West Germany’s Gastarbeiterprogramm began in 1955, a decade after a wide-ranging world war had left it in ruins. An economic upswing left the country needing untrained workers, and it signed bilateral agreements with a host of down-at-heel countries—Italy, Spain, Morocco, South Korea, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia—for thousands of euphemistically-known ‘guest workers’, who would be permitted in, work for a year or two, and then be repatriated. By 1961, however, the vast majority of the Gastarbeiter were Turks, pouring into Germany through an agreement rammed through by the US that sidelined German misgivings about cultural and political dissonances.
These were mostly rural Turks, unfamiliar with the ways of Europeans—indeed, with those of urban Turks. A German liaison office set up in Istanbul advertised positions for “lathe operators, milling cutters, spoolers, factory workers and packers”. Soon enough, these Gastarbeiter formed the bottom of the German worker pyramid, trapping themselves while freeing up the citizenry for upward mobility.
By 1972, the German government had serious concerns about whether, in the words of the then chancellor Willy Brandt, “society’s absorptive capacity” had been crossed. Less than a year later, the Turkish Gastarbeiter programme was shut down. In 1983, paralleling a recession that disemployed two million Germans, the government passed a law providing money to Turkish residents who were open to repatriation. The law was a non-starter: a decade earlier, the government had enabled Turkish workers to bring in their families, many of whom were loath to leave even if some earlier migrants were willing. In the early 1980s, a sort of Kristallnacht redux occurred in West Germany when unemployed German youth rampaged through Kreuzberg, a Turkish-majority borough of Berlin.
October 2021 was the 60th anniversary of the first arrival of Turkish Gastarbeiter. In the following decades of German unreason and guest worker rioting, of bilateral introspection and outreach, the multigenerational Gastarbeiter couldn’t become a part-and-parcel of German society. While many Turks are integrated, two-thirds remain non-citizens and, therefore, outside the purview of social gain but not of loss. Sociologically, this is a stunning failure of multiculturalism and multireligiosity.
In the 1960s, the growing Dutch economy too called for workers from Spain, Portugal, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, Morocco and Turkey. This followed the mass emigration in the 1950s of 350,000 Dutch nationals to Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In 1964, the Dutch government signed a recruitment agreement with Turkey and then Morocco. The initial welcome was euphoric. But as the cold reality dawned of low-salaried incoming employees edging out citizen employees, local emotions whiplashed. The government vacillated, passing the Family Reunification Act in 1974 and then quickly terminating the recruitment programme. Since then, although the Netherlands has been striving for a policy of integration, it has been hard going.
And it raises questions about the conflationary ideals of the liberal Left on the matter of forcing socially, religiously and economically inimical cultures into close proximity. Experts on labour migration are today re-examining the long-term politicoeconomic utility of job migration from developing to developed countries that carries the baggage of inequity on its back.
India might seem to be an outlier. There are documented and illegal Indian migrant workers everywhere, but they don’t attract anti-social attention in Europe, not because they are better than other migrant nationalities but likely because they do not have the targets of ghettoisation painted on their backs. India even coasts economically on what is known as the Gulf-boom surf, with workers repatriating enough money to keep entire southern states afloat. But behind this golden-age migrancy lies a system of exploitation and disenfranchisement—the kafala employer-sponsorship system and the migrants’ inability to vote despite multidecadal residency. While foreigners now outnumber locals in all Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states but Saudi Arabia—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the UAE—and Jordan and Lebanon, they are kept sociopolitically unambitious through religio-political declassing and controlled sociality. Also, this system is under a country’s interior ministry, not the labour ministry, so there is little recourse to redress.
The migration-for-labour system works, until it doesn’t. A downturn in the GCC states, which inevitably shadows a global downturn, means labour, not money, repatriated, and fewer workers allowed in. In 2017-18, emigration clearances to Indians fell by 21 percent. Relative to 2014, the decline was a stunning 62 percent. White-collar emigration did not decline; blue collar—comprising 70 percent of the 9.3 million Indian expats in the Gulf—plummeted.
In the long term, workers from poorer countries have for decades earned a living abroad—but it has been largely unempowered and precariously placed.
Let’s keep this in mind when we celebrate conflict-ridden Israel schmoozing with India about importing 100,000 Indian unskilled workers to engine its construction and agriculture sectors after it cancelled overnight similar permits for 90,000 Palestinians. These Indian workers will apparently be temporary. Even if they were granted a measure of permanency by a less extreme and xenophobic Israeli dispensation, given Israel’s super-tight citizenship rules, they would never be granted full citizenship or the civic rights embedded therein. With Israel’s own finance ministry and central bank signaling an economic downturn—and with an average unemployment rate of 6.3 percent in 1992-2023 reduced by half only after a massive recall of army reserves in October 2023—a faceoff between Indian labourers and Israeli blue-collared workers could be impending.
Taiwan has jumped on the bandwagon, too: it is expected to sign an agreement with the Indian government in December 2023 to hire 100,000 workers—for its factories and farms. This might mean money in the short term, but also, as elsewhere, socio-labour precarity and societal unbelonging.
We need to find employment solutions in situ, at home. The past of exploding transnational social friction is the future.
Views are personal.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)