ABSTRACT
On 13 March 2000, the following headline appeared in The New York Times: ‘A Swiss Town Votes to Reject Dozens of Would‐Be Citizens’. What followed in the article must have sounded very odd to the nonSwiss reader:
Provided with information about an applicant’s salary, tax status, background and hobbies, voters in an industrial suburb of Lucerne decided that only four families, all of Italian origin, were suitable to become Swiss – 8 individuals out of a total of 56. The rest, many from the former Yugoslavia, were voted down, most by considerable margins (Olson 2000).
