The Peaceful Invasion

...And the difficulty is compounded by the fairly large numbers of Italians from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Turkey who have also drifted back, under the pressure of Moslem Nationalism, to the homeland their ancestors left centuries before to establish prosperous communities throughout Northern Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean in the heyday of Genoese, Pisan or Venetian trade...

...In the Netherlands, a similar phenomenon has brought 50,000 Eurasian and Christian Indonesian refugees, most of them Amboinese, from Sukarno's rabidly nationalistic inferno of administrative incompetence, political corruption and Javanese neo-colonialism...

...Every European nation employing these masses of "repatriated" or alien manpower adopts its own attitudes and techniques in assimilating them and in attempting to avoid dangerous tensions in the communities where they settle in large numbers...

...Many a North African worker, unable to find unfurnished lodgings rentable on a monthly basis, pays as much as half of his meagre salary for a hotel room in a filthy fire trap owned by an extortionist landlord who often happens to be a more fortunate compatriot, established in France long enough to have invested his hard earned savings in this venture of smalltime capitalism...

...Despite the availability of language instruction in some areas, most foreign workers soon become discouraged by their failure to learn anything very useful in classes attended after a heavy day's work in factory or mine...

...In Munich, statistics have revealed that Turkish workers are also accident-prone, being unaccustomed to city traffic and unable to read or understand traffic regulations...

...Instead, they wait until these workers have acquired skills at the expense of Belgian or French employers and then recruit them "illegally" across the border...

...In the Belgian coal mines, Moroccans and Turks are employed as indentured labor, obliged to remain for three years with the firm that has paid for their transportation and training...

...Around Mons and Liège, some German firms employ Arab and Turkish "black market" agents who induce their compatriots to break their contracts with Belgian employers and escape to Germany, where employment conditions are so much better...

...In France, too, over 1.5 million North Africans of European or Jewish extraction have recently come from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt...

...The majority, however, remain restless and uprooted, changing jobs all too often and easily becoming so lonely and discouraged that they return home before having learned any skill or made any substantial savings...

...In the end, perhaps one of the most significant aspects of the vast influx of foreign labor to Western Europe is that its basic causes are being ignored...

...EUROPE'S MIGRANT WORKERS The Peaceful Invasion By Edouard Roditi Paris For several years now armies of workers from North Africa and the less developed areas of Southern Europe—Portugal, Spain, Southern Italy, Greece and Turkey —have been marching at the rate of a million emigrants a year to the industrial centers of Northern Europe in search of work and a new life...

...Many factories which employ them in large numbers have built mosques and organized special canteens to cater to their requirements in strict observance of Moslem dietary laws...

...Tuberculosis and syphilis are rampant in such slums...

...The still less fortunate workers from the Maghreb or from West Africa crowd together in "hot-bed" lodgings...

...Thus, successful marriages between skilled North African workers, mainly light-skinned Berbers from the mountains of Kabylia, and French women are no longer infrequent...

...Because the French are so convinced of the superiority of their own culture, they expected all immigrants to allow themselves to be effortlessly assimilated...

...A contrasting situation exists in West Germany...

...And the most recent wave of immigration from West Africa has created a category of workers who are even more poorly prepared than the North Africans to face the problems of social or cultural integration: French social workers have reported cases of 10 or more West African laborers, often unemployed, crowding together in a single damp cellar room without light, ventilation, heating or any convenience...

...Until quite recently, though, almost no attempt was made to cope with the situation in France, which now has by far the largest number of such immigrants...

...The Swiss government's restrictions on family immigration have been a major source of discontent among the Italians...

...His escape to "freedom from want" has no propaganda value in the cold war, so our newspapers publish no dramatic daily statistics of new arrivals...

...Many German employers no longer go to the trouble and expense of recruiting unskilled labor in North Africa or Turkey...

...A new agreement between the Swiss and Italian governments, designed to improve conditions for the 470,000 Italian workers in Switzerland, also provides that pay scales for Italians will be raised to levels received by Swiss workers, and permits the Italians to look for work in other fields after a minimum of five years in their original job category...

...West Germany's better living and working conditions attract not only skilled North Africans but also many Italians from Switzerland...

...Recruited in Morocco for the infirmary of a Belgian mine, a young male nurse from a Rabat hospital found himself forced, in Liège, to work as a miner...

...Once a criminal or an unbeliever in his own eyes, the immigrant may easily become a cynic who no longer observes any moral obligations, whether Islamic or French...

...In Cologne a luxurious cultural center, with a library and readingroom, has been built for Turkish workers, many of whom are illiterate and had never seen anything quite as luxurious in the Anatolian towns and villages from which they have come...

...Recently Swiss officials relaxed their rules somewhat...

...The high frequency of crime among immigrant workers is due, to some extent, to the individual's loss of self-respect when he finds himself unable to pursue his customary disciplines of daily prayer and ritual ablutions or to observe his religious holidays...

...Edouard Roditi, whose first article on shifting labor forces ("North Africa's Great Migration") appeared in the September 28 NL, reports frequently from Europe...

...In any case, the whole of Western European culture is already affected by this influx of foreign labor, which has attracted far less attention than the flow of East German refugees to the West...

...In Scandinavia, on the other hand, there exists an almost romantic preference for the more exotic immigrants...

...It has also produced some shocking social evils and inequalities whose eradication is now imperative and doubly difficult...

...In Italy, for instance, it is very difficult to estimate the flow of workers from Sardinia, Sicily and the provinces south of Naples to the booming commercial centers in the North...

...Within a couple of weeks, attendance drops to a small core of more intelligent or ambitious workers who turn out to be the only ones to learn the language and who may then decide to settle permanently as fully integrated immigrants...

...No longer known as Fremdarbeiter, foreign workers, the immigrants are pompously called Gastarbeiter, guest workers...

...In France, a more liberal policy already allows foreign workers to import their families if they can prove their ability to support and house them, but French housing shortages are still so severe that such liberality remains almost meaningless...

...Crime and prostitution abound to such an extent that many Frenchmen attribute the prevalence of these evils to the race or cultural background of the immigrants rather than to the conditions in which they are forced to live...

...For several larger communities of imported Turkish workers, an Imam has been brought from Turkey, just as Spanish priests were brought in for Catholic Spanish workers...

...But just as the dialects of East Germany are now so frequently heard in some West German cities that Frankfurt wits say their city is "in the Saxon occupation-zone of Germany," so has cous-cous already become a standard dish in French cuisine, since most French restaurants now employ Algerian rather than French cooks...

...Some of them, ironically enough, are thus learning to read and write their own native language in their German exile...

...Yet many European industrialists are still unwilling to face the huge investments that automation would require in order to reduce manpower needs...

...The workers previously had to wait 10 years before they were allowed to obtain other types of employment...

...The Swiss Parliament has recommended automation as a cure to Switzerland's permanent labor shortages, arguing that Swiss export industries owe their prosperity to high standards which cannot be maintained by these less skilled imported workers...

...Within a few weeks, he had escaped to West Germany, which is experiencing a shortage of nurses...

...A more democratic educational system now provides nearly all native Europeans with sufficient skills or expectations to make them unwilling to accept menial jobs for which the immigrants are imported...

...This appears particularly true when he discovers that, in his factory canteen, he has been eating forbidden pork without realizing it, thus transgressing one of the basic tenets of his faith...

...As a result Belgium now imports much of its foreign labor at a loss, paying for transportation and on-the-job training without deriving much profit from it...

...workers have had to wait three years before bringing their families from home...

...Though they are officially listed as "repatriated" French citizens, many had never lived in France and bear a closer resemblance to Arabs or Berbers in physical appearance, social custom and cultural background, than to metropolitan Frenchmen...

...Odd problems have arisen in cases of fatal accidents or illness: Where can one bury a Mohammedan in a community which has only Christian cemeteries...

...Exact statistics on these population movements cannot be obtained...

...In Switzerland, for example, the massive influx of alien labor has already generated a peculiar kind of Helvetic insecurity—both cultural and racial...

...In England, however, a similar flow of immigrants from the West Indies, Pakistan, West Africa and other areas of the Commonwealth has caused tensions—in a few instances, even race riots—in the communities where they have settled...

...but neither is the growth of huge slums of unassimilated Arabs and Berbers in most French cities, where no effort has been made to house them suitably...

...This curious laissez-faire, so similar to the optimistic American philosophy of the "melting-pot," has achieved, as in America too, some remarkably felicitous results...

...In France, Northern Italy, West Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland and other parts of the industrialized North, where serious labor shortages are still felt not only in industry but in mining, agriculture and many of the less remunerative services that require little training or skill, this invasion is proving to be one of the really notable social alterations in the Europe of the '60s...

...These programs are not commercial, like those for immigrant communities in America...

...This, plus the fact that many Belgian employers are somewhat unscrupulous, makes recruitment very easy...

...Such facilities are especially necessary, of course, in helping to maintain selfrespect in the difficult transition from ancient habits and beliefs into the customs of modern urban life...

...In some areas where there are many widely scattered smaller communities of Moslem workers, a truck equipped as a mosque makes regular rounds, accompanied by a travelling Imam...

...Foreign-language programs in Italian, Spanish, Greek or Turkish are also planned or already broadcast by many local West German stations...

...they are officially sponsored, to compete with the Communist foreign language broadcasts that Radio Budapest had been quick to beam into West Germany, where Turkish workers had become their regular listeners for lack of other programs in their native language...

...Though motivated by the same hopes of a higher standard of living, the immigrant from Greece or Turkey comes from a society which, in spite of its many evils, is still officially a "democracy...

...Except in Paris, where a huge mosque was built between the two wars as an official gesture of French recognition of Morocco and Tunisia as protectorates rather than mere colonies, no serious efforts have been made to provide Mohammedan immigrants with their accustomed religious and cultural facilities...

...there the North African Arab or the West African Negro is more popular than the mere Spaniard or Italian...

...An uneasy conscience about the treatment of imported foreign labor in Hitler's Third Reich has inspired many municipalities and employers to create almost ideal conditions for the new immigrants...

...Such efforts to satisfy the cultural or spiritual needs of foreign workers in many West German communities are already causing problems in neighboring Common Market countries...

...The waiting period has now been cut from three years to 18 months...

...The Vatican has officially condemned Switzerland's policy of thus disrupting the family life of Italian workers in order to preserve the "national character" of Helvetic culture and community life...

...Dutch employers are also recruiting foreign workers from the Belgian mines, which are notoriously the most dangerously obsolete in Western Europe...