Guest worker experiments transformed Europe

Via The Boston Globe
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff  |  April 19, 2006

BERLIN -- Germany needed workers. Turks needed work.

So starting in 1961, the country invited Turkish ''guest workers" to come do the dirty jobs that Germans didn't want.

Only 7,000 ''gastarbeiter," as they were called, arrived that first year, a curiosity in a country where non-European faces were rare. Press flashbulbs popped. Politicians made speeches of welcome. Ordinary Germans watched, bemused.

Nobody grasped that the country -- and the continent, because neighboring nations soon undertook similar experiments -- was on the brink of a transformation whose effects are still reverberating across Europe.

In Berlin, which today ranks as the largest ''Turkish" city outside Turkey, falafel stands and kebab joints far outnumber eateries offering schnitzel. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, Islamic calls to prayer are as common as church chimes. In the raw-knuckled housing projects ringing Paris, graffiti are more likely to be scrawled in Arabic than in the language of Voltaire.

''The idea, originally, was that the foreign workers would stay for as long as economically necessary, then go home," said Michael Bommes, director of the Institute for Migration Research at Germany's Osnabrueck University. ''It didn't quite go like that."

As the US Congress wrestles with comprehensive immigration reform, one idea under discussion is a new program that would allow guest workers to enter the country, but not necessarily to stay on and become citizens.

In Germany, guest workers -- mostly poorly educated young men who were issued special visas allowing them entry for one or two years to take unskilled jobs -- helped the nation to become the third-richest in the world. The fabulous post-war prosperity of France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and other West European countries was also boosted by immigrant labor, mainly from Turkey and North Africa.

But more recently, as economic growth has slowed, swelling numbers of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa -- many of them arriving without any visas, or overstaying their visas and melting into the ethnic suburbs -- are being blamed for social stresses from urban blight to chaotic schools.

In the words of the late Swiss writer Max Frisch: ''We wanted workers, we got people."