I’m very excited to announce a new publication outlining Swiss immigration and integration policies since 1848 (yes, that’s 167 years’ worth of data). We use the latest version of the MIPEX questionnaire to trace how immigration and integration policies have developed since the inception of modern Switzerland in 1848. Policies are covered in 7 areas and a total of 148 indicators, with the situation at the national level recorded for every year.
This gives us a more accurate picture of how policies have changed over time than previous efforts, including a limited extension of the MIPEX data to 1995 undertaken as part of the SOM project.
I’m also very happy to announce that the full data are already available, including a detailed description outlining the reasoning and decisions behind the scores.
In the paper we provide a first description of the data: an assessment of Swiss immigration and integration policies at the national level in a systematic and truly historical manner. Three periods of policies are identified; we refer to these as expansive, restricting, and expanding. Indeed, if immigration and integration policies are captured in a broad and multidimensional way, we can see that the highly politicized direct democratic decisions in the past few years have not (yet) had a major impact on Swiss policy. In recent years the expansion of rights seems to have slowed, perhaps stalled, but there is no evidence of overall more restrictive policies.
Ruedin, D., Alberti, C. and D’Amato, G. (2015), Immigration and Integration Policy in Switzerland, 1848 to 2014. Swiss Political Science Review. doi: 10.1111/spsr.12144
Didier Ruedin 
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