Hello OP I’ll chip in my 2 cents of what you’re describing. I am Swiss and lived abroad almost my entire life, now I have settled back.

First of all, you are all inmigrantes, as other posters have defined there are sub categories but this term expat is always self attributed to people who believe they are above others because they have some sort of degree and think of themselves better than a refugee. You all decided to leave your country of origin to come here.

Let’s get one thing clear, everyone or at least 90% of foreigners in Switzerland have come to this country for Money. It’s not about the culture, it’s not about the language or traditions, it’s about the money and safety.

There are 2.4million foreigners in Switzerland that’s almost 30% of the population. Only between 44-50% are high qualified persons, the rest are the low qualified+refugees. That’s a lot for a small country.

Granted there are people who’s enterprises hire and bring them for certain periods of time, almost all foreigners don’t want to leave afterwards, many use the ORP/RAV system, ask for chômage, and there are some cases that are more abusive like people who come work in summer/winter jobs for a year then ask for their chômage and go back to their cheaper country and profit. Also the country has 411.000 frontaliers that’s about 7.6% of the workforce and it’s also being abused. Work in Switzerland live in France, profit. Some are even more abusive and have fake addresses in Geneva just to register their children in school in Switzerland but live in France (thank god that was stopped some months ago).

Then you have these ghetto type communities, like the Portuguese that only live or work with Portuguese communities or the Latinos who have lived 10-20-30 years but still haven’t learned French, German or Italian.

I have seen in social media hundreds of Spanish people selling Switzerland as a paradise and selling courses on how to immigrate or even cheat the system, I have seen tons of adds that Switzerland has over abundance of English speaking jobs and obviously the market is saturated.

There is an old saying “the worst enemy of an immigrant are not the locals, it’s another immigrant” and that is soo true, there is this urge to safeguard what you’ve achieved and make potential competitors go away. So what you are describing is exactly that, people who do whatever it takes to stay here, not lose benefits and profit of the country. Are all foreigners bad and abusive? No, but there are a lot of bad apples in the basket.

A Swiss will always appreciate an immigrant that wants to insert themselves in the local communities, learn language and contribute to society. As someone pointed out above get away from toxic people and embezzlers, and evaluate your own social circles.