Nearly half the marriages in Switzerland are international ones, up from a third in 1990.
Yet language still matters:
…the Swiss “marry out” in particular ways. The German-speaking Swiss marry largely neighbouring Germans; the Francophone Swiss marry the French; Italian-speakers marry Italians.
Story here, and here are some more numbers:
According to Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore, 5% of marriages in Japan in 2008-09 included a foreign spouse (with four times as many foreign wives as husbands). Before 1980, the share had been below 1%. In South Korea, over 10% of marriages included a foreigner in 2010, up from 3.5% in 2000. In both countries, the share of cross-border marriages seems to have stabilised lately, perhaps as a result of the global economic slowdown.
…in France the proportion of international marriage rose from about 10% in 1996 to 16% in 2009. In Germany, the rise is a little lower, from 11.3% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2010.
…In most developing countries, the share of men married to foreign women was less than 2% in 2000 (0.7% in Ghana and Bolivia; 0.2% in Colombia and the Philippines; 3.3% in South Africa)…only 4.6% of Americans were married to a foreigner in 2010, up from 2.4% in 1970.
as of right now 100% of commenters to this post are married to foreigners
Sort of – technically, I’m the foreigner, not my wife.
My wife and I are from opposite sides of the oldest international border in Western Europe.
I’ll bite: Switzerland-Germany?
Netherlands-Germany?
England-Scotland?
Wales/England is my guess, although may God help you if you’ve married the welsh!
Impressively 21% of the Swiss population is foreign residents. Purely statistically that should translate to a 38% rate of international marriages; so 50% is not that far off. Heterogeneous age demographics etc. should explain the rest.
What percentage of these international marriages involve one Swiss partner? That’d proxy for integration.
>Impressively 21% of the Swiss population is foreign residents.
Why does this impress you?
Why do you loathe native Swiss people so badly?
Things can be impressively bad as well as impressively good. Or just impressive, with no value judgments.
+1
These stats are not very useful. They include tourist marriages — ie where both spouses are foreign.
This obviously drives up the rate in a country like France.
The stats are not look at the marriages of current citizens or even residents, but instead are just looking at marriage records.
The rate of French marrying foreigners may be going up, but the fact that many rich American couples pay to have their fantasy wedding in Paris or on the French Riviera doesn’t say much about changes in French marriage habits.
Tourist marriage #s would have to be separated out for this data to be useful.
only 4.6% of Americans were married to a foreigner
A Swiss German-speaker marrying a German is about the same as a Californian marrying somebody from Arizona or Oregon.
You ever tried to understand Swiss German? Completely unintelligible as far as I am concerned.
switzerdeutsch? cofusing indeed!
But no German can understand Swiss German until they have lived in Switzerland for months and interacted with the language almost daily (some Germans on the border excluded).
I lived there for 12 weeks and still couldnt understand the Swiss unless they switched to Standard German, which most Swiss can do (because they learn it in school), but they still arent native speakers.
I think the Swiss don’t like Germans speaking Swiss-German to them.
That’s because the Germans invariably fail at it. I actively recommend to all German friends not to try – it’s just too embarrassing for everyone involved.
Realistically, if you did not learn Swiss German by the end of your teens, you never will.
Funny the Swiss are so proud that they can speak Italian that Italians can’t understand, German that Germans can’t understand, and French that French can’t understand.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage weren’t higher here in Detroit that other parts of the U.S. because of our proximity to Canada. Slocum is right. This is more about geography.
How do you define an “international” marriage in the US? If an immigrant to the US marries an American-born, is the marriage “international” or domestic? The US is a universal nation and most of these sterotypes do not apply to the diversity at play here.
Is it because Switzerland is percieved as a nice place to live? Maybe a typical Swiss can “trade up” on the marriage quality scale by offering the ability to live in Switzerland.
I don’t think that’s a major concern, at least not for most marriages. Most EU nationals can get a Swiss work permit as long as they can find a job there. Besides, it’s a two-way transaction: do the Swiss marry EU citizens in order to live/work in EU countries?
The quality of life in Switzerland is (in my opinion) not substantially different to that in neighbouring Alpine parts of France, Germany, Italy, or Austria – and all EU nationals have the right to live there. The Economist and Mercer “Liveable Cities” indices often rate Swiss cities highly, but Vienna and Düsseldorf are rated highly too and few people aspire to living there.
Swiss salaries are substantially higher than anywhere around it.
Higher salaries and lower taxes (sadly partially compensated by insane real estate)
Yes, but the real estate only matters till you live there. Nothing smarter than earning in Switzerland and retiring in……umm Majorca?
And how exactly do you propose to earn there without living there (living on the other side of the border might help real estate but will drastically increase your taxes, so that one is out)?
I married a Texan. Does that count?
To Rick Perry, yes.
A Swiss should marry either an American or a European, a European an American and vice versa, because of all the permanent residency and work-permit benefits that result from immigration policies that favor “family reunification” over merit or readiness for work.
A Swiss who marries into the EU or USA has multiplied his opportunities 100-fold, while a EU-USA marriage roughly doubles the opportunities to both spouses.
Of course, gays, cohabitors and singles will remain screwed by the outdated immigration policies of most countries and should consider “sham” marriages if need be.
The Swiss do have the same liberty to move to the EU as any EU citizen – at least until the right wing nuts get their chance to screw with this…
The Swiss (at least some) seem paranoid about the German hordes coming in and stealing Swiss jobs. I’m curious to observe the endgame.
I’m neutral on this issue.
!!!
legitimate lol
I think an interesting indicator is the marriage across languages (my case: German / South-American-Spanish, and we live in France). Our home culture is something that resembles our individual cultures sprinkled and modulated by the cultures of countries where we have lived together.
More and more, we are finding that many people are living in the similar situation. Look across graduate schools (sience PhDs, MBAs, social science PhDs) and global firms (consulting, banking, big multinationals, NGOs) and you’ll find this pattern. People meet, fall in love and get married, eventually settling down in one of the home countries or in a third country. This affects the way we consume, the opinions we hold, etc. After 10 years, you feel more at home in your own hybrid culture (the word “third culture” is used when referring to children), than perhaps in our home-country culture.
This affects world culture. I wonder whether Tyler touches this issue in his book about globalization and culture (I have not read it).
how is this related to the hard way of becoming swiss citizen? http://www.bfm.admin.ch/content/bfm/en/home/themen/buergerrecht/einbuergerung/ordentliche_einbuergerung.html
That might be why the Swiss spymaster was bat shit crazy. Too many suspects
Women are attracted to what they can understand. Men sieze whatever is attracted to them.
The vast majority of women stay within their language and cultural group.
Women vary less than men, and are hypergamic.
Men vary more than women, creating a body of undesirable men at different points in the distribution across the social classes.
So men at each point of undesirability will select down if they need to in order to get access to sex (japanese marriages for example, and americans who seek russian and asian brides)
In the lower classes and lower status races within any geography, there is a mutual status benefit to marrying across lines.
Urban women seem to be gene-capturing testosterone and reverting to serial marriages with more predictable men – restoring our historical mating pattern
Humans are predominantly serially monogamous, and marriage as we understand it is an artifact of the agrarian era.
1. Distance. 2. Language. 3. Citizenship requirements.
1-2. More than half of all Danes live closer to a national border than the distance between N.Y. and New Jersey. Switzerland is roughly the same size (km^2) but the fact that it’s landlocked means that you have to look really hard to find a point not within, say, 150 km of the border. Play around with google maps if you doubt me. More than 90% speak either (Swiss) German, (Swiss) French or (Swiss) Italian and when including language considerations the distances shrink even further, in particular for the French- and Italian speaking segments of the populations.
In Switzerland, it’s a lot easier to come work in the country than it is to become a citizen, and lots of people live in the country but do not obtain citizenship for one reason or another. This has been the case for a long time: “The number of registered resident foreigners was 1,001,887 (16.17%) in 1970. This amount decreased to 904,337 (14.34%) in 1979, and has increased steadily since that time, passing the 20% mark during 2001 and rising to 1,524,663 (20.56%) in 2004.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Switzerland#Nationality
According to the article, the number of naturalizations as a percentage of resident foreigners is somewhere in the 2,5-3 % range. So 97 % or so of all foreigners who live in the country do not become citizens (in any given year). How many of them get married?
I’d assume that a sizeable part of the increase seen in Germany and France comes from muslim immigrants – not from a big increase in, say, German-French intermarriage.
… There is no distance between NY and NJ. ?
Yeah, well, when I started out writing the comment I wrote Manhattan. Have no idea why I changed it as it would have been easy to foresee a comment like yours. Google maps gives a distance of ~80 miles from Manhattan to a place like, say, Berkeley Township, NJ.
But yeah, the distance is minimal. Which was my point as well. In the US, if you live in a state like Texas or Arizona, you live ‘relatively close to the border.’ In European countries it’s different. Roughly one third of all Danes live in the Copenhagen Metropolitan area – and a train ride from Copenhagen to Malmø, Sweden, takes a little more than a half an hour. Add another million people living in Southern Jutland near the German border. The scales are different. Given how important distance is in this matter, it just makes no sense to compare intermarriage rates of a small European country with those of the US, rather than with, say, Southern Texas. The United States is 3 times as big as EU-15 used to be, and EU-15 included pretty much all of the countries in Western Europe that people from the US like to compare to their own country (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, UK, Sweden…) – map here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EU15-1995_European_Union_map.svg
You need passports and visas to move across (most) American borders unlike within Europe. A girl from Malmø can move in with a guy from Copenhagen, no questions asked. The number of hoops you’d have to jump to do that in the US is incredible (I doubt it is even possible to get a visa for a girlfriend).
I know. It doesn’t change that if you live in a very big country and there’s a long way to the border, you don’t have nearly as many opportunities to even meet those foreigners in the first place. How many males living in Denver happen to spend the afternoon in Mexico one day shopping and then decide after they come home in the evening the same day that it might be fun to give that nice girl from the shop in Monterrey a chance – after all, she gave him her number? It’s not just the passports and visas.
The German-speaking Swiss marry largely neighbouring Germans; the Francophone Swiss marry the French; Italian-speakers marry Italians.
Wow. People really prefer their own kind. Who would have thought?
Sweden Fact of the Day: 100% of marriages in Sweden are between 2nd cousins or closer relatives.
Looking at the attitudes of Swiss women, I am frankly surprised the figure isn’t higher…
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