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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.