The Swiss would be crazy not to love Foreigner. Seriously, who doesn't? But how do they feel about foreigners?

In the part of the world where I grew up - Canada - we called them immigrants and we for the most part celebrated their stories. Apart from the fact that most of us or our relatives came on some kind of a boat or later, airplane, the integration of new people was an built into public policy at most levels.

Europe, on the other hand, is having a more difficult go at it. France has it's North Africans (and the beggers who hand you sad notes at the Champs-Élysées and Gare du Nord), Italy's been trying to index the gypsies since the end of World War II and Switzerland seems to have some kind of campaign or referendum on sending people home, banning mosques or withholding passports every several years.

In Postwar, Tony Judt details the attitudes taken by many Europeans over the last 60 years, which I paraphrase liberally: take the Italians and Eastern Europeans and have them do the rebuilding, work the bad hours and pick the tomatoes, but expect that in time, they go to their corners.

But what happens if they stay?

Citizenship laws here do not guarantee a Swiss passport for the children of immigrants and a good-sized constituency here - Swiss for all intents and purposes - isn't actually Swiss.

And they're not called immigrants. They're called foreigners. This is interesting and not necessarily an issue of semantics. Suppose we expect these people - the Tamils, Eastern Europeans and others - to integrate, are we holding ourselves back when the first point at which we categorise them - our vocabulary - is exclusionary?

In any case, Switzerland will vote on February 8 on whether to extend free movement rights to new EU members Romania and Bulgaria. Of course, there is a campaign to keep them out (most, as I learned on a reportage to Romania last week, don't actually want to come) but if the Swiss reject the free movement extension, there will be ramifications for our labour agreements with the rest of the European Union.

A colleague at swissinfo, Rodrigo Carrizo Cout, recently wrote from Geneva and Lausanne on the plight of the illegal immigrants, many of whom work long hours for low wages.

The report is here.