A Glance at Immigration World-Wide: Putting Immigration in Austria on the Map
The USA is the classical country of immigration. Millions of people have emigrated to the United States from all over the world, and there is no end to this development. The dominant metaphor in use has been that of the "melting pot". Israel Zangwill wrote a drama with the same title, and he has one of the characters say this: "The real American has not yet arrived, he is only in the Crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races, the coming superman." (Quoted in Treibel 1988, 37) Glazer and Moynihan, on the other hand, say in their study Beyond the Melting Pot: "The idea of the melting pot is as old as the Republic. The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen." (1963, 288-289)
As early as 1914 Horace M. Kallen stands up for cultural pluralism and declares America to be a phantom: "America is a word. As a historic fact, or as a democratic ideal of life, it is not realized at all. " (1914, 95) And he goes on to say: "Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grandfathers." (Kallen 1914, 122)
In the seventies a new metaphor appears, that of the "salad bowl". This implies that the original ingredients are still recognisable, but they touch, there is a mixture of the elements, they share the same space, and with the salad cream all over them there is a new taste to it.
The melting pot has been unmasked as a myth, a dream, that cannot easily be lived
in reality.
From about 1820, 15 to 20 million Europeans left the southern European countries to settle in South America. In the decades before the First World War, more than 5 million Russians settled in Siberia. A considerable number of Europeans moved to Africa, especially to South Africa, about 4 to 5 millions in all.
Meanwhile the direction of the streams of migration have turned around. An
increasing number of legal and, more recently, also illegal immigrants pour into Europe.
Since the fifties several million people have been moving to countries such as Great
Britain and France, later to Italy, Portugal and Spain. The reason for this were difficult
conditions of living in Third World Countries as well as an increased demand for cheap
labour in Europe. (Cf. Münz 1991, 20) And despite growing unemployment and harder to get
immigration permits, the influx of foreign people into Europe has not come to a halt yet.
Before 1989, Austria was more a country of transition on the way to Germany for people from Turkey and Yugoslavia than the country of their choice. After the fall of the iron curtain Austria turned into the "door to the west" for migrants from former Eastern bloc countries.
The trend to go west, where the pay cheques were better, hit Austrian workers soon after World War II. The majority of these Austrians in foreign countries live and work in Germany (176.000) and Switzerland (29.000); others live in Brazil, the USA, Canada, Central and South America, South Africa, Australia, Italy, and Great Britain. These Austrians in foreign countries total 430.000 as opposed to 550.000 foreigners in Austria. As the latter group is generally less qualified, this phenomenon could be seen as a form of "brain drain".
In the early sixties a contingent of 47.000 foreigners were allowed in to redress the shortage of labour at that time. They were called "guest workers" and were clearly thought of as temporary. When in the seventies it became common practice to employ "tourists", migration from Turkey and Yugoslavia increased dramatically and reached a high point in 1973 with 226.000 workers.
With the recession after 1974 these numbers were drastically reduced again as many of these workers lost their jobs and returned home. On the other hand, those who were able to keep their jobs changed their initial plans and began to think of their situation in Austria as a more permanent one: this is expressed by the number of family members that moved to Austria to live together with the foreign workers. In Vorarlberg, for instance, the Turkish population kept growing steadily although the number of the Turkish workers remained the same.
(This page is based on Gauss, Rainer, Anneliese Harasek und Gerd Lau (ed.). 1994. Interkulturelle Bildung - Lernen kennt keine Grenzen. Vol.1: Eine Einführung.)
