Migration and Immigration

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes and effects of changes to migration within and immigration to Europe from the Second World War to the present (Skill 5.B; LO L).
• Account for KC-4.4.III.D: how postwar economic growth produced labor migration from southern Europe, Asia, and Africa to western and central Europe; and how the post-1973 economic downturn produced anti-immigrant agitation and extreme nationalist political parties.
• Account for KC-4.3.III.C: how increased immigration into Europe altered Europe's religious composition, producing debate and conflict over the role of religion in social and political life.
• Connect the postwar guest-worker recruitment, the postcolonial migration, the 2004 EU eastern-enlargement free movement, the 2015 European migration crisis, and the post-2022 Ukrainian refugee flows as a single linked phenomenon (Skill 5.B in direct practice).
• Account for the principal late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century anti-immigration political parties (the French Front National / Rassemblement National; the Austrian Freedom Party; the German AfD; the Italian Lega; the Dutch PVV; UKIP) and the conditions that produced their electoral mobilization.

Topic 9.11 covers postwar European migration patterns and the resulting political-cultural transformations. KC-4.4.III.D captures the principal economic and political pattern: postwar growth produced labor migration; the post-1973 economic downturn produced the anti-immigrant political response. KC-4.3.III.C captures the religious dimension: increased immigration altered Europe's religious composition and produced sustained debate over the role of religion in social and political life. The lesson is structured in four parts: the postwar labor-migration patterns (1945-1973); the post-1973 reorganization and family-reunification migration; the post-2004 EU eastern-enlargement free movement and the 2015 migration crisis; and the contemporary anti-immigration politics and religious-makeup contests.

Postwar labor-migration patterns (1945-1973). The postwar Western European economic miracle (Topic 9.2) produced substantial labor demand that domestic European workforces could not fully meet. The principal labor-migration patterns developed across the 1950s and 1960s through a combination of bilateral guest-worker recruitment programs, postcolonial migration, and intra-European migration from the southern European periphery to the northern European core.

The West German Gastarbeiter (guest-worker) program was the largest of the bilateral recruitment frameworks. The principal recruitment agreements: Italy (December 1955); Spain and Greece (March-September 1960); Turkey (October 1961); Morocco (May 1963); Portugal (March 1964); Tunisia (October 1965); Yugoslavia (October 1968). Approximately 14 million Gastarbeiter entered West Germany between 1955 and 1973; approximately 11 million returned home; approximately 3 million remained as long-term residents. The Turkish recruitment was the principal long-running pattern: by 2020 approximately 2.8 million Turkish-origin people lived in Germany (approximately 3.4 percent of the German population), making the Turkish-German community the largest single national-origin group of immigrants in Western Europe. Comparable Western European programs included the French Office National de l'Immigration (operational from 1945; substantially recruited from former North African colonies and from Iberia); the Swiss Saisonnier program (the Italian-Swiss recruitment from the 1950s); the Belgian and Dutch coal-mining and industrial recruitment programs; and the British Commonwealth migration framework.

The British Commonwealth migration produced a substantially different pattern shaped by the British imperial legacy. The arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury, Essex, on 22 June 1948 (carrying approximately 1,027 passengers including approximately 802 from the Caribbean, principally Jamaica) is conventionally treated as the symbolic beginning of the postwar Caribbean migration to Britain (the "Windrush generation"). The British Nationality Act of 1948 had granted full British citizenship to all British subjects across the Commonwealth, substantially facilitating the postwar migration; approximately 200,000 West Indians, approximately 1 million Indians and Pakistanis, and substantial East African Asian, West African, and Hong Kong migrants entered Britain across the postwar period. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and subsequent restrictions substantially constrained the open-door framework; the 2018 Windrush scandal (when the Theresa May Conservative government's "hostile environment" policy produced wrongful detentions and deportations of long-term Windrush-generation residents) produced sustained public reckoning with the postwar migration.

The postcolonial migration extended the pattern. French recruitment from former North African colonies (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) produced approximately 4.5 million Maghrebi-origin residents in France by 2020; the harkis (Algerian Muslims who had served alongside the French military during the Algerian War, Topic 9.9 covered) and the pieds-noirs (European settlers from Algeria) produced the immediate post-1962 wave. The Dutch postwar Indonesian repatriation (approximately 300,000 people in the immediate postwar period; subsequent Surinamese migration after 1975 Surinamese independence) and the Belgian postwar Congolese migration produced parallel postcolonial patterns. The intra-European migration from the southern European periphery to the northern core (Italian internal migration north; Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek migration to West Germany, France, and Switzerland) produced the substantial labor flows that reshaped the postwar Western European demography.

The post-1973 reorganization (KC-4.4.III.D). The 1973 oil shock and the resulting stagflation (Topic 9.6 covered) ended the principal labor-recruitment programs across Western Europe. West Germany announced the Anwerbestopp (recruitment stop) on 23 November 1973; comparable programs across France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium followed. The recruitment stop was intended to be temporary but became permanent; substantial subsequent migration continued through three principal channels: family reunification provisions (which permitted the migration of spouses, children, and other family members of long-term residents); asylum claims (the European refugee framework anchored by the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol); and irregular migration that the European border-control framework had not anticipated.

The 1990s produced two principal new migration flows. The post-1989 collapse of the Eastern bloc produced substantial East-to-West migration, particularly from Poland, Russia, and the former Yugoslav republics. The Yugoslav wars (1991-2001, Topic 9.5 covered) produced approximately 4 million Yugoslav refugees, with substantial flows to Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy; many of the refugees subsequently returned after the 1995 Dayton Accords and the 1999 Kosovo War end. The post-1989 Central and Eastern European labor migration to Germany, Austria, and other Western European destinations (substantially constrained by the EU pre-accession framework) anticipated the larger post-2004 EU eastern-enlargement migration.

The 2004 EU eastern enlargement (Topic 9.10 covered) substantially extended European labor mobility. The EU treaty framework granted full free movement of workers to nationals of the new member states; the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Sweden opened their labor markets immediately on 1 May 2004 (the other EU-15 states applied transitional restrictions of up to seven years). Approximately 1.5 million Polish migrants entered the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2016, producing the substantial Polish-British community (the principal British post-1945 single-source migration after the Indian-Pakistani migration). The 2007 accession of Bulgaria and Romania produced subsequent substantial Romanian migration to Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom; approximately 1.2 million Romanians lived in Italy by 2020 (the largest single national-origin group in Italy). The free-movement framework substantially shaped the British 2016 Brexit referendum debate.

The 2015 European migration crisis. The 2015 European migration crisis was the principal twenty-first-century European migration event. Approximately 1.3 million people sought asylum in EU member states across 2015 and 2016. The crisis had multiple sources: the Syrian Civil War (from March 2011, displacing approximately 13 million Syrians from their homes across the conflict period); the Iraqi instability following the 2003 American invasion and the rise of the Islamic State; the Afghan instability following the 2014 American withdrawal; the Eritrean political situation; the Libyan post-Gaddafi state collapse from 2011 onward. The principal Mediterranean routes: the Eastern Mediterranean route (from Turkey to Greek islands and onward through the western Balkans); the Central Mediterranean route (from Libya to Italy); the Western Mediterranean route (from Morocco to Spain). Approximately 4,000 deaths from drowning and exposure occurred in 2015 alone; the cumulative Mediterranean death toll since 2014 has exceeded 30,000.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's August-September 2015 commitment to admit Syrian refugees substantially shaped the European response. Merkel's "Wir schaffen das" ("We can do this") statement at the 31 August 2015 federal-government press conference and the subsequent German decision (4 September 2015) to admit the Hungarian-stranded refugees produced the substantial German leadership of the 2015 response: approximately 1.1 million refugees were admitted to Germany across 2015-2016. The EU response combined the substantial German leadership with the more contested Visegrad Group (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia) refusal to accept the proposed EU-wide refugee distribution; the EU-Turkey statement of 18 March 2016 (in which Turkey agreed to accept the return of irregular migrants from Greece in exchange for substantial EU financial assistance and visa-liberalization commitments) substantially reduced the Eastern Mediterranean flows. The 2015 crisis substantially shaped subsequent European political life, including the British 2016 Brexit referendum, the rise of the German AfD, and the substantial expansion of populist-nationalist political mobilization across the EU.

The religious-makeup transformation (KC-4.3.III.C). Increased immigration into Europe altered Europe's religious composition. The principal demographic change has been the substantial increase in European Muslim populations: approximately 24-26 million Muslims in Europe by 2020 (approximately 5 percent of the European population), concentrated principally in France (approximately 9 percent of the population), Germany (approximately 6 percent), the United Kingdom (approximately 6 percent), the Netherlands (approximately 5 percent), Belgium (approximately 7 percent), and Switzerland (approximately 5 percent). The principal Muslim-origin national groups: Turkish (in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands); North African (in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain); Pakistani and Bangladeshi (in the United Kingdom); Indonesian and Surinamese (in the Netherlands); Bosnian and Albanian (in Switzerland, Austria, Italy); Iranian (across Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden); Syrian and Iraqi (post-2015). The substantial Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist populations from South Asian migration; the substantial Orthodox Christian populations from Greek, Russian, Romanian, and Ethiopian migration; and the substantial Jewish migration from the post-Soviet successor states have parallel demographic significance.

The substantial subsequent debates over the role of religion in social and political life have produced sustained European political-cultural contests. The French laicite tradition (the 1905 separation of church and state law; the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in public schools; the 2010 law banning face-covering veils in public; the 2021 separatism law extending state oversight of religious associations) produced the principal European secular-state framework. The Swiss minaret-ban referendum of 29 November 2009 (approved by 57 percent of voters) produced the constitutional prohibition on the construction of new minarets. The Belgian and French face-veil bans (Belgium 2011; France 2010) produced sustained European Court of Human Rights litigation that the Court eventually upheld (the 2014 S.A.S. v. France judgment). The Austrian and German citizenship-test requirements have produced sustained debates over the substantive content of European national identities. The 2010 German publication of Thilo Sarrazin's Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany abolishes itself"); the 2010-2015 Pegida movement in Dresden; and the 2015 substantial expansion of the Alternative fuer Deutschland (founded 2013) produced the principal German anti-immigration political mobilization.

The contemporary anti-immigration politics. KC-4.4.III.D's reference to "anti-immigrant agitation and extreme nationalist political parties" captures the substantial political mobilization that the postwar migration produced. The principal European anti-immigration parties developed in waves. The first wave (the late 1970s through the 1990s) included the French Front National (founded 5 October 1972 under Jean-Marie Le Pen; reached the second round of the 2002 French presidential election with 16.9 percent in the first round; renamed Rassemblement National in 2018 under Marine Le Pen who reached the second round of the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections); the Austrian Freedom Party (the Freiheitliche Partei Oesterreichs, founded 1956 from the post-Nazi-era milieu; substantially reorganized under Joerg Haider from 1986; entered government coalition in 2000-2005, 2017-2019, and from December 2024); the Vlaams Blok / Vlaams Belang in Belgium; the Front National in Switzerland (Swiss People's Party from 1971); the Italian Lega Nord (founded 1991 by Umberto Bossi; subsequently Lega under Matteo Salvini from 2013); and the Danish People's Party (founded 1995 by Pia Kjaersgaard).

The second wave (the 2000s through the 2020s) produced substantially expanded electoral mobilization. The Dutch Geert Wilders's Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, founded 2006); the Swiss People's Party's substantial post-1992 expansion; the Finnish Finns Party (founded 1995 by Timo Soini); the Swedish Sverigedemokraterna (founded 1988); the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (founded 1973); the British UK Independence Party (founded 1993; substantial expansion under Nigel Farage from 2010; substantially shaped the 2016 Brexit referendum) and the subsequent Reform UK (Brexit Party, 2019); the German Alternative fuer Deutschland (founded 2013; entered the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6 percent; substantially expanded in 2024-2025); the Spanish Vox (founded 2013); the Italian Fratelli d'Italia (founded 2012; led the post-October 2022 Italian government under Giorgia Meloni); the Hungarian Jobbik and Mi Hazank; the Polish Konfederacja; and many others. The cumulative European populist-nationalist vote share has reached approximately 25-30 percent across the EU member states by the 2020s.

The 2022 Ukrainian refugee response. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 produced the largest single European refugee event since the Second World War. Approximately 8 million Ukrainians fled the country across 2022; approximately 5-6 million remained displaced internationally by 2024. The principal destination countries: Poland (approximately 1.5 million); Germany (approximately 1.1 million); the Czech Republic (approximately 380,000); Italy (approximately 170,000); Spain (approximately 200,000); the United Kingdom (approximately 200,000 under the Homes for Ukraine and Ukraine Family Schemes). The EU Temporary Protection Directive (Directive 2001/55/EC, activated for the first time on 4 March 2022) provided substantial coordinated EU protection for Ukrainian refugees; the contrast with the 2015 EU response produced sustained substantive European political debate. The Ukrainian refugee response substantially shaped subsequent European migration policy and the broader European response to the Russian invasion.

The Skill 5.B argument. Topic 9.11's suggested skill is 5.B (Making Connections: account for the way one historical development or process is tied to another). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should connect the postwar guest-worker recruitment, the postcolonial migration, the post-2004 EU eastern-enlargement free movement, the 2015 migration crisis, and the post-2022 Ukrainian refugee flows as a single linked phenomenon despite their substantially different sources, scales, and political-cultural contexts. The cumulative European immigration produced the substantial demographic transformation that KC-4.3.III.C and KC-4.4.III.D identify. Second, students should connect the migration phenomenon to the broader Unit 9 narrative: the postwar economic miracle (Topic 9.2) generated the labor demand; the postwar decolonization (Topic 9.9) shaped the postcolonial migration; the EU integration project (Topic 9.10) produced the post-2004 free-movement framework; the 2010s populist political mobilization (Topic 9.6) reflected the cumulative anti-immigration response; the 2022 Ukrainian crisis connected migration to the post-1989 European geopolitical reorganization that Topic 9.7 examined.

Three sources framing postwar European migration: the international refugee framework, the principal 2015 crisis statement, and the EU institutional response.

1. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Connect the postwar Gastarbeiter recruitment, the British Commonwealth migration, and the post-2004 EU eastern-enlargement free movement as varied forms of postwar European labor migration. What features connect them, and what features distinguish each?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.4.III.D: how did the 1973 oil shock and the resulting economic downturn produce anti-immigrant agitation and the rise of extreme nationalist political parties? Cite specific cases.
3. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Connect the 2015 European migration crisis to the broader European migration trajectory. What does the crisis reveal about the limits of the postwar European refugee framework, the EU integration project, and the resulting political-cultural reorganization?
4. (Causation) Account for KC-4.3.III.C: how has increased immigration into Europe altered Europe's religious composition? Cite specific cases of debate or conflict over the role of religion in social and political life (the French headscarf law; the Swiss minaret-ban referendum; the Belgian and French face-veil bans).
5. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Connect the substantial 2022 Ukrainian refugee response to the substantially different 2015 EU response. What does the comparison reveal about the political conditions for European refugee admission?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.