As an official matter, the concern was that the goal celebrations might, as ESPN put it, incite Balkan political tensions. After their crucial World Cup goals against Serbia, Switzerlands two Albanian-Kosovar stars, Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri, both had flashed a double eagle gesture with their hands. This was an allusion to the eagle on the Albanian flag a pointed political statement directed at the nation that had committed genocide against Kosovars and still rejects Kosovos claim to independence.

In the aftermath of the game, FIFA debated whether to punish the players. Its disciplinary code recommends a two-game punishment for anyone who provokes the general public during a match.

Back home in Switzerland, though, the criticism ran in a different direction. Right-wing nationalists were upset that Xhaka and Shaqiri had celebrated another country while wearing the Swiss colors. The gestures were proof that they and many of their teammates werent Swiss enough to represent Switzerland at the World Cup.

The two goals were scored for Kosovo, not Switzerland, Natalie Rickli, a National Council member from the anti-immigrant Swiss Peoples Party, tweeted . At the World Cup we support Switzerland and we play for Switzerland.

The angry responses, fueled by the same anti-immigrant hysteria that has gripped Europe and other parts of the world in recent years, were as predictable as they were bigoted. None of the World Cups 32 teams has benefited from immigration as richly as Switzerland has, and none stands more firmly than the Swiss at the crux of the European panic over nationalism and identity.

Eight of Switzerlands 23 World Cup players were born abroad, more than any other European team present in Russia, and more than all but three of the tournaments teams overall. The Swiss roster has seven players with ties to the Balkans, including Xhaka and Shaqiri. The squad includes a player born in the Ivory Coast, one from Cape Verde and three born in Cameroon. Defender Manuel Akanji is the child of a Swiss mother and Nigerian father; midfielder Denis Zakarias parents are of Sudanese and Congolese descent.

Were it not for those immigrants many of whom play for top clubs across Europes best leagues Switzerland almost certainly wouldnt be in Russia at all.

The country those players represent, however, has taken an increasingly skeptical view of immigrants like them, seeing their success not as a benefit of their presence but as an indictment of expanded immigration that has diluted the Swiss identity.

And many across Switzerland seem to agree with them. Ricklis Swiss Peoples Party holds 65 of the 200 seats in the Swiss National Council more than any other party gaining 11 seats in 2015 elections. The SVP, as the party is known, won nearly 30 percent of the national vote, breaking a single-party record it had previously set a decade earlier.

The SVP has successfully pushed measures to limit both immigration and cultural symbolism associated with foreigners and other religions Islam, in particular. In 2009, 57 percent of the Swiss population approved a measure that would prohibit the construction of new minarets in the country. Five years later, voters narrowly approved a referendum to limit immigration by placing quotas on the number of migrants allowed to enter the country. Switzerland has also considered banning Muslim women from wearing burqas.

The SVP has expanded its power primarily by railing against the sort of immigration that makes the Swiss national team what it is, and it has used the teams shifting identity to make its case. Before the World Cup, SVP member Ronald Koeppel called the national team a seasoned troupe of foreign mercenaries with Balkan accents, according to the AFP . Koeppel also referred to its African-born players as ensuisses, a derogatory term for foreigners.

You can sort of see the football team as a microcosm, said Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, an associate director at the Migration Policy Institute who specializes in European immigration. You have significant levels of immigration, and you have people with dual identities. And theres a question of, is identity a zero-sum game? Can you be Swiss and Kosovar-Albanian? Can you be Swiss and Muslim? Can you show pride in the country of your birth, and the country of your ancestry?