Swiss Population 1950-2013: Swiss and foreigners

Source: Office fédéral de la Statistique

Population résidante permanente selon la catégorie de nationalité et le sexe, à la fin de l'année

From Wikipedia: "The number of registered resident foreigners was 1,001,887 (16.17%) in 1970. This amount decreased to 904,337 (14.34%) in 1979, and has increased steadily since that time, passing the 20% mark during 2001 and rising to 1,524,663 (20.56%) in 2004. The number of Swiss citizens thus numbered about 5.9 million in that year. In 2013 there were a total of 1,937,447 permanent residents (23.8% of the total population of 8.14 million) in Switzerland. Of these, 1.65 million resident foreigners (85.0%, or 20.2% of the 8.14 Million total population), had European citizenship (Italian: 298,875; German: 292,291; Portuguese: 253,227; French: 110,103; Serbian: 90,704; Kosovan: 86,976; Spanish: 75,333, Macedonian: 62,633; British: 40,898; Austrian: 39,494; Bosnian and Herzegovinian: 33,002; Croatian: 30,471). From other continents; 122,941 residents were from Asia; 83,873 from Africa; 78,433 from the Americas; and 4,145 from Oceania."

The chart below shows the composition of the permanent resident population, from 1950 until the end of 2013. Hovering your mouse on the chart will pop-up a tooltip showing the values.

We can see that the number of foreigners (yellow strip) has constantly grown, from 285'100 in 1950 to 1'937'447 in 2013. That represents a growth rate of 5.8. For the Swiss nationals, the variation in the same period has been from 4'432'100 to 6'202'184, with a growth rate of 0.4. While the foreigner permanent residents represented the 6.04% of the resident population in 1950, the proportion was of 23.8% in 2013.

For comparison, France had about 11.3% of foreigners in 2013. However, acquire citizenship in Switzerland is probably harder than in France. Moreover, unlike in the United States, Switzerland does not grant a child citizenship for being born on Swiss soil. It might even be that, in communes where voters have a say in who is naturalised, the fear of rejection is an issue. For young men, the obligation to perform military service can also be dissuasive.

So, let's see what are the trends in the number of naturalisations in recent years:

In 2009, 43'400 have been naturalised; in 2013, there were only 34'100 naturalisations. According to the Ferderal Office of Statistics: "only 2 out of 100 foreigners living in Switzerland have been granted Swiss citizenship in 2013. This is a small percentage compared to other countries."