Over the last few years, Europe has faced the most dramatic refugee crisis since the end of World War II.1 However, this is not exactly the focus of this book, even though this challenge has been strongly influenced by the issues discussed here. The aim of this book is to retrace the story of the European relationship with immigration, going back to the post-World War II era, when the European migratory regime was initiated. In other words, the aim of this book is to demonstrate how the full legacy of the relationship between Europe and immigration—since it developed during exactly the same time that the project of a European Union gained consistency—must be taken into account in order to understand current reactions towards migrants and asylum seekers who try to penetrate ‘Fortress Europe .’ This includes reactions towards people with a migratory background who are already sojourning within the borders of each Member State, who often continue to be perceived as ‘diverse,’ despite their status as long-term residents (or, eventually, as full citizens) and despite the ‘equalizing’ efforts put in place during the last decades. Finally, the aim of this book is to allow readers to be challenged by the still-unsolved knots of this historical inheritance, thereby drawing a crucial—even a prophetic—lesson from the current refugee crisis.
Contrary to the many analyses that unilaterally stress the securitarian and discriminatory (or, eventually, assimilationist) attitude towards migrants and asylum seekers , this book suggests that the idea of a Janus-faced image is more adequate for describing European policies and the stances towards them. Evidence provided in the following chapters permits one to grasp the contradictions, the ambivalences and the hypocrisies that characterize the answers of both governmental authorities and other influential actors. Moreover, coherent with its historical meaning, this metaphor alludes to swinging between different, opposed conditions and claims, and the simultaneous presence of harmonizing and clashing pressures, thus appearing particularly appropriate to describe the ‘schizophrenic’ approach towards immigration. Lastly, this metaphor evokes the link between past and future, or the importance of historical legacy in shaping attitudes towards current and future challenges.
Actually, in order to understand the current attitude towards immigration in its different components and challenging aspects, I think that it is necessary to go back to the origin of the European migratory regime and to its illusionary ambitions (Zanfrini 2017). As a matter of fact, any choice—or no choice at all—in the field of migration policies has a normative character, which reflects the expectations of the receiving societies and of their most influential groups. This feature is particularly evident in the case of the migratory regime inaugurated in the post-war period, which was strongly influenced by the interests of the most relevant economic actors. In this book, I will refer to this hallmark by defining the traditional European model as an ‘economicistic’ approach.
According to the well-known classification proposed by Papademetriou and Hamilton (1995), European countries such as Germany and Switzerland exemplify the Temporary Labor Model . Here, foreign workers are usually assigned positions in particular firms, sectors or activities through a process supervised by government bureaus; occupational and sectoral mobility is severely curtailed, and residence permits are pinned to employment and require frequent renewal—immigrants may be obliged to return to their country of origin when their work permits expire. The concept of ‘Guest Worker ’ efficaciously summarizes this kind of expectations.
Since it clearly clashes with the philosophy of rights and solidarity embedded in European democracies, as well as in the same EU project, this model was destined to be repeatedly remoulded. Because of its intrinsically discriminatory characters, the Guest Worker paradigm can hardly coexist with the culture of rights that is strongly rooted in European democracies. Therefore, contrary to other destination countries in the global migratory system that can casually tap into the reservoir of labor represented by immigrants and get rid of them when they are no longer needed, European countries had to quickly come to terms with the instances of inclusion, equalization and recognition of the diversity embedded in immigration.
However, based on available studies (see, e.g., Challoff 2016; Zanfrini 2015), the aforementioned model can be deemed as the typical European approach and not only typical of the countries that officially adopted it in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, in most European nations , migration policies are traditionally (and continue to be) aimed at importing foreign workers in order to fill specific (and temporary) labor shortages. Finally, as will be described in this book, despite its successive revisions and empirical invalidations, migration schemes enacted by many countries during the post-WWII period of rapid growth strongly marked European immigration history, imprinting it with an economicistic matrix.
Indeed, in the period between World War I and World War II, characterized by the advent of new forms of border policing (involving the need for a foreign person to obtain a permit to enter a country and reside there), the emerging regime of visas in Europe already began to link the right to reside in a country with a work permit, virtually defining a migrant as a temporary worker (Wimmer and Schiller 2003). This approach was further institutionalized after the end of World War II, through the introduction of new migration schemes based on bilateral agreements signed between sending countries and receiving countries. These arrangements were expected to meet two different needs. The sending countries’ need to ‘export’ their numerous unemployed workers and the destination countries’ need to satisfy a labor demand that exceeded the volume of domestic labor forces.
As a result, for many years, since the end of the World War II and all throughout the ‘Glorious Thirty,’ European States were characterized by an approach based on the rhetorical figure of the Guest Worker (Penninx 2005). The latter contained in itself the reasons for (Zanfrini 2016):
- a)
Defining migration as a pure economic phenomenon (akin to the importation of any other productive factor), and denying migrants inclusion in the community of citizens;- b)
Legitimizing a differential treatment towards migrant workers, and encouraging their ‘natural’ concentration in the lower layers of the professional hierarchy and social stratification;- c)
Cultivating the illusion of the temporary nature of migration and contrasting the stable settlement of immigrant families and communities.
Given these premises, from the point of view of most European States, both their status as countries of immigration and the challenge of governing a heterogeneous society can be viewed as unexpected—and largely “unwelcom...