World: Europe's Migrant Workers: Northward!

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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.

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