Ethnicity Counts by William Petersen

Author:William Petersen [Petersen, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351291743
Google: _JouDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28T04:35:50+00:00

Immigrants: Legal, Quasilegal, and Illegal

Most countries of Northwestern Europe have experienced a marked increase in the number of alien or quasi-alien residents. Those willing to accept low-level jobs have generally differed markedly from the typical natives of industrial countries. Guestworkers, as their name suggests, were supposed to be temporary by definition: the policies of receiving countries defined them as a means of furnishing a work force during a labor shortage without adding a permanent sector of foreigners. By the 1970s, the labor shortages that had followed World War II had eased. Many migrants became guests who stayed beyond their welcome. Though juridically the foreigners were temporary, socially they became a part of the society in which they lived, and demographically often a rapidly increasing one. According to the regulations that the European Union itself set, free movement was supposed to be permitted within the whole region. In every country they went to, guestworkers acquired the legal right to have their wives and children join them. Added to their number were an estimated one to five million labor migrants who circumvented the controls and entered the receiving countries more or less illegally. The roughly 15 million alien residents of Western Europe were often called the tenth member of the Common Market, larger in total population than several of the member countries.

Labor migration is generally analyzed in an economic framework, but sentiment regarding aliens is largely based on ethnic differences. From ethnic jokes to physical violence, German antipathy to Turks has been largely cultural rather than merely an expression of competition for jobs.52 Violence against blacks and Asians in England became notorious. In France the sizable minority has become a permanent and insoluble problem. About a fourth of France’s population are either immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Legal influx continues at about 100,000 a year, plus an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 who slip in illegally. The principal change has been not in numbers but in the sending countries; nearly half of recent newcomers are Arabs or blacks from Africa. Unemployment, almost 12 percent in the mid-1990s, is widely attributed to competition from immigrants—whose jobless rate is three times that of the native French.53

The background of the large movement from less developed to industrial countries can be illustrated with details about one receiving country. As recently as a generation ago, Sweden had been almost entirely homogeneous, with 99 percent of the population speaking the same language, sharing the same national culture, and at least nominally belonging to the same Lutheran Church. When a sizable migration started from Finland, another member of the Nordic Union, these newcomers were guaranteed the same working conditions and access to housing as natives.54 Sweden’s fertility was well below the replacement level, and unless such acculturated aliens as the Finns replenished the stock, it was feared that Sweden would disappear.

The flood of later immigrants, brought in to supplement the depleted work force, was larger and from quite different cultures. By the mid-1980s, 1.2 million persons out of Sweden’s total of 8.

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