Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

12 Open Borders
The system established a clear distinction between the civil rights of
foreigners and those of citizens. Foreigners had no voting rights and, because
their work and residence permits usually tied them to a particular employer,
they were forced to work in the worst jobs in the worst conditions and could
do little to improve these conditions.
The guestworker system was most highly developed in Germany, but, as
Castles and Miller relate, it existed to some extent throughout Europe.
Switzerland imported labour on a large scale from 1945 to 1974. Swiss
industry became highly dependent on foreign workers, who were recruited
abroad by employers, while admisssion and residence were controlled by the
government; there were severe prohibitions on job changing, permanent
settlement and family reunion. Belgium brought in foreign workers, mainly
Italians and mainly for the coal mines and the iron and steel industries,
immediately after the war. The Netherlands brought in ‘guestworkers’ in the
1960s and early 1970s. France established an Office Nationale d’Immigration
(ONI) in 1945 to recruit workers from southern Europe. Employers had
to apply to ONI for labour and pay a fee per head. ONI vetted the applicants
and ensured they were healthy and suited to manual labour (examining their
hands to make sure they had calluses, according to one report). By 1970, 2
million foreign workers and 690,000 dependants had entered France. The
British government brought in some 90,000 European workers under
various schemes.
Mainly in France, the Netherlands and Britain, there was in addition
immigration for work from colonies and former colonies. Immigration of
workers to France from its former colonies was the largest. By 1970,
according to Castles and Miller, there were over 600,000 Algerians,
140,000 Moroccans and 90,000 Tunisians in France, as well as many
Senegalese, Maliens, Mauritanians and others from former African colonies.
Some came as citizens of Overseas Departments, including Algerians before
1962, and an estimated 250,000–300,000 from Guadeloupe, Martinique
and Réunion. In the Netherlands, between 1945 and the early 1960s, nearly
300,000 ‘repatriates’ came from Indonesia, as Dutch citizens. By the late
1970s there were also about 160,000 Surinamese, who had Dutch
citizenship up to 1975. In Britain 541,000 people had migrated from the
‘New Commonwealth’ by 1962, when immigration controls stopped most
‘primary’ immigration for work.
In the United States postwar immigration was lower than it had been at
the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was 880,000 per year; in
the 1950s there were 250,000 immigrants per year and in the 1980s
600,000. In 1965 the discriminatory national-origins quota restrictions,
which had restricted immigration from non-European countries, were
abolished under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and there was then a
big increase in immigration from Asia and Latin America. There was also
widespread use of temporary migrant worker schemes in agriculture which
involved especially Mexicans, who lived in extremely harsh conditions. Peri-