Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 25.2
'Guest workers' in Western Europe
it was not uncommon for whole communities to become
transplanted, including shopkeepers and in some cases
even the village priest, as the continued exodus of young
men progressively undermined local farming and social
life in the rural areas that formed the main source areas.
The cumulative nature of this migration, referred to as a
'self-feeding' process by Böhning (1972), was reinforced
by the way in which the migrants soon came to dominate
whole sectors of the economies of their host countries,
such as metal manufacturing, textiles, and hotels and
catering, making these sectors less 'respectable' for the
native population and increasing their dependence on
the immigrant groups.
The system therefore produced some extreme
examples of the effects of urbanisation. At the rural end, it
threatened the long-term survival of settlement in areas
that not long before had been overpopulated, prompting
policy responses in the form of trying to diversify the local
economy away from dependence on farming and to
stabilise the service sector base by concentrating new
public investment into key settlements. At the big-city
destinations in northwest Europe, the biggest challenge
concerned the very poor living conditions of the immigrant
workers—perhaps not so serious an issue in the early
stages when only young men were arriving for temporary
work, but a major concern when they stayed longer and
formed families. A quarter of a century on from the end of
the 'guest worker' system, there remains a clear legacy in
the form of high concentrations of immigrant stock in the
poorest housing and most deprived neighbourhoods.
The 'guest worker' system was established in the early
postwar period by the more industrialised countries of
northwest Europe (especially West Germany and France)
to combat labour shortages arising from renewed
economic growth and the low fertility of the interwar years.
Normally through bilateral agreements with countries with
labour surpluses (especially southern Europe but also
Turkey and North Africa), workers were recruited on
relatively short-term contracts, usually of no more than
one or two years, with the expectation that afterwards they
would return to their origins, taking with them the money
that they had saved and the skills that they had acquired.
The system proved highly successful in terms of the
numbers involved, with annual flows of labour migrants to
West Germany averaging 0.4 million in the 1960s and
reaching a peak of 0.7 million in 1970; and flows to France
averaging 0.25 million in the later 1960s. By the end of
1973, foreign workers made up 12 and 10 per cent,
respectively, of the total labour forces of these two
countries and the proportion was even higher in
Switzerland, at 30 per cent. Active recruitment terminated
soon after this, mainly because of economic downturn in
these countries occurring at the same time as their rate of
indigenous labour supply was again increasing, but also
because the 'guest worker' system seemed to be taking
on a dynamic of its own and having some unintended
impacts.
The main problems with the system arose because
the migrants' stays tended not to be as temporary as
originally anticipated, chiefly because it took them longer
to earn the money that they had hoped for. In due course,
they were joined by family and others from their home
area in a process known as 'chain migration'. In the end,
Sources:
Böhning 1972; Salt 1976; Salt and Clout 1976;
Ogden 1993; Blotevogel
et al
. 1993.
cities' have increasingly been challenging the
original central business districts (Hartshorn and
Muller 1986; Garreau 1991). It is only since the
1960s, however, that records have shown a large-
scale net exodus from these wider metropolitan
regions into smaller urban regions and rural areas
that lie beyond the primary commutersheds of the
major cities, the process commonly termed
counterurbanisation (see, for instance, Berry 1976;
Fielding 1982; Champion 1989). Suburbanisation,
or 'local urban decentralization', and
counterurbanisation, or 'urban deconcentration',
carry largely similar implications for the older
urban cores, or 'central cities' in American
parlance, which both of them are denuding of
residents and activities, but their impacts on the
reception areas are differentiated to a greater
extent, mainly because of contrasts in the character
of areas affected but also because of some
differences in the types of people involved.
Urban decline and inner-city problems are
nowadays high on the policy agenda of most
developed countries. As with urbanisation, many
of the changes induced by population
deconcentration are positive in nature, being
associated with long-term social trends that most
people embrace wholeheartedly, for instance
rising real incomes, greater personal mobility, a
widespread desire for living in relatively new
low-density settlements and the economic
advantages of home ownership. Other
irreversible trends aggravating urban decline are
the shrinking share of the workforce in
manufacturing and the expanding use of
electronic communications technology. Yet, in
the words of Downs (1994: p. 60):
