MV: I am a very different person from what I was some years ago. I am 43 years old, I have changed a lot for instance moving here, you know? Some years ago that would have not even come up into my mind… I never had this desire to go live abroad. But life has determined what I needed to do. I am very family-oriented, I work a lot very hard, I am quite shy so I don’t make friends easily here is even harder. I am an introvert, at the beginning it’s always harder.
KC: I am 31 years old and I feel that I am restarting my life. I feel like a child when you need to learn a new language, you have to learn again, study to get a new job, learn how to make new friends, so I feel like a child (laughs) again. Discovering life, the world, my objectives, everything has changed.
MV: Like she said, we haven’t come here very young, so restarting in a new country it is way harder. And it is not that we choose to come here. Life has brought us here, I have a friend who really wanted to come here I know lots of people who want to come on their own, leave the country, see another culture, live in a different place. In our case, it was life that pushed us to this situation. Either you come or you lose something. It is not an option. And restarting is hard due to the age or because when you think “I am gonna live the country because I want to leave I am 18, 20 years old” you choose, I think you are more motivated, ready to deal with the barriers and so on. When you come here due to other circumstances.
AKC: What brought you here?
KC: Love.
MV: A relationship.
AKC: How was this? When was the decision made like “I am going to live there now”?
MV: A year and a half ago. In my case, he had already been living here for two years. And there was a moment when someone needed to make a decision. In my case I could take a leave from my job and that made more sense to us than having him quit his job here and go to my country.
KC: I came to stay for 20 days I have a sister who lives here I was supposed to stay for this period and travel a bit, I went to Barcelona, Paris, I actually didn’t even like here I couldn’t identify with anything when I came here, on the opposite, I thought it was very boring. I ended up meeting my boyfriend at the time, it worked out well, I decided to the spend two months here. Well for us to be together, either I would stay here or I would stay here, I had no other option. I had to leave everything back home and stay try to… Well, it worked out, we got married but I had to leave everything, my professional life, my family.
MV: I think these are very different situations, I had a very stable life back in my country, so re-starting was…
AKC: I wanted to ask that, what did you leave back in your countries?
MV: I left my family, my job, my own apartment.I had two degrees, a masters and was starting a third degree.
KC: I had worked at a hospital for almost eight years, I had two degrees, professionally I was doing fine.I was renting an apartment, I had my family, I had just got a car, I was single but everything seemed on the right place. There was nothing that I could complain about.
AKC: What did you get from being here? Is it even worth being here?
MV: Firstly, this life experience. You behave very differently than in the way you would in your city, hometown.
KC: I think you learn when you leave your comfort zone.
MV: Life styles. To go walking on a weekend, it’s just way easier.
KC:Here is way cheaper to travel for instance.
MV: Culturally you learn a lot. Every little town here has so much history we don’t have that back home, an old villa that you go visit here has an entire history, we don’t have that back there. If you start studying, it even makes you go forward. Even if the relationship doesn’t work out, it is the life experience. Sometimes I even take notes on how much money I am losing here but I think “oh, it’s worth it”
KC: I am gaining on culture.
MV: And that is priceless right?
KC: I think for both of us the hardest part is to quit entirely this professional life, we are not part of the society here.
MV: You get this impression that you are unlearning what you had learned.
KC: You think that you are not going forward, right? You don’t feel as a whole, what you like to do.
MV: When you are young here, you can do no matter what, clean houses, study, but when you are older and you had a more stable situation, you think, yeah but do I really want to do this, clean houses?
KC: Yeah if you think, but I have studied so much, I have devoted so much of your time to do a job that you never thought you would? Not to diminish the work of cleaners but it is harder if you had a job, another life style.
AKC: If I can ask you, how long have you been here for?
MV: For a year and a half.
KC: Same here.
AKC: What is the level of integration into the Swiss society that you currently experience? How much contact with the Swiss society do you have?
MV: Zero. I think here is like in a big city. I know like one person, who is Swiss.
KC: But at the same time, Switzerland is also not super Swiss, we don’t find so many Swiss but I have contact with other migrants, from other nationalities.
MV: The contact is more like tied to social events, you see the same people in a bar or a party. For example, I broke my arm in November, I had an accident, a surgery, if I had been back home, I would have had a million of visitors at the hospital, loooking after you, here I told to so many people, only her and an English woman who is more of a friend came visit me. The others are more like people we meet in a bar….
KC: But it’s more formal, right?
MV: It is formal, I think it is even easier for KC here because her husband used to live here so she has more contact to other people because of him, his social circle. In my case, my boyfriend, he is American, but he does not have many friends here either, he has like two colleagues he is in touch with from work. So people I am in contact with are the ones with whom he is in contact, so it is a very restricted social circle. Even people from my country here, everybody seems so busy, maybe they are not even but they want to pretend they are busy. Europeans have like seasonal schedules, if you are not planning in advance, you are out. It is not spontaneously decided, like on a Sunday morning, where in my country you just call and tell a friend “Let’s have a barbecue, bring a friend” ….
KC: Yeah that irritates me. On that day she organized a birthday party we had his mother coming over and he didn’t want to ask her to postpone her visit because it had already been planned. Imagine that, even within your own family you need to respect your appointments with your relatives. You cannot just call your mom and ask “Mom, can we do it next week?”
MV: People complicate things too much. Even friendships here are kind of fake.
AKC: Is it superficial?
MV: Yeah, you never know if the person is really telling you everything or is hiding something from you. We don’t have that much back home.
AKC: How is your contact with your national community here?
KC: The most part think that I sound weird, I feel like an alien with them, to be honest, because I am from a region in our country from which people do not migrate as much. I dont know, it is hard to make friends here, everybody is very close here, I think people adjust to this European rhythm.
MV: It is not the same. People want to sound very busy here, I don’t know , to me it doesn’t seem that they are actually busy. Maybe it’s also because we don’t work here. It just makes very difficult to keep friendships.
KC: It never goes further than just we see each other in this particular setting. I have a sister here and I could not integrate into her own family, because I do not fit with our national stereotype, they have been living here for so many years so they don’t want to go to museums, they just want to go to somewhere where they can go out more often. The girls would go out in short dresses and make-up, I have never even behaved that way back home I will not start doing that here. So even within my own family here, I could not be really integrated I was kind of the weird one. We are a very mixed people but for them I am weird and my feeling is that the majority of people from our country abroad behave according to the stereotype that the Europeans might have of us.
MV: The language is very hard and it is the biggest burden for the integration. If you don’t speak English or French… We also watch too much TV and we don’t read enough. Europeans don’t either but Americans do. Their high educational system does not restrict them to an area X or Y. Sometimes I analyze it and if we are like in a bar, it is almost boring. We might be talking politics back home but it is never so serious as it is here. Sometimes you don’t even feel like talking. It is just too formal and if you talk politics here, it is just very serious.
AKC: What about the stereotype that people have of the countries you are coming from?
KC: I think people from my country come here and literally become the stereotype. Or people come here and become the European stereotype. It’s one or the other.
MV: I think our country sells this bad image too. Nobody sells the image that we have blond people with blue eyes too.
KC: It’s not judgemental it is just a statement. The majority of the people from my country who comes here does not have a degree, they end up having a mini-job, they don’t have a very high cultural level, they are very restricted. The majority can’t even write in our own language. They come without an educational, intellectual level because they didn’t have opportunities back there and they come to work. And then the Europeans think we are lazy, they don’t expect more qualified people coming, they only have this stereotype of people who are coming for very bad jobs.
AKC: Did your partners have this kind of stereotype too?
MV: Not in my case, because my boyfriend has lived there for a while, he knows more about the country than I do.
KC: Mine had a lot of stereotypes: “So you don’t know how to dance?”, thinking that we are all very sexy.
MV: I get so irritated by that. At first you think that is interesting but after you just get annoyed.
KC: My boyfriend thought we were all lazy, nobody would study, we had no infra-structure back in our country. We were like underdeveloped people, the image was like, you are coming from the jungle. My objective was to change his view, when I brought him to meet my family by the end of last year. “See, there are good schools, enterprises, people who study, 24 hour-supermarkets, people working for 10, 12 hours, we have rich, poor, intelligent, people who didn’t study not only the ones that you meet in Europe.” He was amazed that we had roads.
MV: If you are going to tell someone you know back home that even here you find dog poop everywhere, that you saw someone begging for money here they are not going to believe you, they think everything is perfect. It is the opposite.
AKC: Are you alone here? What is the view that people back home might have about your life abroad? Do people think you have changed a lot?
KC: Every one thinks everything is perfect here. So many things are better than back home but the image that people have of Europe is based on an illusion.
MV: My relationship to friends and relatives back in my country has not changed as much. It’s maybe because my father was sick and I needed to go back very often and I would see my friends, nothing has changed.
AKC : Do people think that your socio-economic status has changed?
KC: Oh ja, people think you are so rich that you are almost burning money here. Because it must rain money here on European streets.
MV: I didn’t feel that because I had a good job there and because I am unemployed here.
KC: But I am also unemployed here. My friends have an idea of what life is abroad but even then, they think wages are higher so you must have a better life. And that’s simply not true, you have a good pay but you also have way more expenses. If you are going to compare with the wages there, yeah sure. But you spend a lot of money here, there are not as many inequalities as there, but on the other hand, I have it harder too because I am not an European. I have read some newspaper articles saying that families think a migrant have an obligation to send money back. I asked my boyfriend not to say anything when we were visiting there because prices would rise instantly, if he would order something.
MV: Because also people who live here, either in the US or in Europe, they make sure they are going to bring gifts to the family which must have helped people back home to create this image that everybody here has more money. So many people only think about investing back, buying land, and not even to take advantage of the lives they are having here now. Some 10 years ago, people would come here, work a while, save some money delivering pizza, living in a rental apartment, but being able to build something back in the country. But now I think that is changing, people are staying more often.
KC: We got married here but we organized a big party on the beach back home. In my country, when you normally get married you get some gifts from friends and family, and I had registered on a webpage to create a gift list.Only two people gave me something. And people normally buy you gifts if you are getting married. My husband was horrified. Not even my closest friends. At first I was very troubled “Do they think I am not getting married for real?” Friends from childhood, not even my grandma. I asked a friend “Do you think people think I am getting just to stay in Europe?” And she said: “No, it’s because people think you don’t need. You are getting married to a foreigner they are not going to spend money with you.” I talked to my mom, his mom, people who had given me gifts, everybody told me the same: “”You are now living in Switzerland”, that really hurt me. And everyone came to our party, they spent money to come to the party, they could have given me a gift. But they didn’t. For our marriage here, my brother-in-law asked to borrow a fancy car from a friend so that we would get out of the city hall and go to the restaurant, i don’t even know how he got this one. And my husband took photos, he had never seen a limousine before, he posted them on Facebook and I told him “Now my people back home are going to think that we are rich, that we have a limousine” And we do create this image, I was also fancy on the day, but come on it was my marriage ceremony! People told me: “Wow you became a fancy woman in Switzerland.” (laughs)
MV: You weren’t, you became one. (laughs) I think some European women are also envious of the way we look, I can wear no matter what and there is this French friend, she is always in jeans, but who will always tell me “Oh I like your dress” and it is often not vulgar or anything but we are just more feminine. She is an interesting case, she always needs to be doing something, go for a swim, she can’t just be with herself. Because Europeans are very lonely, they don’t know how to deal with it. We are OK with being alone, they always need to be doing something. Back home we don’t care if we work and take care of the house. But here no, they want to be just like men. I have read something on women back home who are even quitting good jobs to stay home. But here is not like that at all, they really value the professional side, it’s not wrong that they want to be the same as men, even in a relationship. This French woman for instance, she asked a guy out, “Do you want to go to the movies today?” and the guy told her “Sorry I am too busy today” I would hide myself out of shame. It is not that I would never ask a guy out but there is a certain way or a good time to do it.
KC: Yeah European women are just like European men.
AKC: Do you think the European woman has lost something?
KC: Oh yeah.
MV: Lost a lot.
KC: You lose some of your essence.
MV: This same girl, she was very aggressive towards me, we were talking about a problem in the dish washer and afterwards my boyfriend told me “That’s why I am with you. Because I can’t stand these women who scream at you”, there are a lot of cases here. Women want to be just like men everywhere, including in the relationship. And people from my country here, they change too. I have this friend who has been living here for 15 years now, she was celebrating something and lots of friends came. “Let’s go out dancing” we said. The other day we went to have lunch at someone’s place. Her husband is Italian. “Ah he is upset that I went out to dance with the girls and he thinks that because he is sick I have to take care of him all the time.” Inside I was thinking “Well I agree with him” but she was thinking “That’s very normal, imagine that because he has had a surgery I need to take care of him! ” That’s just like an European woman not like us. I wouldn’t have done that.
KC: My husband would complain that his ex would go out every night. “It’s not that I am macho but I need some company.” He wants to have someone close to him, f you want to have a single life, you stay single then, but if you are in a relationship, you need to be together. For her it was very normal but men think it’s weird.I wouldn’t like the other way around either, if he would go out every night and I would stay at home. There must be some mutual respect.
MV: Women coming here change but that does not happen if European or American men move to our country, they don’t change, they remain the same.
Photo credits: Ken and Barbie Let me whisper in your ear...by Romita Girl67, Flickr CC 2.0
Economic Migrants 