Swiss naturalisation

Les déboires eines Deutschen bei der Naturalizzazione Svizra

We are Swiss citizens!

We received the final authorisation of the Federal Office for Migration via a letter sent by the Canton of Zurich. We have the Swiss nationality since 14 December 2010. The whole process took 13 months and cost us CHF 4'068.-, including Communal, Cantonal and Federal administration costs, paying for a myriad of official documents as well as Swiss IDs and passports for five persons.

After receiving the official letters shortly before Christmas 2010, I hastily applied online for my passport and Swiss ID. Alas, you are only Swiss when The Database says so. Until then you can wave your naturalisation certificate in front of official eyes until your arm falls off – "Sorry, but you don't exist in our database. We can't do anything for you. Try to apply again next year. Merry Christmas."

 

 

 

 

In January 2011 The Database was updated and I reapplied for a red passport. The process was flabbergastingly efficient: reserve online then show up at the appointed time at a designated Swiss passport office. On location the total time for completing the acts of taking a number, waiting, being called, identifying oneself, having a picture taken and paying for the service took 10 minutes. The documents were sent by post within a week.

Swiss_passport1

Keeping expectations low

The Swiss authorities know how to manage expectations: exempli gratia they'll send you a letter predicting a maximum 18 month waiting period for your next citizenship level, then 3 weeks later you're notified that the Canton of Zurich has accorded you citizenship (which will immediately be revoked if you don't pay CHF 1'000 in the next 30 days)

Only cynical people may be inclinded to hint at the end of the fiscal year ;-)

I'm curious to see how long the Federal Office for Migration takes to complete the process. At this rate I may become a Swiss citizen sometime in 2011.

 

 

When half is only one-third

Open your letters quickly or you’ll be informed the next day via the local paper, where such official notices are usually published, that the commune has accorded you citizenship. Even then you may learn that your neighbour, whose personal situation and naturalisation application were in almost all respects a carbon copy of your own, was completely surprised that he received his communal citizenship without needing to take the civic knowledge test you had studied for so arduously and which cost CHF 300.-

The “more to come” is our remaining 2/3 Swiss nationality (the cantonal and federal authorizations), outstanding two thirds of the total cost, but perhaps only another 100% of the time it has taken so far. This may be the half-way point. Seeing the situation in the Bundesamt für Migration, which is responsible for the paperwork at the federal level, as described in (German) in the NZZ edition of 27 August 2010, the process may take longer.  

Such is life: after five months of being held incommunicado suddenly the news is published to the world (which for some people is their village, and perhaps the next large city in shopping distance), and almost as an afterthought, to you.

As an imperfectly informed reader of said newspaper you may think “let me congratulate that person on his newly acquired Swiss nationality the next time I meet him at the train station on the way to work.” This would be appreciated, but it is incorrect.  The only thing I received, other than an official communication, was a bill covering the administrative costs with a promise of much more to come.

Civic knowledge

Once you've successfully vaulted the first administrative hurdles, the administrative race of becoming a Swiss citizen starts in earnest: documentation is sent by your commune to the canton, which then returns more documents back to the commune, which then sends other documents back to the canton, etc.
The explanation for the to-and-fro between the governmental levels is very simple: you become a Swiss citizen when your commune of residency, your canton and the Federal Administration have agreed that they really don't have a reason for not making you Swiss. The official explanation of the process is available from the website of the Federal Administration: "Naturalisation proceeds in three stages. Thus the federal naturalisation permit only constitutes the Confederation's "green light" for the acquisition of Swiss nationality. However, the cantons and communities have their own, additional residence requirements which applicants have to satisfy. Swiss citizenship is only acquired by those applicants who, after obtaining the federal naturalisation permit, have also been naturalized by their communities and cantons."
If, as I was, you are lucky enough to skip the mandatory written and spoken language tests, because the local language happens to be your mother tongue, your civil knowledge will be tested.
The canton of Zurich has an hour long civic knowledge test which is divided into five sections: 
1) geography, history, languages
2) democracy and federalism
3) rights and duties
4) social security, health, work and education
5) canton Zurich 

Wappen_zrich

Each section is composed of three knowledge questions where you write the answer, three multiple choice questions and three right/false questions where you check the answer. All together 45 questions.

To prepare, you should read these websites which contain information about the rights and duties of Swiss citizenship and about the canton of Zurich:
General information about Switzerland: Swissworld
Educa has a list of websites with Swiss civics knowledge
Test yourself at the Civic Campus 
A must-read is the brochure by ECHO "Informationen zur Schweiz". If you are really ambitious, you could tackle "Staat und Wirtschaft – Grundlagen und Strukturwissen" by Beat Gurzeler and Hanspeter Maurer. 
Wouldn't we all just want to learn something playfully without studying? Try the Helvetiq game, which has many play cards with questions and answers, or their iPhone app.
I used flash cards on my iPhone to study for the test. A company called Digital Assertion offers an iPhone application named "Notecards" 

Small_notecards

A version which exchanges information with the iPhone app is available for Apple computers free of charge. The app reads files in csv format. Here are the csv files with german language questions I used in preparation for the test. You should be able to import them into the Mac app, then send them to the iPhone app. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.

Click here to download:
Einbürgerung Bund.csv (17 KB)

 

 

Click here to download:
Einbürgerung Kanton ZH.csv (2 KB)

 

Be prepared for questions like "on which date did the old confederation end?" (answer: 1798), "when did women obtain the right to vote at federal level?" (answer: 1971) or "in which general compass direction is the Säuliamt in the canton of Zurich" (answer: west).  

 

We should receive the results of our test in a few weeks, following which the communal authorities will invite us for a discussion about how integrated we are in the local community. Generally, 60% correct answers are sufficient to pass the test. However (an unsurprisingly common word in the naturalisation process), some communes may set more stringent (and not publically documented) achievement requirements.

 

Updated 30.04.10: We received the test results eight weeks after taking the test. It looks like a report card. We were awarded points for each right answer for the five question categories on the test. Yes, we passed! The results came with a cover letter informing us of the communal authorities' invitation for an interview on a weekday mid-June. Ok, so I now need to take a half-day off work.

Expedition to the document alps

Although there is no official minimum intelligence criteria for the candidates to naturalisation in Switzerland (the Federal Court ruled that mentally handicapped people can not be discriminated against: 1D_19/2007), the cornucopia of varying administrative requirements and documents required by each Canton are in effect a covert IQ test. 

Self-assuredly I challenged myself to submit a complete and faultless set of documents and ... failed. The scriptwriters of the Star Trek series were probably inspired by the Swiss naturalisation process when they designed the unwinnable Kobayashi Maru test: which serves to test the character of the applicants. 

Where my reconnaissance went wrong

Officially there are no unwritten rules. From experience, at least some rules must only be “on display in the bottom of a locked filling cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard” (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams). 

For example, a CV needs to be written for each applicant, even your 1 week old baby. The completed CVs, which we had signed on behalf of our children (only children 18 years or older need to fill out the naturalization application themselves), were returned to us with the request that our children age 9 and 10 sign their CVs as well. Our 6 year old first grader would have loved to sign her name on her CV to prove that she can, but this wasn’t required of her.  Unsurprisingly, these requirements were never actually mentioned anywhere. Furthermore none of the children really understood the legalese, so they signed where I told them to. So what value do their signatures have? Perhaps this question could be added to the Mystery Park exhibitions near Interlaken.

Beware the ever changing responsibility matrix between the Confederation, the cantons and communities. Depending on cantonal arrangements, applications must be submitted to the canton, the community, or the Federal Office for Migration. Just look at this document which details where your application should be sent and on whose forms. 

Don’t believe what you read. The Confederation sets minimum requirements for naturalisation. The cantons are free to add to these. For instance, the Confederation website will tell you that the certificate proving no one is undertaking debt collection action against you, needs to cover the past three years. The canton of Zurich, on the other hand, has recently extended this period to five years. At least you can count on the community authorities, the ones who actually issue the certificate, to give you a 3-year certificate which will subsequently be rejected by the cantonal authorities. Result: I paid for this certificate twice and wasted a few hours in the process.

Another fun pass-time is discovering how to order the proof of domicile certificates. In Illnau I was able to order it online; in Greifensee I could only order by phone; the municipal authorities of Bellevue told me the canton of Geneva issues such certificates in their stead and in Lucerne they refused to send me anything unless I paid up-front.

The real fun begins when your personal situation is a bit more complicated: notary translation of foreign language documents; obtaining birth records, marriage and divorce documents when these events happened in another country; or discovering your place of birth no longer exists as an independent administrative entity.  

Endurance test

The task of filling out forms multiple times with unvarying information must have been contrived in order to evaluate your stamina as a Swiss citizen. A case in point:  After submitting the documents, we received a one page form to fill out from the canton of Zurich which compelled us to restate the same information as previously given, i.e. names and birth dates of the children, marital status, etc.  

Tactics

Lists or a database will be key to your (partial) success. Group web links and contact lists of all authorities you’ll need to approach, cross-link these to each document you’re required to procure and set deadlines for their delivery. 

Time limits are specified for the “freshness” of the documents, i.e. the age of the documents based on the date on which they were issued by the competent authorities. These can be categorized into:

  • timeless: CVs, form on complying with the law and giving authorities power of attorney; photocopies of passports and residency permits.
  • not older than 6 months: birth and marriage records
  • not older than 3 months: excerpt from the swiss criminal record; proof of domicile; certificate proving no one is undertaking debt collection action against you; work certificate.
Start with the list above and work from top to bottom. Timeless documents are the ones you can fill-out anytime during the documentation process. Complete these first and you’ll feel as if you are making headway. Before you focus on the 6-month documents, check to see if your passport and C-permit are still valid; if not, wait for the updated identification papers to be returned before proceeding. 

Good luck :)

Welcome

November 3, 2009 is the day I sent in my family's request to acquire Swiss citizenship.

I've created this blog to guide other people in hiking the bureaucratic niceties of becoming Swiss.

Naturalisation is the process whereby foreigners learn more about Switzerland than most of the natives care to know. From my time living in Geneva, I remember that being more Swiss than the Swiss is not considered to be an arresting character trait.

Wish us bon voyage :)