The ‘New’ Immigration and the Newest: Slavic Migrations from the Balkans to America and Industrial Europe since the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

How alike or unlike were the ‘new’ immigration from southern and eastern Europe to north America before 1914 and the temporary-worker migrations from the Mediterranean lands to western Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s? Was the ‘new’ immigration itself of the Gastarbeiter type? And, if so, what lessons may be learned from this analogous historical experience? In this study of the emigration history of the Balkans, we compare some aspects of migrational experience before 1914 and during the 1960s. For a long time this comparison was ignored, because it was supposed that the 1960s movement only involved the employment of temporary workers who retained their main domicile in the countries of their origin, and, thus, that the movement was not an immigration at all. By contrast, the ‘new’ immigration to America resulted for the greater part in permanent settlement, though it might be conceded that it also had a transitory component. However, the ‘new’ immigration was also thought by contemporaries to be a purely transient movement, for much the same reasons, and in the last few years western Europe has come to realise that, whatever the original expectations of its guest workers, this newest immigration has planted huge and probably irreversible demographic facts in its midst.