Swiss at heart, not on paper: the challenges of naturalisation from abroad 

The number of people acquiring Swiss citizenship from abroad has fallen to a historic low. One person currently going through the naturalisation process is Kendall Gewalt. She had always assumed she was Swiss. Only as an adult did she discover she wasn’t. In her mid-twenties, as she began exploring study opportunities and career prospects in Switzerland, Gewalt made a surprising discovery. She was not a Swiss citizen after all. “It was a shock,” recalls the now 56-year-old, whose mother is Swiss and whose father is American. At first, she thought the problem lay in an oversight on her mother’s part and tried to correct it. But she soon found out that she would have needed to register with a Swiss authority abroad before her 22nd birthday. It was too late to pursue Swiss citizenship. Or so she believed at the time. Kendall Gewalt was born in California in 1969. Although her mother held Swiss citizenship at the time, it was not automatically passed on to Gewalt or her siblings. She ...