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3. Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race
- University of Michigan Press
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Chapter 3 Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race Rita Chin In an attempt to head off a major labor shortage precipitated by the postwar economic boom, the Federal Republic of Germany signed a worker recruitment treaty with Italy in December 1955. The agreement inaugurated an eighteen-year period of foreign labor recruitment that targeted guest workers from many southern Mediterranean countries, including Muslim Turkey. It also marked the beginning of a massive labor migration, bringing two million foreigners to West Germany by the early 1970s. This effort to obtain manpower during the Wirtschaftswunder produced a number of unintended consequences, most notably a radically transformed demographic, social, and cultural landscape. What began as a short-term solution to an economic crisis ultimately became the catalyst for the long-term creation of a sizeable minority community of Turks in the Federal Republic. In many ways, the practice of importing foreign workers and the accompanying experience of demographic expansion were not new in the German context. During the Wilhelmine period, Poles from Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been recruited to work in the coal mines of the Ruhr valley and hired as seasonal workers in the eastern agricultural regions.1 Of more immediate relevance to the period after 1955, the Nazi state—just ‹fteen years before—had forced tens of thousands of foreigners onto the territory of the Third Reich and exploited them as slave laborers to help fuel its war machine.2 Yet the Nazi legacy itself signi‹cantly altered the terms on which the postwar labor recruitment could be understood. Precisely because race had served as the primary mode of social distinction during the Nazi period, a form of categorization that determined whether a person was valued by the state or marked for destruction, one of the implicit imperatives for the 80 reconstruction of a more fully democratic West German society was to make the question of race a nonissue. This imperative, of course, did not mean that race and racism simply disappeared from everyday interactions or even social policy in the Federal Republic. As we have already seen, policymakers had no problem absorbing the American model of a black/white binary and applying it to the offspring of African American GIs and German women; and West Germans quickly began to treat Jewish displaced persons (DPs) as “parasitic foreigners,” at times drawing on language and images that the Nazis had used to brand Jews as racial Others. Guest workers did not escape this pattern. The pejorative slang word Türkentüte, for instance, was coined to refer to the cheap plastic bags that Turkish guest workers often used to carry groceries. At the very least, though, the horri‹c consequences of Nazi social policies and the regime’s subsequent demise thoroughly discredited the category of “race” and made the term taboo in West German polite society and public discourse. Despite this new reluctance to employ the word race, the postwar recruitment of guest workers produced a demographic landscape in which forms of essentialized thinking associated with racial ideologies became a key tool for social differentiation once again. The relationship between processes of racialization and the labor migration, however, is not as straightforward as one might expect. During the ‹rst twenty years that guest workers resided in the Federal Republic, their presence remained largely unproblematic at the level of national public debate and failed to elicit the kinds of open questioning about racial compatibility that emerged around black Mischlingskinder in the 1950s and 1960s.3 Indeed, government leaders across the political spectrum, policymakers, employers in industry, and newspaper commentators actively championed the use of foreign labor as a necessary strategy to keep economic production high. There was little sense that guest workers might eventually present a social problem because everyone involved in the recruitment program assumed that labor migrants would inevitably return home. Over the course of the 1970s, however, changes in the migrant population transformed the ways Germans thought about guest workers. By the end of the decade, the number of foreigners living in the Federal Republic surpassed four million, largely due to the in›ux of spouses and children. Turks, meanwhile, had outpaced other national groups and were routinely identi‹ed as the quintessential guest worker. These developments prompted political authorities to acknowledge that labor forces had become de facto immigrants, which in turn drove the establishment of new Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race 81 [3.82.3.33] Project MUSE...