Postwar Europe’s migration had two structurally distinct labor recruitment regimes

Evidence

Postwar Europe experienced several types of migration. At first, large numbers of people emigrated, mainly to North and South America and Oceania. At the same time, millions of “displaced persons” had to be absorbed, especially some 12 million who entered West Germany from the former Eastern areas lost in the War. The independence of former colonies led to the return of many colonists to Europe. By the 1950s, strong economic growth was leading to labor shortages, and employers and governments began to encourage labor migration. This was of two main types. Most Western European countries recruited foreign workers, from the less-developed periphery: Southern Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Finland, and Ireland. Some labor-recruiting countries, such as Germany and Switzerland, went to great lengths to prevent settlement through “guestworker” systems which controlled the recruitment, working conditions, and rights of the migrants. The second type of labor migration was from colonies or former colonies: from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent to Britain, from North and West Africa to France, and from the Caribbean and Indonesia to the Netherlands. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3861

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the guestworker system from colonial-worker migration — a useful conceptual distinction between two recruitment regimes.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar Western Europe shifted from emigration to mass destination of immigration. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 41