Gespräch mit der Einbürgerungskommission

This week, almost six months after we had our first interview, we received the invitation to the Gespräch mit der Einbürgerungskommission.  This is the big interview with a committee of seven people during which we’ll be grilled about Swiss history, geography, traditions and the government.  The first three categories shouldn’t be difficult but the fourth, because it will include the names of our federal, cantonal and local politicians will be a bit trickier.  We may even be asked the departments for which they’re responsible.  My strategy will be, when in doubt, answer Urs or Ueli and hope for the best.   Our interview was initially scheduled for October 11th, when we’ll be in San Diego for Lindsey’s wedding, so I shifted it to the week after we return.    Not a problem.  We’ve waited this long so what’s two more weeks.  We know others who’ve done this, although no Americans, so we’ve done some research to learn a bit about what to expect.  All Cantons do it differently and in Basel we’ve heard that one member of the committee does the speaking and will direct each question to a specific family member.   Unfortunately, this means that it’s not done like a game show where the family can huddle before confidently responding with their collective answers.  This is too bad for us because while Paige’s excellent German would ensure we understood the questions correctly, her negligible interest in preparing may leave her stranded, short of the goal.  In a team scenario, I could have then stepped in to demonstrate the benefits of my boundless enthusiasm and preparation to provide the correct answer.   Alas, that’s not how it will go so we run the risk of me accurately answering the wrong question while Paige is left responding, “I don’t know” in perfect Schwyzerdütsch.  We’ll see.  Wish us luck. 

Einbürgerungsgesuch

Well, the wheels of our naturalization process finally became unstuck and last Friday we had the first family interview, the one whose purpose is to gauge our level of swissness.   Up to this point, our application has been judged administratively, for instance whether we’re in arrears on debt obligations or have committed any crimes.  Fortunately, speeding tickets apparently don’t count.  I’ve lost count of how many of those I’ve collected although it’s not as felonious as it sounds since a mere 3 mph over the limit will earn you one here.  I took the invitation to the above-mentioned interview as an implied recognition that we passed this objective hurdle and were deemed ready to have our level of assimilation assessed.   Integration is a very important part of the process and is evaluated on four levels; social, cultural, political and economic and the first step in doing this is via the family interview with your case manager, in our case a nice young woman named Frau Nonic. 

The interview took place in the same office building where we received the application a year ago and as we sat waiting our turn, Paige, who wasn’t present for that perfunctory exercise, made an interesting observation that I’d missed even though I’m better positioned than she to have made it.  She remarked about the total absence in this Swiss government building of any flags or pictures of government officials.  In the US, you can’t swing a dead cat in a government building without knocking over an American flag or endangering a picture of the president, and Paige, who’s never been in a US administration building other than the embassy in Bern, was somehow able to see this.  What explains this lack of nationalistic ornamentation?  Probably the same reason why you will only rarely see Swiss politicians with little Swiss flags adorning their lapels.   I can unequivocally say that the Swiss are just as proudly patriotic as Americans but as with most things, not overtly so in a rah-rah sort of way.  Call it typical Swiss reserve.   Hopp Schwiez! has its place during a World Cup soccer game but in an office building?  What’s the point?

In any event, this interview is the first of two, intended, as I said, to subjectively assess how integrated we are into Swiss society.  I would like to note at this point that we’re more than okay with this expectation.  Switzerland is a small country and as such could be susceptible to significant changes to its cultural norms brought about by immigrants more interested in making Switzerland meet their expectations than respecting and adopting the traditions and conventions that make Switzerland what it is.  Change happens here but it’s slow and that’s okay.  Swiss citizenship is not a right due us or anyone else and it’s incumbent on us, as immigrants, to demonstrate that we seek to gain the privileges of being citizens of the Switzerland that is, not of another Switzerland more closely resembling the United States. 

The interview itself went well.  Frau Nonic began by putting us at ease and kindly asked whether we’d prefer to speak Schwyzerdütsch or Hochdeutsch.   For Paige it doesn’t matter but for Lisa and me, it makes the difference between comprehension and blank stares and we gratefully accepted her offer to speak standard German.   Her questions were about our backgrounds, how we interact with Swiss people and why we wanted to become Swiss (still sounds strange when I put it that way).  At one point, as she was reviewing our file, she asked where our other two children lived and it occurred to us that because Lindsey had never been registered here it was, from the Swiss authorities’ perspective, as if she didn’t even exist.  One more ignominy for the poor child who found herself split off from the pack thirteen years ago when we dropped her off at Cornell and fled the country.  She had the only revenge she can muster when she did her study abroad in Australia instead of Europe but has since made peace with this turn of events, no doubt helped by the eventual coalescing of the greater part of the offspring in the US.  The discussion went pretty smoothly with the only unexpected question coming when Frau Nonic asked me what my father did for a living, which wasn’t a problem except I didn’t know the word for Human Resources.  Towards the end, she spent a few minutes giving us pointers on how to prepare for the next interview, which will be more intimidating because it will be with a panel of seven people.  Also, the focus will be on factual specifics about the government, geography, politics and history, not just about the clubs we participate in and how we like our jobs or school.  This is the test that most of our Swiss friends say they’d likely fail themselves although, as native language speakers I point out that they could more easily bullshit their way through it than Lisa and I could.  When she told us that Basel offers a course specifically designed to prepare applicants for this interview we let slip, at the risk of appearing a bit too eager beaver, that we were already signed up.  She nodded, seemingly not surprised then concluded by outlining the next steps and telling us that the invitation to the panel interrogation would probably not come until after the summer holidays and that we’d receive another bill in the coming weeks, neither of which surprised me.

Next step, the class, which sounds genuinely fun and interesting but which I've yet to convince Paige to attend.

Sexting

We remain in the naturalization holding pattern so I thought I'd address to an entirely different topic. Sexting.  It was recently brought to mind for me when I read an Atlantic article by Amanda Mull titled, Why Do Smart People Send Nudes?  It was fascinating, if disappointingly not in the least titillating but as often happens when reading articles containing links, three hours of my life quickly evaporated and by the time I climbed out of this particular rabbit hole I’d flipped through almost fifty academic articles dissecting the topic of sexting.  Who would have thought that this is such a dynamic and growing area of research?  More impressive than the body of work, however, were the results as one study summarized a meta-analysis which showed that almost half of the adult respondents reported sending nude photos.  Somewhat comforting was the finding that this figure dropped to 12% for minors, but still.  Sadly, this area of research is almost entirely devoted to adolescents and young adults so I couldn't help wondering how the numbers look for my generation, the shady side of fifty.   The only study that ventured into this age group delivered a surprisingly high number (40%) but the data was drawn from what I suspect, or hope, is a severely non-representative population of respondents, namely members of Ashley-Madison, a website whose motto is, “Life is short…Have an Affair”.   So, in response to the scant attention we’ve received - Jeff Bezos is but a single data point - I resolved to devote an hour to conducting a very scientific study which consisted of asking some work colleagues a simple question.  Have you ever sent pictures of your genitals to someone else with your smart phone?  I live and work in Europe so such a question, while not common, is less likely to be viewed as sexual harassment in the workplace here.  It’s clearly not encouraged but if you’re careful you can get away with it and not affect your work relationships too much.  In any event, it didn’t take long and by extrapolating my findings across cultures I’m happy to say that except for billionaires, no one in my generation has ever sexted a picture of their junk to someone else.   I don’t think anyone has ever even taken a picture of their junk but I didn’t ask that question specifically.  I would publish this important finding but after having scanned the articles noted above I can see that I’d have to first do some really complicated statistical analysis that I’m not qualified to do.  I’d also probably need to speak with more than ten people.  But please feel free to build upon this mound of data and let me know what you learn.  If you’re a Millennial, you can start by asking your parents, who will, I’m certain, be happy to discuss this topic with you.  At least now though, thanks to Mr. Bezos and Mr. Pecker, they’ll as least know what sexting is.  Also, in case you’re wondering how I’d have answered the question myself, let’s just say that the closest I’ve ever come to sexting, with or without photos, is a few kissy-kissy emojis and if I’m feeling especially amorous, I’ll sometimes include a little heart or two.     

I hate waiting

It’s been six weeks since I submitted the application and nothing’s happened.  Well, not literally nothing.  We did receive an invoice.  I concede that we’ve had fair warning to expect no updates during the lengthy review period between application submission and invitation to the Gespräch mit der Einbürgerungskommission (Immigration committee interview) but still … couldn’t they throw us a bone?  Perhaps a “Thinking of you” postcard.  Or even just an email.  I pulled out the packet of information I’d been given when I handed in our application.  Tucked within was an invitation to information sessions for applicants.  Offered six time a year, they’re forty-five minute summaries of the process and what we can do to prepare for the interview.  I’d seen this but hadn’t originally planned to attend.  I thought I knew everything we need to do, but maybe not.   Maybe there are some tips and tricks.  And they’ll probably have cookies.   I sent in the RSVP.

Application submitted

Last week, five and a half months after kicking off the process, we submitted our application.  In mid-June the last remaining document, Paige’s birth certificate, finally arrived.  In fact, we received two.  Perhaps Pennsylvania was trying to make up for having lost our original order.  I immediately scooted down to the Zivilstandamt to submit our now complete package of official certificates.  The clerk accepted the documents and asked me how I would like to pay the CHF 116 filing fee.   After paying, I stood expectantly waiting for the promised registrar’s extract.  The remaining piece of the application puzzle.  Sensing my expectation, she told me that it would be sent by post.  What?  Couldn’t I just wait a bit and get it while there?   “Nope, we will send it.”    Astutely recognizing my limited negotiation position, I nodded acceptance and left.  In the end, I thought, what’s another two weeks.   November, 2020 is more than two years away and we’ll certainly have this worked out by then.  Sure enough, two weeks later the official document arrived so I zipped down to the immigration office at the first opportunity (open Thursdays only) to submit the full application.  Five months’ worth of form filling, certificate ordering, document collecting and signature requesting.  It felt like I was holding a summary of our very existence which, from a Swiss perspective, perhaps I was.  To my surprise, there was no line in the immigration office.  A dark thought emerged.  Maybe they weren’t open.  Worse, maybe everyone eligible had already applied.  Darker still, maybe the immigration quota had been filled and it was too late.  Not to worry, though.  No line meant simply no wait and I was immediately invited in to speak with a nice, thirty something woman of Asian descent.  She asked for my package and quickly sifted through it to ensure completeness.  After having done so she stamped a case number on the front sheet and told me we would be invited to an interview in six to eight months.  She also mentioned casually that we should expect a bill in the next few days for CHF 950.  The entire interaction took five minutes. Three days later there it was in our post box.  I’d heard that this part of the process was very efficient.  On the invoice it was noted that our assigned Ansprechperson would be Kun-Hye Suh.  Our contact person was herself an immigrant.  I smiled at the irony and immediately paid the bill.  The last thing I wanted was to be the source of another delay.

Die Geburtsurkunde

First big setback today when I learned that Pennsylvania lost our request for Paige’s birth certificate so I must re-order it.  As mentioned in my last post, I won’t whine about this but it is pretty annoying.  We won’t have to pay twice but our new order goes to the end of the queue so it’ll be another month before we get it (or more if it’s lost again).  Like I said, no whining.  Let’s just say that I’m bringing it up in hopes of helping future Schweizermachers.  Clearly, this is a workstream to initiate at the beginning of the process and as a professional project manager, I know that it’s all about identifying and addressing critical paths.  

Naturalization meeting

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an invitation that we’d received to attend an information meeting for Basel residents who’ve recently become eligible to pursue Swiss citizenship.  I mentioned a comment made by a neighbor who wondered whether the invitation was distributed only to those possessing first world passports.  Well, last night the meeting took place and I can say unequivocally that the invitation list was blind to national or socioeconomic standing.   There were over 300 people crammed into the Grossratssaal (another of the many very beautiful rooms in the various Basel government buildings) in the Basel Rathaus.  There were people in the seats.  People in the tribune.  People in the aisles and along the back wall.  There were even people sitting in the seats reserved for the members of the Cantonal Council during the bi-monthly meetings.  It was definitely not the cozy little gathering of twenty or thirty people that I expected. 

The question of whether such a turnout was expected by the organizers was settled with the first few words from Mr. Michel Girand, Head of the Migration Department, when he opened the meeting by saying how astonished they were by the crowd.  He was undaunted, however, and moved ahead with reviewing the agenda before handing over to Mr. Bashi Dürr, a member of the Cantonal Council.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t see Mr. Dürr from my seat in the balcony but I could hear him and was thankful that he and his colleagues addressed us in High German and not the Basel dialect that continues to elude me.  He welcomed us, saying a few words about what it meant to become a Swiss citizen then passed the baton to Mr. Oliver Meury (Office of Naturalization and Residency Permits) and Dr. Stefan Wehrle (Basel City Council member) who carried the ball the remainder of the meeting.  Mr. Meury began by reviewing the process, noting that it all begins with a visit to the Immigration Office, which is only possible on Thursdays.  As he said that, he remarked that this was coincidently the next day then quickly added that it would be best if not everyone in the room that evening were to stop by.  The comment was certainly not planned and resulted in a ripple of laughter which loosened up the crowd.   He then shared a video of street interviews with people who were asked whether they were Swiss and what it meant to be Swiss.  Most of them spoke in pretty heavy dialect so I couldn’t understand much of what they had to say but they were anyway pretty funny.  One lady in particular, who from my perspective might as well have been speaking Russian, communicated sufficiently through her facial expressions and cadence that I found myself laughing just as hard as those in the room who actually understood what she was saying.    

In the end, none of the information communicated was news to me as I’ve made quite a project of understanding the process and pretty much everything is available via the internet but what I did get out of the evening was a feeling for the enthusiasm within the crowd.  These folks were clearly interested in doing this.  They were happy to be in the room and weren’t doing so just to participate in the inevitable Apero at the end of the evening.  The second half of the meeting was reserved for Q&A with Mr. Girand circulating around the room, handing the microphone over to one participant after another for their, often very personal, questions. One lady introduced herself as being from Aleppo and her question had to do with her birth certificate.  As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, one of the requirements for applicants is that they provide an original copy of their birth certificate issued not more than six months ago.   She remarked that the office where she would get hers no longer exists and she is afraid to return in person to find out what she must do.  Her question was simple.  What are her options?  The crowd was silent as she asked this.  Mr. Meury told her to stop by the Zivilstandamt to speak with someone there.  She asked if he would personally help her.  Her boldness in asking this, and the way in which she did it, wasn’t cheeky.  It was touching.  The crowd responded with supportive laughter, then Mr. Meury said he would and the crowd cheered.  It made me feel good and I resolved to stop whining about Pennsylvania’s delay in providing Paige’s certificate. 

I stopped by the Apero as I was leaving the building and there, on the tables, was proof that they did not expect over 300 people.  A few baskets of crackers and five or six of those savory cakes with bacon specks.  I left them to everyone else and went home for dinner.