaints” about his proposal and expresses confidence that “as soon as the first ten families and their children have been expelled from the country, then things will get better at a stroke.” Furthermore, the party claims that foreigners, who constitute roughly a fifth of Switzerland’s population, are four times more likely to become involved in crime than are Swiss nationals. According to an official study conducted by the Federal Foreigners’ Commission, non-citizens are in fact overrepresented in violent offences.

The bill has been attacked as well on the grounds that it hearkens back to the Nazi practice of “Sippenhaft” (kin liability) whereby a criminal’s family members were punished alongside the offender him- or herself for the crime in question. On one hand, the idea that an individual might be held accountable and made to pay for a relative’s crime goes against our sense of justice. Even the supposedly wrathful God of the Old Testament states that “Parents must not be put to death for the crimes of their children, and children must not be put to death for the crimes of their parents.” Though deportation rarely leads to death, the substance of the argument remains the same.

Nonetheless, many of us feel that at a moral if not legal level parents are responsible to a certain extent for the conduct of their children. As another Biblical saying goes, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Certainly most people would recognize some mitigating circumstances. For instance, few would entirely blame the adoptive parents of a teenager born with fetal alcohol syndrome for an offence he or she might not even be aware of having committed. The vast majority of parents, though, have at least some control over how their sons and daughters turn out.

Another issue raised by the Swiss People’s Party’s bill deals with the rights of non-citizens when they commit crimes in their country of residence. Even individuals such as myself who would probably oppose a law that penalized parents for the misdeeds of their offspring might agree there is a strong case to be made that non-nationals guilty of serious offences in their adopted nations forfeit their right to continue living there. Canada faced this dilemma twice in 1994 and again in 2005. In separate incidents, Georgina Leimonis, police officer Todd Baylis, and Jane Creba were killed by people who had been ordered deported from Canada after committing violent crimes here. In the aftermath of the murders, some legal experts, professors and newspaper columnists (like the Globe and Mail’s Michael Valpy) argued that deporting the offenders in question would be too harsh because they had spent most of their childhoods in Canada, the “only country they knew.” They simply had never become Canadian citizens. One might counter that citizenship is like marriage: if you take the step of obtaining citizenship of a particular country, you are entitled to certain rights and protections that those who decline to do so are not, just like, as I wrote in a previous article, married couples should enjoy privileges that their common-law counterparts do not. Therefore by not making an effort to get the proper papers, the killers of the three above-mentioned individuals lose the legal as well as moral right to stay in this country. (Of course citizens who commit crimes should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.) In this respect the Swiss proposal to deport immigrants – though not their families – who fail to abide by the laws of the land in which they reside would probably not strike most people as a great injustice.

The future of this bill is yet to be seen. Stay tuned.