‘Teachers will not be turned into snitches’

A proposal that would see schools sharing information on the undocumented parents of their students with other state bodies has been heavily criticized by the education sector.

Published: 8 February 2018 18:22 CET

'Teachers will not be turned into snitches'

File archive of school children. Photo: AFP

The proposal put forward by the National Council’s social security and public health commission is part of a plan the commission says will help forge more coherent legislation for people who live and work in Switzerland without proper papers – a group the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) estimates numbers from 58,000 to 105,000 people.

Under the motion put forward by a commission dominated by right-wing politicians, undocumented people in Switzerland would be stripped off their current access to certain welfare benefits and to health cover. Employers hiring people without the right to work in the country would face stiffer penalties.

But a section of the motion calling for processes enabling the sharing of information on undocumented people between government agencies – and citing education as an example –has come in for particular criticism.

If the proposal were to be implemented, it would become easier for teachers of school children with undocumented parents to report the status of those mothers and fathers to the authorities. Currently it is forbidden for schools and teachers to pass on this information.

“We teachers do not work for the migration department and definitely won’t become snitches. Children and teenagers in Switzerland have a right to education that is completely independent of their migration status” Beat W. Zemp, president of the Swiss teacher’s federation, said to Swiss daily the Tages-Anzeiger in response to the proposal.

Zemp said the move would “seriously damage” relations between parents, schools and teachers if teachers began sounding out their students about their parents’ migration status.

Emilie Graff with the Swiss commission for youth affairs (EKKJ) has also spoken out against the plan, telling national broadcaster RTS that a worst-case scenario could involve undocumented people pulling their children out of school, or even blaming their children if they were reported to the police and later deported.

But the president of the National Council’s social security and public health commission, Thomas de Courten with the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), has defended the plans. He argues that critics risk hurting the interests of undocumented migrants by leaving them in an “irresponsible” legal limbo. He says the plan aims to tackle what is currently a completely unsatisfactory situation regarding this group.

The National Council plans to look at the proposal in the upcoming spring session, but left-wing politicians have already said they plan to attack it strongly during the parliamentary debate.

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.