Federation. In contrast, in 2007, the average among the 15 old member states of the
European Union was 7.4% and only Luxemburg had a higher immigration
proportion (42.5%) than Switzerland (Eurostat 2010). However, the annual numbers
of naturalizations in Switzerland are surprisingly low. This is reflected in the rate of
citizenship take-up, which relates the number of foreign-born individuals with
citizenship of the country of residence to all foreign-born individuals within a
country. A comparison across OECD countries shows that Switzerland has one of the
lowest shares of naturalized immigrants (Liebig et al. 2010). While in classical
immigration countries like Canada about 75% of the foreign-born individuals have
acquired the citizenship of the host country, the corresponding share in Switzerland
is only about 30%. Nevertheless, empirical evidence about the implications of
naturalization in Switzerland is very scarce. For this reason, the Swiss case is of
particular interest in analyzing the relationship between integration and naturalization.
In particular, in how far naturalized and non-naturalized immigrants differ in
respect to their economic integration.
The aim of this paper is to present