The Regulation of International Migration: The United States and Western Europe in Historical Comparative Perspective Brendan Mullan

Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and Dept. of Sociology Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824
ABSTRACT This paper examines and compares the historical regulation of international migration in the U.S. and in western Europe. I describe first the extent, the types and the stages of migration experienced on the two continents mainly since the middle of the 19th century, and I follow this description with a discussion of migration regulations implemented in the U.S. and in Europe. This discussion covers the major strategic mechanisms used to regulate international migration, labor force strategies, family reunification strategies, selection/restriction strategies, and refugee/asylum strategies and assesses the rationale underlying each in both Europe and the U.S. The paper concludes that by failing to understand the complex social processes underlying international migration, building in loopholes and narrowly focusing on inconsequential details, legislators and policy makers have consistently symbolically addressed immigration issues, without actually accomplishing major change or redirection in immigration flows.

The Regulation of International Migration:

The United States and Western Europe in Historical Comparative Perspective Introduction Conventionally, in liberal democracies the formal regulation of immigration is an explicit act of government with legislative and administrative components; legislatures set policy and administrations implement that policy on a day-to-day basis. A legislativeadministrative immigration regulation continuum exists ranging from detailed legislative regulation of immigration and little administrative latitude in implementation to flexible administrative discretion within a general legal framework (Hutchinson, 1981). The balance of this immigration regulation continuum shifts across time within nations, as evident in the changing regulations applied throughout history in the U.S. and in the various countries of Europe, and transnationally, for example, immigration regulation applied across the countries of the European Union or, potentially, within the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement. This paper examines and compares the historical regulation of international migration in the U.S. and in Europe. I describe first the extent, the types and the stages of migration experienced on the two continents mainly since the middle of the 19th century, and I follow this description with a discussion of migration regulations implemented in the U.S. and in Europe. This discussion covers the major strategic mechanisms used to regulate international migration, labor force strategies, family reunification strategies, selection/restriction strategies, and refugee/asylum strategies and assesses the rationale underlying each in both Europe and the U.S. An Historical Overview International migration has played a key role in the rise and fall of empires, states, and coalitions of states as the world moved through the major political and economic stages of mercantilism, colonialism, industrialization, post-industrialization, and globalization. The modern history of international migration can be conveniently, if approximately, categorized into four broad stages: European dominated, colonization-driven migration from about 1500 to 1800, industrialization-driven migration from Europe to the New World from about 1800 to 1915, limited international migration in the inter-war years and up to about 1950, and the post 1950 emergence of migration as a complex multi-faceted global phenomenon (Massey, 1990). From the early formative period of the monarchlead territorial state, through the differentiation and separation of the institutions of government from the monarch as a person, to the post French Revolution concept of the sovereign nation-state, the state has had the role of creating and implementing solutions and regulations for human state-boundary crossing movement in the form of legislative immigration policies and administrative implementation of those regulations (Hammar, 1992; Delbrk, 1994; Calavita, 1994). Because of the limited state involvement in emigration, the endurance of free travel as a liberal ideal until the first third of the 20th century, and the relative youthfulness of todays nation states, economic considerations have outweighed political considerations in explaining the dynamics of international migration (Hammar, 1992:247). When international immigration began to emerge as a durable phenomenon with profound and far-reaching consequences, control of immigration became a pertinent issue for governments, and four dominant state strategies for monitoring and controlling
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immigration emerged: external controls applied through diplomatic mechanisms abroad (embassies) and by immigration authorities at borders; internal alien controls of residence and work permits and programs, employer sanctions, the maintenance of alien registers, and deportations; the granting of permanent residence in a country of destination; and naturalization to full citizenship (Hammar, 1992:250-253). Although all of these control mechanisms are used to some degree by most states, the U.S., a country of settlement immigration, has employed mostly external controls and the transition from temporary to permanent residence, while Europe, mainly concerned with labor immigration in the second half of the twentieth century, emphasized internal controls to a much greater extent. Because the two continents differ fundamentally in their migration history and experiences, any comparison of U.S. and European national and transnational migration policies requires first an empirical description of the extent, types and stages of immigration in each region. Immigration to the United States Since its founding as a nation-state, the U.S. has always been a country of immigration. Approximately 60 million people have entered the United States as immigrants throughout its history. As a proportion of the total U.S. population this immigration ranges from a low of about one half of one percent in the 1930s and 1940s to an average of 10.4 percent between 1910 and 1920. In 1994, at 8.7 percent, the proportion of foreignborn is at its highest since 1910 when more than 14 percent of the U.S. population was foreign born (CPS, 1994:2). When estimates of illegal immigration (between 2 and 3 million) are added to the official number of immigrants, it is probable that more immigrants entered the U.S. in the 1980s than in any other decade. In sum, the U.S. has experienced two great waves of mass immigration, the first classic era between 1880 and 1930 and the second new regime from 1970 until today. Separating these waves was a mid-century period -- a long hiatus -- when immigration levels were much lower than during the preceding or succeeding decades and when the inflow ceased to be dominated by Europeans (Massey, 1995). These foreign born entrants are not distributed evenly in terms of either their region of origin or their state of destination within the U.S. The change in immigration origin from the classic era (1880 to 1930) and the modern era (1970-today) reflects the decline of Europe and the rise of the Americas and Asia as an area of origin. The vast majority of immigrants before the 1930s were from Europe. Northwest Europe supplied most of the immigrants during the first seven decades of the 19th century gradually relinquishing momentum to Southern and Eastern Europe by the early decades of the 20th century. The new immigrants of the late 20th century have come to the U.S. from all over the world; approximately 40% come from Asia (Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam Nam)and many of the remainder from Latin America (Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti). Within the United States, the foreign born are not distributed evenly throughout the country. Today, California is home to 7.7 million foreign-born persons -- more than onethird of all immigrants to the U.S. and nearly one quarter of all California residents. New York ranks second with 2.9 million and Florida ranks third with 2.1 million foreign-born. Three other states have over 1 million foreign-born residents -- Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey (CPS, 1994:2). In 1990 these five states received fully 78 percent of immigrants whereas a century ago, the preponderance of immigrants were located on the north3

eastern seaboard of the U.S. with New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New Jersey being preferred destinations, absorbing 54 percent of immigrants (Massey, 1995:647). Immigration Regulation in the United States Migration regulation has been a feature of American legislative, judicial, and executive life since the earliest days of the Republic and indeed figured prominently at the individual state level in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries (Proper, 1900; Albright, 1928; Hutchinson, 1981). The first federal immigration law (An Act to Encourage Immigration, which created the Bureau of Immigration to facilitate the importation of immigrant workers from Europe) was passed in 1864 in response to industrialists complaints of reduction in labor supply during the Civil War, decreases in immigration and rising wages (Calavita, 1992:4). The interplay of U.S. immigration policy with U.S. foreign policy or with the concept of sovereignty notwithstanding (Zolberg, 1978, 1994; Scanlan, 1994; Delbrck, 1994), this, and most subsequent regulations, demonstrate that it is within the framework of the problems experienced by a developing capitalist democracy that immigration legislation can be most easily explained and understood (Papademetriou, 1988; Calavita, 1992, 1994; Zolberg, 1994). More specifically, immigration was a critical labor-regulation mechanism underlying the growth and dominance of U.S. capitalism (Calavita, 1984:310). Because immigration was the source of a huge reservoir of cheap labor and therefore crucial to American industrial expansion, industrialists promoted and supported legislative regulation to maintain and increase this reservoir while the American labor movement, fearful of falling wage rates and power dilution sought to limit immigration. The contradiction between the usefulness of a cheap surplus labor supply to an emerging capitalist democracy and the poverty accruing from the depressed wages and poor working conditions which required state health, welfare and criminal maintenance expenditure underlay much of the tension associated with legislative, judicial, and executive immigration debate and regulation (Calavita, 1992:5-6). Immigration legislation rarely leads to the desired outcomes. By building in loopholes, narrowly focusing on inconsequential details, failing to provide for adequate implementation, enforcement or funding, legislators have consistently symbolically addressed immigration issues, apparently responding to pressure group demands, without actually accomplishing major change or redirection in policy (Calavita, 1984:52). Much immigration legislation has been symbolic in that while the anti-immigrant demands of organized labor apparently succeeded in achieving the passage of immigration limiting legislation (e.g. the exclusion acts of the 1880s and early 1900s and the quota laws of the 1920s), capital and industry satisfied their labor needs through alternative channels usually involving short-term foreign labor programs or their tacit support and encouragement of illegal immigration. This contradiction in immigration regulation has been aptly labeled the main-gate/back door system and has been the dominant characteristic of immigration policy for the past century or more (Zolberg, 1978; Papademetriou, 1988; Calavita, 1992). During the classic era, main-gate labor-backed immigration exclusion legislation originated within the organized labor lobby and was additionally justified with allegations of racial and ethnic inferiority among immigrants, while concomitantly, but especially towards the end of the classic era and during the long hiatus, back-door immigration regulation (temporary worker programs, especially from
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Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, and select exemption from exclusionary quota restrictions) fulfilled capital and industrys labor needs. Thus there is consensus that the direct influence of immigration legislation on reducing the inflow into the U.S. was limited. If the cessation of mass-immigration in the 1930s was not due to immigration regulation, then what does account for it? Non-legislative factors including the outbreak of World War I, the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II and the ensuing heavy demand for labor necessary for rebuilding western Europe, and the Cold Wars restriction of emigration from eastern Europe were major causes of the long hiatus in immigration to the U.S. during the 1930 to 1970 period (Massey, 1995: 636-637). The symbolic nature of immigration regulation and the associated unexpected effects continued in the second half of the twentieth century. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act reinforced the central elements of the quota laws of 1917 and 1924 and those of the 1950 Internal Security Act which excluded Communists from the U.S. The Act established a four-category selection system within the national quotas specified in the 1920s legislation. Fifty percent of each national quota was allocated for first preference distribution to aliens with high education or exceptional abilities and the remaining three preference categories were divided among specified relatives of U.S. nationals. This four point selection system was the precursor to the family reunification preference system enacted a decade later. Less than half of the immigrants of the 1950s were admitted under the quota system, many came under special temporary laws facilitating the admission of refugees and family members outside the quotas. The imperfections of the national origins quota system were not addressed until the comprehensive immigration legislation of 1965. While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished national origin discrimination and instituted a system based mainly on U.S. labor market skill requirements and family reunification measures, was a very significant revision to U.S. immigration law, it did not directly confront the issue of back-door immigration, failed to provide for refugee immigration, and had amendments exempting immediate relatives of U.S. citizens (Papademetriou, 1988:323; Massey, 1995:638). By removing the quotas placed on Asian immigration and actively promoting very significant family reunification immigration the 1965 legislation ushered in an era of significant immigration from Asia. Despite the conventional wisdom that the 1965 Act transformed immigration to the U.S. both numerically and source-wise, there is considerable evidence that the Act had little direct bearing on the subsequent rise in immigration from Latin America or that it had any real impact on shaping the process of immigration (Massey, 1996; Rumbaut, 1994). Once again, the legislation was largely symbolic and had little direct impact on regulating or controlling the flow of immigration. The admission of refugees into the U.S. has generally fallen outside the purview of general immigration regulation, and the various regulations for refugee admissions in the 1950s and 1960s originated as Administrative Bills combining humanitarian concern with international political considerations to authorize the admission of refugees from war shattered Europe or fleeing from the Communist eastern bloc and Cuba. In the late 1970s refugees and refugee-related issues dominated congressional concern with immigration.
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The Refugee Act of 1980 repealed the ideological and geographical limitations which had previously favored refugees fleeing communism and redefined refugee to conform with the definition used in the United Nations Protocol and Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees as one unable to return to his country of nationality or habitual residence because of persecution, or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Over one and a half million refugees were admitted to the U.S. between 1975 and 1991 (DHHS, 1991) and the refugee admissions ceiling for 1992 was 142,000. More than 90% of these refugees are from formerly communist countries of Southeast Asia, Cuba, and Eastern Europe (Majka and Mullan, 1992; Mullan and Majka, 1996). Reform of the law relating to the control of illegal immigration had been under consideration for 15 years, since the early 1970s. In 1986 legislation was enacted which marked the culmination of bipartisan efforts both by Congress and the executive branch under four Presidents. As an indication of the growing magnitude of the problem, the annual apprehension of undocumented aliens by the Department of Justices Immigration and Naturalization Service increased from 505,949 in 1972, the first year legislation aimed at controlling illegal immigration received House action, to 1,767,400 in 1986. Immigration and Naturalization Service apprehensions dropped to 1,190,488 in fiscal year 1987. The prospect of employment at U.S. wages generally has been agreed to be the economic magnet that draws aliens illegally. The principal legislative remedies proposed in the past and included in the new law were employer sanctions, or penalties for employers who knowingly hire aliens unauthorized to work in the U.S., and increased monitoring and apprehension capabilities. First, in an attempt to deal humanely with aliens who established roots here before the change in policy represented by the new Act, a legalization program was established that provided legal status for otherwise eligible aliens who had been in the U.S. illegally and continuously since 1982. Second, the legislation sought to respond to the apparent heavy dependence of seasonal agriculture on illegal workers by creating a 7-year special agricultural worker program, and by streamlining the previously existing H-2 temporary worker program to legalize undocumented immigrants employed as agricultural laborers for 90 or more days in 1986. By 1989 the effect of the IRCA of 1986 was being felt: significantly increased funds were made available to the INS for additional border patrols, and to the Department of Labor for the inspection of employers records, some 2.3 million Mexicans applied for either the general or special amnesty, and U.S. employers were officially examining a potential employees legal right to work in the U.S. (Bean et al. 1989). Undoubtedly, the 1986 IRCA had a significant impact on the monitoring and apprehension, especially of illegal immigration, into the U.S. but in terms of actually achieving a drop in the number of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S., IRCA was again mostly symbolic legislation. One carefully implemented empirical study estimated probabilities of illegal and repeat immigration using data from Mexico and concluded that IRCA had not significantly deterred illegal Mexican immigration into the U.S. (Donato et al. 1992). Given that the 1986 legislation addressed illegal immigration by making large numbers of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. legal, apparently making it more difficult to enter the country, and imposing sanctions on employers for hiring illegal immigrants,
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congressional legislative attention shifted to legal immigration, including the numerical limits on permanent immigration. This was an issue for a number of reasons. The numerical limits and preference system regulating the admission of legal immigrants originated in 1965, with some subsequent amendments. Since that time, and particularly in recent years, concern arose over the greater number of immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification compared to the number of independent non-family immigrants, and over the limited number of admission visas available under the preference system to certain countries. There was also concern about the backlogs under the existing preference system and about the admission of immediate relatives of U.S. citizens outside the numerical limits. Major legislation addressing these concerns passed the Senate and was introduced in the House in the 100th Congress (1987 1988). However, only temporary legislation addressing limited concerns passed both, leaving further consideration of a full-scale revision of legal immigration to the 101st Congress. The Immigration Act of 1990 represented a major revision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which remained the basic immigration law. A primary focus was on the numerical limits and preference system regulating permanent legal immigration. Beyond legal immigration, the eight-title Act dealt with many other aspects of immigration law ranging from non-immigrants to criminal aliens to naturalization. Major changes relating to legal immigration included an increase in total immigration under an overall flexible cap, an increase in annual employment-based immigration from 54,000 to 140,000, and a permanent provision for the admission of diversity immigrants from underrepresented countries. The law also provided for a permanent annual level of approximately 700,000 during fiscal years 1992 through 1994. Refugees were the only major group of aliens not included. The Act established a three-track preference system for family-sponsored, employment-based, and diversity immigrants and also significantly amended the workrelated non-immigrant categories for temporary admission. The 1990 Act addressed a series of other issues pending before the Congress. It provided undocumented Salvadorans with temporary protected status for a limited period of time, and amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to authorize the Attorney General to grant temporary protected status to nationals of designated countries subject to armed conflict or natural disasters. It authorized a temporary stay of deportation and work authorization for legalized aliens eligible immediate family members, and in response to criticism of employer sanctions, it expanded the antidiscrimination provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and increased the penalties for unlawful discrimination. As part of a revision of all the grounds for exclusion and deportation, it significantly rewrote the political and ideological grounds which had been controversial since their enactment in 1952. Currently, the U.S. Congress is considering a comprehensive overhaul of current laws on immigration. The House Judiciary Committee already has completed work on a bill that would cut legal immigration by almost 25 percent by 2001, strengthen existing measures to block illegal immigrants from finding work (including the hiring of 500 new INS work inspectors), double the size of the U.S. border force within five years, make illegal aliens ineligible for nearly all federal benefits, and restrict benefits for legal aliens. Immigration in Western Europe.
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Unlike the U.S., the countries of Western Europe have not had an uninterrupted history of immigration. In fact, it is only since about 1960 that Europe has received a significant inflow of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, which significantly supplemented the mainly intra-European international migration of the 1950s when East Germans and Italians dominated the migration flows, and of the 1960s when large numbers of Spanish, Portuguese, and Greeks moved to western Europe. By the 1970s Europe had clearly changed from being a region of emigration to being a region of immigration when its migration balance became highly positive (Mnz, 1995). For centuries Europe dominated the worlds immigration flow, first through its colonization of the New World, then through the supplying of workers for the industrialization process under way in America, Canada, and the Antipodes. It is estimated that in the 115 years before 1930, approximately 50 million people or about 12 percent of the European population in 1900, left Europe, mainly from the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, and Scandinavia, the majority of them going to the U.S. (Ferenczi, 1929; Mitchell, 1980; Massey, 1988; Hatton and Williamson, 1994; Mnz, 1995). In essence, the classic era of immigration into the U.S. was mirrored by a classic period of emigration from Europe. The outbreak of World War I stemmed this huge outflow from Europe and the sequential phenomena of destination country entry restrictions in the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and World War II prevented any resumption of this emigration (Massey, 1990, 1995). The year 1870 has been identified as a key turning point, before which emigration from Europe was driven by the pan-European push factors of agricultural enclosure, agricultural and industrial technical improvements and innovations and, rural population growth. After 1870, the U.S. had proceeded sufficiently far along the path of industrialization so as to pull immigrants from Europe lured by the ready availability of wage labor in the manufacturing and extractive industries of a rapidly developing economy (Thomas, 1954). The peaks and troughs of this European emigration were very closely tied up with the inversely related economic business cycles in Europe and the U.S. Recent evidence confirms the existence of an emigration cycle driven by demographic and economic forces which explains the mass migrations from Europe in the late 19th century (Hatton and Williamson, 1994:557). Accompanying this overseas migration, during the century and a half from 1800, there was very significant migration within Europe to meet the demands of industrialization and extractive industries in France, Germany, and Austria. Following World War I, migration within Europe can be categorized into that related to displacement and ethnic cleansing associated with new state formation (approximately 6 million), foreign labor recruitment (approximately 1.2 million), and refugee flight (1.5 million Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians fled Russia and 450,000 Jews fled Germany, Austria, and Moravia) (Mnz, 1995; Mnz and Ulrich, 1995). Significant interwar immigration into France was encouraged through a series of bilateral labor agreements instituted in response to the demographic effects of the first World War on the French population. Mnz usefully categorizes migration in Europe since 1945 into displacement and ethnic cleansing migration, de-colonization migration, post-colonial migration, labor migration, elite migration, and ethnic and political refugee and asylum-seeking migration (Mnz,
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1995:97-110). The first and last of these categories provide examples of how war and disaster have fused to constitute a poverty migration, related to explicitly political events. Immediately following World War II, some 12 million ethnic Germans either fled or were expelled from the eastern parts of the Third Reich and territories formerly occupied by the German Wehrmacht (Poland, the Baltics, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovenia, Serbia, Ukraine) or ruled during World War II by allied fascist and authoritarian regimes (Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary) (Mnz, 1995:98). The 1950s and 1960s and late 1980s and 1990s witnessed fleeing Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles, Bulgarians, East Germans, former Yugoslavians, and citizens of the former Soviet Union. Decolonization and post-colonization labor migration are what turned Western Europe from a continent of emigration into one of immigration in the second half of this century. In the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of workers from Southern Europe (Italy, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia) or from newly independent colonies such as Algeria or Indonesia migrated to Western Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries as these nations experienced their postwar reconstruction and industrial expansion. These population movements accelerated in the 1960s, turning the previously homogeneous destination societies into nations with very substantial diverse and heterogeneous ethnic immigrant communities. A similar immigration occurred in Britain with the arrival of substantial numbers of British passport bearing immigrants from the newly independent countries of the Commonwealth. Between 1950 and 1992 the foreign born proportion of Western Europes population almost quadrupled from 1.3 percent to 4.9 percent with the majority of the increase occurring prior to 1975 (Council of Europe, 1994; SOPEMI, 1995; Mnz, 1995). In specific countries the increase in the proportion of the population foreign-born in this period was even greater: Germanys foreign born population increased from just over 1 percent in 1950 to 4.9 percent in 1970 and 8.6 percent in 1992, almost two-thirds of whom are from Turkey and Yugoslavia; Switzerlands foreign-born population was 6.1, 17.4, and 18.0 percent of the total population in 1950, 1971, and 1992 respectively; the Netherlands foreign born proportion rose from 1 percent in 1950 to just over 5 percent in 1992, of whom the largest numbers are from Morocco and Turkey. In 1980 when the U.S. census enumerated 6.2 percent of the 230 million total population as being foreign born, the four major countries of Europe (Germany, United Kingdom, France, and Italy) had a combined population of 225 million with about 6.7 percent foreign born (Livi-Bacci, 1993:39). This match in the proportion foreign-born between Europes big four and the U.S. conceals different historical trajectories during this century. In 1920 the U.S. had approximately 14 percent of its population foreign born while France, Italy, Germany, and the UK combined had about 2 percent foreign-born. The U.S. proportion was at a low of about 4.7 percent in 1970 largely as a result of the long hiatus, while the proportion foreign born in Europes big four countries rose steadily after 1945 to about 4.5 percent in the 1980s. In 1994, 8.7 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born while the latest available figures for Europe, 1993, puts the foreign population at a low of 1.1 percent for Spain and Finland, a high of 18.1 and 31.1 percent for Switzerland and Luxembourg respectively, and an overall average of about 7.3 percent (SOPEMI, 1995:194; CPS, 1994:2). As a result of extensive immigration, Western
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Europes foreign population, as a proportion of the total population, has converged with that of the U.S., at least in terms of magnitude. Immigration Regulation in Western Europe Until the second half of the twentieth century Europe experienced no sustained major migration inflows and consequently with no pressing need for regulation, the systems of immigration regulation which had emerged in many Western European countries in the early 1900s to protect national labor markets constituted the only formal state-sponsored immigration regulation mechanisms. After 1945 and especially since 1960 however, the previously implicit non-policy practiced by Western European states has been replaced by a more or less articulated policy that includes both regulation and integration measures (Hammar, 1992:256). Unlike the U.S., which is a country of settlement immigration, Europe is primarily a continent of labor immigration and this distinction has important ramifications for describing and exploring migration regulation within Europe. In the aftermath of World War II, the major industrial nations of western Europe introduced guest-worker systems through which large numbers of immigrants were received into the labor force to alleviate chronic labor shortages and to facilitate the postwar industrial and infrastructural reconstruction (Bhning, 1984). The sending countries saw participation in these agreements as a partial solution to their sometimes chronic domestic unemployment levels and as a ready source of foreign exchange and wealth creation in the form of migrant cash remittances and material goods being remitted. The individual migrants participated because they were lured by the magnet of higher wages and steady work and the attraction of returning home with their target earnings in hand. As Castles puts it, they were becoming temporary proletarians abroad to avoid permanent proletarianization in their own countries (Castles, 1986:770). The conditions attached to being a guest-worker in western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s very specifically listed the recruitment, working, living and legal requirements and expectations of the participants in those programs. The major bilateral agreements were between France and Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, and Turkey, between Germany and Greece, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, between Switzerland and Italy, and between the Netherlands and Greece, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia (Castles et al. 1984; Castles, 1986). In addition to these bilateral arrangements, Britain (which had a short-live bilateral program labor agreement with Italy in the early 1950s), France, and the Netherlands received significant numbers of colonial migrants from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. The bilateral labor agreements between agents in the receiving and sending countries spelled out the conditions and rules governing labor recruitment. Agents of recruitment (commissions, labor brokers, or receiving countries labor ministries) were responsible for selecting the most suitable applicants and for regulating the immigration flow. As one source notes, such agreements provided for selection procedures, transportation, housing, placement, wage and social benefits, transfer of savings and, in general, the various rights and obligations of the parties to the work contract (Papademetriou, 1988:347). Work and residence permits were issued to each worker initially for one year and then through periodic renewal, usually for several years, and it was through the issuing, renewing, and curtailing of these permits that the immigration flow was regulated. Within these general
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implementation guidelines, each labor importing country had its own specific regulations and refinements, but the receiving countries shared several key characteristics and expectations: they usually accepted as immigrant guest-workers only single persons initially, did not regard them as permanent immigrants, accorded them very limited civil rights, limited the work to a specific occupation, and did not expect or intend that the guest-workers would settle in the destination country permanently. The guest-worker programs in France, Britain, and Belgium were implemented soon after the second world war and were abandoned within a few years in favor of spontaneous labor immigration (Castles, 1986). In those countries which maintained guest-worker programs through the 1950s and 1960s, so great was the demand for labor that many states eventually had to grant significant improvements to guest-workers rights in terms of more freedom for occupational or industry mobility, longer-term stay, and family reunification. The early 1970s constitute a clear dividing line in European immigration patterns and regulation during the last 50 years. After the energy crisis of the early 1970s and the subsequent increases in unemployment and the onset of economic recession in western Europe, immigration was severely curtailed by restrictive measures imposed by Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands to prevent any exacerbation of the worsening economic situation. Only skilled workers, the families of immigrants already in these countries, and refugees gained regularized admittance after about 1974 or the early 1960s in Britain. However, this sharp curtailment of the guest-worker programs failed to have the desired effect of reducing, stopping, and reversing the immigration flow because the process of immigration once initiated generates its own cumulative causation and momentum (Massey, 1988). The guest-worker programs provided the initial momentum for mass immigration and the immigrants intention of temporary stay gradually gave way to more long term settlement in the face of the reality of integration, reduced desire to return home, and the arrival of immediate family members. Although the guest-worker programs had all been officially abandoned by 1974, entry of dependents and family of guest-workers did continue. In the Netherlands, for example, 80,000 dependents of guest-workers had arrived by 1977, and in Germany guest-workers from Turkey brought in large numbers of immediate family in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Immigration regulation did not have the desired effect and the guest-worker programs resulted in many countries of western Europe have large, permanent immigrant populations. The social foundations of immigration are impervious to externally imposed regulations and controls and once a critical threshold of mass migration has been reached, government regulations will have little impact on what has become a self-perpetuating dynamic social process. Conclusion This paper has examined the regulation of immigration in the U.S. and in western Europe. Today, the U.S. and western Europe have approximately equal percentages of foreigners in their total populations but this convergence conceals very different historical immigration trajectories, immigration regulation strategies, and implementation of those strategies. The U.S. has always been a country of immigration and that immigration has largely been of the permanent settlement type whereas western Europe has only recently become a continent of immigration and that has been mostly temporary labor immigration which has evolved into permanent settlement much more through process than design or intent.
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Because of the post-1950 immigration, ethnic patterns in western Europe are beginning to converge on those of the U.S. Substantial and distinct ethnic sub-populations have emerged in Britain, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland and the integration, or lack of integration, of these groups has become a highly politicized issue. Increasingly there are calls for increased immigration controls, restricted social programs for immigrants, and even for immigrant repatriation (Marger, 1992). Today, in many European countries the immigrant workers and their families are marginal components of society and their social conditions are reminiscent of those experienced by successive waves of European immigrants and southern black migrants to Northern U.S. industrial cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As relatively homogeneous nations, western European countries lack the historical experience of the U.S. in absorbing large numbers of immigrants. There is a negative ideology of migration in Europe in that immigration is not perceived as making a longterm contribution to society (Livi-Bacci, 1993:41) . In contrast, part of the enduring myth of the U.S. is its self-perceived image as a nation of immigrants and despite nativist clamor to close the doors, overall immigration is probably viewed favorably. In Germany the eventual assimilation of the immigrant population, mainly Turks and Yugoslavs, is not seen as an appropriate societal goal. Very few of Germanys three million Turks have been afforded citizenship, even those who are second- or third-generation German residents. No notion of eventual social integration was inherent in western Europes temporary worker regulation, the native culture is the dominant culture and completely defines nationality and feelings of belonging. In the end, policy makers must be made aware that the economic foundations of immigration (wages levels, economic development strategies) and the social foundations of immigration (networks and information exchange) are inextricably intertwined and that migration policies and associated regulations should be based on an understanding of those shared foundations.

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