the figures are pretty easy to come up with, as foreigners are required to register (and not only in CH).

Yes, the ex-Yugoslav expats are “white”, whatever that means. The Blocherites’ stock in trade, though, isn’t anything rational. It is fear of the Dark Other. Serbs etc. are quite dark enough for their purposes. If there were no Serbs available, I have no doubt the Swiss klansmen would press the Germans into service, for all that there is essentially no genetic difference between Deutschschwyzer (the primary vector of the illness) and, say, Swabians.

(For those unfamiliar with the history of the Germanic peoples: the German-speaking Swiss and the Swabians descend from the same early Germanic group. As a result, of course, they hate each other. The standard German Swiss expression for a German—any German, even the unrelated Prussians—is “chaibe Schwob”—or, very roughly, “Swabian shite”.)

I’m assuming you’re referring to the racist aspect of the poster. What’s interesting, however, is that I think a lot of the immigrants people find troublesome come from the former Yugoslavia, which means that they tend to be white.

you’re right, the proposed law would impose Sippenhaft only on foreigners (of which Switzerland has many). And the absolutely disgusting poster you link to makes it clear that the Blocherites are not thinking primarily of the Norwegian expat community.

I just filled out a similar card in Luzern. Same problem, although I was more concerned with whether my traveling companion / recently-ex-girlfriend counted as “family member”.

(Oddly, no such card in Lausanne, though possibly the staff filled it out themselves.)

The law you cite, however, sounds baffling. You forgot to mention that it seems it would only apply (it seems?) to immigrant families.

link to poster about suggested law

So, the fact that one card is incompetently written (and probably hasn’t been changed since the turn of the last century), is a minor crime by comparison.

We could dispense with surnames altogether, and assign to each child at birth a unique alpha-numerical ID, or maybe a barcode label. Sound silly? Of course. But so long as we continue with names, we are continuing with something that still speaks of family and kinship, and that still defines and places people in terms of some entity that is larger than merely the individual unit.

Spaniards might wish to reverse the order.

I understand what everyone finds so objectionable about this head of household business, and I share those objections. At the same time, there’s something about the tendency of this discussion that irks me a little bit. The assumption of radically autonomous individuality, maybe, which expresses itself as an intolerance for any sort of acknowledgement of social embeddedness.

As I understand it, the US Census form is now fully up-to-date in these matters. No more assumptions about gender and family and household economy. It’s Person 1, followed by Persons 2, 3, and etc. Which is as it should be, of course, and I certainly can’t think of a better alternative. But there’s something curiously bloodless and disembodied about that numbering of Persons. Also, it makes me think of Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Switzerland has three official languages (German, French, Italian), while there is a fourth national language, Romansh.

http://www.admin.ch/ch/f/rs/101/a70.html