Volume 23, Number 1 · February 5, 1976
Room at the Bottom
By Neal Ascherson
A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe
text by John Berger, photographs by Jean Mohr
A Richard Seaver Book/Viking, 238 pp., $8.95
Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe
by Stephen Castles, by Godula Kosack
Oxford University Press, 514 pp., $17.75
In these years of recession, the most important export of the slackening economies of West Germany, France, or Switzerland is no longer small cars, machine tools, or electric motors, but unemployment. The southbound trains out of the great industrial centers still carry goods, but their most valuable freight consists of thousands upon thousands of small, dark men who sit on pasteboard suitcases with brown paper parcels on their laps, heading home. At the labor exchanges at Frankfurt, Lille, Geneva, long lines of indigenous workers and settled foreigners wait for their relief checks and seek new jobs. But it is the lines at the station ticket offices that count. The immigrant labor system, on which Western Europe now so heavily depends for unskilled work, ensures that the financial and political burden of unemployment in the north and west of the continent is carried by the south and east, in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, in the countries of the North African littoral, and in Turkey.
Review, 2863 words
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