Migration and Immigration

Before 1914, Europe sent people out: Italians, Irish, Germans, and others crossed oceans looking for land and work. After 1945, that reversed. Western Europe needed to rebuild shattered cities and factories but had lost huge numbers of working-age men to war. Countries with overseas empires or former colonies, like Britain and France, drew on those ties: Afro-Caribbean and South Asian migrants moved to Britain, and North and West Africans moved to France. West Germany had no colonial pipeline, so it set up formal guest worker agreements, recruiting laborers from Turkey, Italy, Spain, and Yugoslavia under contracts meant to be temporary.

The temporary design kept failing for the same human reasons. Workers who stayed years built friendships, married, and had children who grew up speaking the local language and going to local schools. Sending them home got harder politically and economically once employers depended on their labor and whole industries were staffed around them. Families petitioned to reunite, governments allowed it, and rotation policies quietly became permanent settlement. By 2020 foreign-born residents made up a substantial share of the population in Germany, France, and Britain, compared to a tiny fraction in 1950.

This migration reshaped more than labor markets. It fed the age pyramid: as native birth rates fell below replacement level across Western Europe, immigration became the main source of population growth and of working-age taxpayers supporting aging populations. It also fed new debates over national identity, religion, and integration that run straight into later tensions over the European Union, borders, and nationalist politics covered next in the unit.