Between Controls and Taboos

The fact that millions of foreign workers were deported from German-occupied Europe during the Second World War and forced to work in factories, industry and agriculture on Third Reich territory or beyond has become one of the least remembered chapters of German migration history. Zwangsarbeit (forced labour) barely features in Germans’ collective memory of the period and took much longer than other Nazi crimes to be afforded even some degree of restitution.

When former forced labourers living in the USA filed suits against German companies, German taxpayers and the industrial sector rather grudgingly shared the €5 billion cost. By June 2007, the money had been paid to a total of 1.5 million victims or their heirs.

Why did it take so long to redress this crime? And why was it done with such bad grace? Why is it so difficult, in general, to remember the facts of forced or even voluntary migration into Germany? When an official commemoration for immigrants murdered by neo-Nazis took place in Berlin in February 2012, why were many Germans almost shocked to be reminded that the history of migration stretched back well over a hundred years?

Zwangsarbeit (forced labour) barely features in Germans’ collective memory of the period and took much longer than other Nazi crimes to be afforded even some degree of restitution.

One explanation would certainly be that historical research lacks the necessary sources, that there are methodological problems, and that historians hardly see migration as a field with career prospects. However, I think there are three deeper symbolic dimensions to the problem, which are simultaneously cornerstones of European collective identity and its dark side: the disciplinary nature of industrial work, the fear of ‘nomads’ with no fixed abode, and white racism.

Here we can simply throw light on these barriers and reflect on the reasons for them. The subject of Zwangsarbeit has been met with a great deal of resistance and wariness – from victims and perpetrators alike. In post-Nazi Germany, the main reason for this was that slave labour was a public crime, organized by the state but welcomed and supported by the nation at large, who – following a long and ignoble tradition – believed that it would rehabilitate the ‘workshy’. In recent years, the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation (Stiftung EVZ) has been working to explain and commemorate this episode of German history and raise awareness among the wider public.

These ‘corrective labour camps’ were a continuation of precursor policies in Tsarist Russia, yet their existence was officially denied – a secret that hung over the heads of Soviet citizens like the sword of Damocles and which could claim their lives if they made the smallest slip or were the victims of malicious denunciation. The subject was only finally debated during the post-Stalinist thaw, above all in the fiction and essays of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Even today, the work of documenting the camp system remains incomplete. Perpetrators have still not been brought to justice and no line has been drawn under this part of the past. The myth of the sacrifices made during the Great Patriotic War meant that even those affected by Stalin's repression colluded in making it a topic that was taboo.

Germany did not fully begin to make reparations until 2000 (by which time most former deportees were either dead or very old); in Russia, victims have not received even rhetorical justice. This reluctance can be explained by the noxious tradition of penal labour that dominated both totalitarian systems between 1930 and 1960, regardless of ideological differences.

However, forced labour also relies on an older and deeper layer in European society, a tradition of labour as discipline and a means of control. The workers' movement, with its goal of solidarity, was never entirely able to overcome this pernicious legacy. This disciplinary tradition needs to be borne in mind today, when the public debate about migration often seems in danger of focusing only on utility (and, implicitly, on ‘uselessness’).

Forced labour also relies on an older and deeper layer in European society, a tradition of labour as discipline and a means of control.

These taboos stifle and distort attempts to write the history of the migrant workers, the Gastarbeiter (guest workers), who came more willingly than the Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) during the war, but who were nevertheless subject to other sorts of pressure. The blurring of the line between forced and voluntary labour has become more widespread with the globalization of the labour markets, which cannot emerge without drastic suffering in the world's poorest regions and urban agglomerations, and where the workforce is often subject to what amounts to nothing less than slavery.

Taboos also affect other groups in migration history: despised ethnic minority groups with a tradition of travelling, such as the Roma and Sinti; asylum-seekers and refugees; those who find themselves called ‘migrant workers’, even when their families have lived in the country for four generations.

Public opinion in liberal societies with high immigration levels has generally been unwilling to admit the connections and continuities between the forced labour of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (and their authoritarian, nineteenth century predecessors) and the voluntary labour migration of today. It is important to explain the effects of global inequality on deregulated labour markets in the North, not least because demographic changes in these countries will only lead to more demand for skilled and unskilled labour.

The criteria of utility and social discipline will come to play a large role, with widespread xenophobia and racist attitudes ever present in the background. At the same time, the transnationalization of labour markets, together with societal breakdown, widening social divisions and ecological problems and disasters in the global South, will probably increase levels of migration. Ethnic discrimination in Europe did not come to an end in 1945. In many towns and villages of Eastern Europe, neighbourhood groups and local councils have erected fences and walls around so-called ‘gypsy quarters’, seeing this as the only way to protect themselves against the anti-social behaviour and theft for which the Roma are so often blamed.

In Slovakia, where Roma make up around ten per cent of the population, ‘gypsy ghettos’ are forming; twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, new walls are being erected, in the heart of Europe, and against a European people. Similar measures have been taken in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, where Roma are subject to systematic discrimination and social exclusion. The end of the socialist economy was a catastrophe for the Roma, given that the great majority of them were employed in the state-run agricultural sector. When this was privatized, they lost their jobs and moved from the countryside to the ‘gypsy quarters’ (mahalas) in the towns and cities.

It seems likely that such perceptions have lasted into postagrarian societies, even though (or possibly because) such societies have given rise to new forms of nomadism, to transnational lives and lifestyles, particularly the highly mobile workforce at the very top and very bottom of the pay scale. Further grounds for intolerance and exclusion are that the Roma live in patriarchal family and clan structures, that these households run their own affairs in a very close-knit manner, and that they observe ritual purity laws. In folklore, the Roma are seen as exotic and strange people who refuse to adopt majority norms and are generally dangerous; even the more benevolent view of the Roma as musical virtuosi, passionate flamenco dancers and devout pilgrims (for instance in the annual pilgrimage to Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer in the Camargue) is loaded with patronizing and marginalizing assumptions.

There are very few countries in the EU where Roma can live free from prejudice […] even though they are EU citizens and thus […] cannot easily be deported.

As with the Jewish minority in Europe, governments and majority populations have, at various times, either imposed limits on Roma people's mobility or forced them to migrate, aggressively targeting those who suffer most from the status quo. This is all despite the evident fact that the overwhelming majority of Roma are settled, and that the proportion of truly ‘nomadic’ Roma is constantly dwindling.

Even though the great majority of Roma are citizens of the country in which they live, or possess the legal residency papers, we may metaphorically say that they are a stateless group. The Roma are Europe's pariahs and disenfranchised par excellence, and their negative reputation far exceeds all others. The European Union would do well to intensify the current, diffuse efforts to guarantee lasting inclusion and integration for the Roma while respecting their specific cultural traits. This would serve not only to protect them as a minority, but would also help preserve freedom of movement within the Schengen space, which is increasingly being jeopardized by arguments about migration levels and the fight against terrorism, with an eye to outflanking the far-right.

The last taboo group is that of the ‘illegal immigrants’, a catch-all term for those who have broken the law in their country of destination by having either incorrect residence documents or forged or expired papers. Such infringements are usually compounded by illegal labour and tax offences.

Despite this, unregistered workers without the proper residency and work permits are to be found in most rich industrial nations, because employers have arranged for them to come and work in conditions often verging on slavery. This is especially true of prostituted women. Obviously, it is unknown exactly how many of these undocumented or unregistered persons reside in Europe, but realistic estimates put them in the millions. With this group, European colonial history comes full circle. A great number of these ‘illegal’, unregistered or ‘irregular’ immigrants come from sub-Saharan Africa and other former colonies of the global South. They have fled, often under appalling conditions, from penury, civil war, political oppression and the ravages of ecological and climatic crisis. They travel thousands of miles, on foot, in overcrowded trucks, in airless containers and on unseaworthy boats, to reach the European enclaves in Africa and the shores of Europe itself.

The Roma are Europe's pariahs and disenfranchised par excellence, and their negative reputation far exceeds all others.

Because the European Union (like the US) has erected high walls to prevent illegal border crossings, they turn to professional people smugglers for help. The typical voyager on this dangerous journey is neither a ‘guest worker’ nor one of those third or fourth-generation children of immigrants notoriously derided as ‘hijab girls’. Rather, the representative figure is the shipwrecked migrant picked up by the coastguard, taken straight to an internment camp and deported back to his country of origin as quickly as possible.

Despite claims to the contrary, the majority of refugees and migrants worldwide do not head for Europe but remain in the poorest regions of the global South. Credible estimates place the illegal population of Europe at a maximum of 1.5 per cent, most of whom have not made the same odyssey as the boat people but, with the aid of false papers and professional people smugglers, have arrived in Europe as tourists, where they are exploited by unscrupulous employers who are only too pleased to see them.

States and supra-state groupings such as the European Union certainly have the right to register and control the flow of migrants across their borders. However, their efforts in this direction are confounded by the sheer fact of socio-economic disparity between the rich OECD countries and ‘the rest’. Attempts to control migration also do not square with a process of transnationalization, which on the one hand posits a mobility of goods, capital and people, in so far as this serves global economic and financial transactions and influxes of tourists, but on the other hand wants to slam the shutters on the unwanted aspects of globalization.

The majority of refugees and migrants worldwide do not head for Europe but remain in the poorest regions of the global South.

Consequently, states that are now merely quasi-sovereign entities have lost much of their ability for control and planning. Meanwhile, in the richer nations, social and political movements are increasingly opposing the moral scandal of a border regime that fans the flames of xenophobia by upping the rhetorical ante. This is exactly why the third taboo group offers a perfect symbol of transnationalization (and diaspora), breaking open the cozy, prosperous container of the nation state and exposing the risks of bare, unprotected existence.

Given its various dimensions, the outlines of which are sketched above, migration should be seen not as a peripheral phenomenon but as central to Europe's shared memory. For economic reasons, rich countries are eager to recruit (highly) skilled workers from the global South, but at the same time barricade themselves in for reasons of security or cultural anxiety. This glaring contradiction casts a shadow over any discussion of the history of European migration.

The responsibility for this may lie with the three symbolic dimensions that form the cornerstones of European collective identity and its dark side: the disciplinary nature of industrial work, the fear of ‘nomads’ with no fixed abode, and white racism. There are many practical as well as academic reasons why we should remove these barriers through a rational, generous immigration policy.