Europe's Migrant Workers: Northward!

They are outsiders, set apart by birth, language, national identity and poverty. A Dutch newspaper has referred to them as "our new slave generation." They have been ridiculed as "spaghetti eaters" in Hamburg and "devil foreigners" in Stockholm. There are 6,000,000 of them in northern Europe--migrant workers from Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey and North Africa as well as black Africa, who have moved north in search of jobs.

Every week thousands more arrive, aboard the "Train of Hope" from Italy's blighted south, aboard jampacked boats out of Dakar and other West African ports, aboard buses from Spain and Portugal, and even on foot, carrying their belongings in a kerchief or a cardboard suitcase. One day, their quest for affluence in the cold and often inhospitable north may be looked upon as one of the great social movements of the 1960s and '70s. Already, they have given Europe a "northward tilt" comparable to the westward tilt that the U.S. has experienced since World War II. But unlike the California-bound Americans, and unlike European emigrants of the past, the migrants in northern Europe have never really unpacked their bags. Strangers to the last, they pinch their pennies, save as much as 70% of their pay, and dream of the day they can go home.

White Widows. In 1959 there were only 10,000 foreigners working in West Germany. Today there are 1,670,000, including 350,000 Italians, 326,000 Yugoslavs and 290,000 Turks. In France, whose migrant population of 3,000,000 is the largest in Europe, squalid shanty towns known as bidonvllles (after bidons, flattened gasoline cans that provide the basic building material) surround practically every major industrial city. In Switzerland, where the migrants now account for one-sixth of the population, a tourist is apt to discover that the only Swiss citizen in a restaurant is the man behind the cash register.

The Netherlands, with 60,000 migrants, has modified its welfare legislation so that Moslem workers can draw allowances for the children of more than one wife. In Britain, one veteran restaurantgoer remarks ruefully, "To dine out successfully in London today, a rapid course in Spanish and Italian is advisable. But if you want to be sure of getting what you order, ask for spaghetti." In Leeds, the winner of a recent Yorkshire pudding baking contest turned out to be a Chinese cook who spoke no English and called the prize-winning dish shortska po din (because that is how it sounded to him). Native Yorkshiremen were enraged.

As a result of the northward migration, many villages in southern Europe, particularly in Italy, are almost bereft of their young men. "The only union members we have in this town are pensioners," a labor organizer complained recently. Every village has its "white widows" whose husbands headed north soon after the wedding. In the first half of last year, 140,000 Italians left their country. Only 20,000 went overseas; the rest went north.

In the past decade the migrants have eased a severe labor shortage in the booming northern economies, partly because they have accepted jobs that the northerners themselves refuse. The Italians often rank as the aristocrats of the movement, holding down skilled jobs, but their colleagues constitute a kind of subproletariat. West Berlin recently formed a street-cleaning unit made up of 85 Turks. Out of 3,800 garbage workers who went on strike in Paris two months ago, two-thirds were black Africans. When a Swedish fireworks and grenade factory blew up recently, seven of the nine workers killed were foreigners. A Paris industrialist admitted in a television interview that he employed foreign labor to reduce his payroll by 20%. Another told Le Monde: "I prefer foreign workers because they think of nothing but work."

West Germany's migrants sent $740 million to their native lands in 1969, and on visits home carried millions more in the form of washers, TV sets and bicycles. Of the workers in Germany, more than half have remained at least four years, far longer than they originally intended. "How else could I ever save 400 marks a month," asks a Turk in Munich, "and still send enough money home to support my family? Some day, at home, I will have a good farm."

At Wolfsburg, east of Hannover, 6,000 Italians make up one-fourth of the work force at the giant Volkswagen plant. They live in spartan company-owned rooms (rent: $10 a month) in a complex known as "the Italian village," grumble about the unfriendliness of German girls and at Christmas time, laden with gifts, pile aboard special trains for the annual visit home.

Spanish couples have taken over thousands of domestic servants' jobs in Britain. According to one jaundiced Londoner, "they maintain an excellent intelligence service among themselves, and are adept at squeezing out salary increases by threatening to leave and go to a hated neighbor." Adds the same party snidely: "The au pair girls have a tendency to become pregnant or fall in love with their employers--sometimes both. But they have become an indispensable part of the British way of upper-middle-class life."

Close Vote. Nowhere in Europe have relations between guest and host become more acrimonious than in Switzerland. Uberfremdung (over-foreignization) has been a battle cry of the far right for the past five years. Under a particularly vicious law that severely restricts the right of migrants to bring their families into Switzerland, several infants have actually been expelled. In one case, a three-month-old boy was expelled because his Italian parents were not married, but was allowed to return after newspaper protests.

This week the all-male Swiss electorate will vote on a nationwide referendum that seeks to reduce the foreign population from the current 16% to 10%, and would thus require the expulsion of 300,000 workers. Says Zurich Deputy James Schwarzenbach, who has led the Uberfremdung fight, "They call me a new Hitler, but that's a lie. I just want to feel at home in my own country." Once, it was expected that the referendum would be defeated by a wide margin, largely because it would deal a harsh blow to the Swiss economy. Said the Tribune de Geneve: "If Schwarzenbach has his way, it will mean that the Swiss will have to go back to work." Nonetheless, the vote may be extremely close.

Unspeakable Cases. Housing is a problem for migrant workers all over Europe, but in France it has virtually become a matter of national shame. At Ivry, in southeast Paris, a "sleep seller" was granted permission three years ago to house 150 Africans temporarily in a former chocolate factory. Subsequently, he increased the number of lodgers to 600, with many bunks occupied 24 hours a day on a three-shift basis. Last January, five Africans died of asphyxiation while trying to keep warm in a crumbling house at Aubervilliers near Paris.

The resulting public outcry caused Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas to visit the bidonville at Nanterre, whose 1,000 Moroccans, Tunisians and Algerians give it the look and smell of an Arab slum outside any big North African city. Shocked by the conditions in which the North Africans were living, he promised: "By the end of the year we shall have dealt with these unspeakable cases. By the end of 1971 we intend to solve the entire problem." Since that time the government has restricted the formerly free flow of Algerians into France, and has quietly adopted a policy of restricting black immigrants.

The Darker Side. In social terms, the gap between what the Germans call the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) and his host has remained wide. EUROPEANS ONLY signs have become a commonplace in the vicinity of the Sorbonne, and SOUTHLANDERS NOT ACCEPTED is a standard phrase in room-for-rent ads in Zurich. Rejected as garlicky inferiors, the workers are also baffled by cultural differences. A German girl who might welcome the famous Italian approach while vacationing on the Adriatic resents a pinch or a loud pass on Wolfsburg's Porschestrasse. In Sweden, an Italian or Yugoslav haled into court on a rape charge is apt to be genuinely puzzled; after all, when a girl accepts an invitation to visit a man's room, she must be kidding when she insists that coffee is all she wants.

In some respects, the northward migration demonstrates what British Journalist Anthony Sampson, in his Anatomy of Europe, called "the darker side of [European] prosperity." Yet the returning workers also represent a new hope for their native lands. Thousands of Italians, coming home from Frankfurt and Lille and Basel, have been eagerly absorbed by Italy's skill-short industries. Thousands more have used their savings to buy a piece of land, a cafe or a gas station in the Italian south.

Recognizing the opportunity, many Italian companies regularly scout German and Swiss factories for newly skilled Italian workers, and lure them home with firm offers of jobs and housing. Italian authorities have supported these efforts by offering housing priority to the returnees, and customs inspectors have levied nominal duty on their cars. But technical skills, appliances and a nest egg are not the only things the workers bring back. From the Iberian peninsula to the Bosporus and beyond, the migrant workers may one day serve as a compelling force for change when they return from the north with fresh notions about economics, politics and society.

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