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Article: A LESSON IN IMMIGRATION GUEST WORKERS EXPERIMENTS TRANSFORMED EUROPE
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- April 19, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2006 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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BERLIN Germany needed workers. Turks needed work.
So starting in 1961, the country invited Turkish "guest workers"
to come do the dirty jobs that Germans didn't want.
Only 7,000 "gastarbeiter," as they were called, arrived that first
year, a curiosity in a country where non-European faces were rare.
Press flashbulbs popped. Politicians made speeches of welcome.
Ordinary Germans watched, bemused.
Nobody grasped that the country and the continent, because
neighboring nations soon undertook similar experiments was on the
brink of a transformation whose effects are still reverberating
across Europe.
In Berlin, which today ranks as the largest "Turkish" city outside
Turkey, falafel stands and ...