9.11 Migration and Immigration

Europe had long been a continent people left; millions emigrated to the Americas in the 1800s. After World War II the flow reversed. The economic miracles of the 1950s and 1960s (9.2) created more jobs than local workers could fill, especially in factories, mines, construction and cleaning, and war losses and low birth rates had shrunk the labor force.

Two main streams filled the gap. The first was labor recruitment from poorer parts of Europe and its neighbors. The second was migration from former colonies, whose people often held citizenship or special rights in the old imperial country and spoke its language.

• West Germany signed recruitment agreements with Italy (1955), Spain and Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), Portugal (1964) and Yugoslavia (1968). These Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, were expected to work for a few years and then go home.
• Britain: the ship Empire Windrush brought migrants from the Caribbean in 1948, followed by people from India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh. As citizens of the empire and Commonwealth they could at first enter freely, until the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) began to restrict entry.
• France recruited workers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as from Portugal and Spain. After Algerian independence in 1962, hundreds of thousands of European settlers and Algerians who had fought for France also arrived.
• The Netherlands received people from Indonesia and Suriname, and Belgium recruited workers from Morocco and Turkey.

The oil shock of 1973 and the economic slowdown that followed (9.6) changed everything. West Germany stopped recruiting guest workers in 1973, and other countries tightened their rules. But many migrants did not leave. They had built lives, and their employers often wanted them to stay. Through family reunification, spouses and children joined them, and a second generation grew up as Europeans. Germany, which long insisted it was not a country of immigration, reformed its citizenship law in 2000 so that more children born there to foreign parents could become citizens.

Many immigrants and their children faced discrimination in housing and jobs and were concentrated in poorer neighborhoods, such as the suburbs around French cities, where riots broke out in 2005. They also changed European life, from food and music to sports, and many rose to prominence in politics, business and the arts.

Hostility to immigration fed new political parties, starting in the 1970s and 1980s. In France, the National Front, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, argued that immigration threatened French jobs and identity, and Le Pen reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, a shock to many voters. In Austria, the Freedom Party under Jörg Haider combined anti-immigration appeals with nationalism; when it joined a coalition government in 2000, other EU governments briefly limited diplomatic contacts with Austria in protest. Supporters of such parties say they defend national culture and ordinary workers; opponents argue that they spread fear and prejudice against minorities. Similar parties gained ground across Europe in the following decades.

Many immigrants from Turkey, North Africa and South Asia were Muslim, and Islam became Europe's second-largest religion in many countries. This raised questions about religion in public life in societies that had become largely secular, meaning that religion was kept separate from government and played a smaller part in daily life. France's strong tradition of laïcité, rooted in the 1905 law separating church and state (7.2), led to a 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols, including Islamic headscarves, in public schools. Supporters saw it as protecting equal, neutral schools; critics saw it as singling out Muslims. Debates over integration grew sharper after terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists in the 2000s and 2010s and after more than a million asylum seekers, many fleeing the Syrian civil war, reached the EU in 2015 (9.10).