These two publications are dedicated to the history of the first generation of labor migrants from Turkey, who arrived in Western Europe in the 1960s. Mazyar Khoojinian examines the recruitment of seventeen thousand Turkish workers to Belgian mines during the 1960s, while Jennifer Miller analyzes how the immigration of Turks to West Germany created, redefined, and reconstructed borders. She focuses on borders between East and West Germany and between Turkey and Germany, and borders of class and gender.
The history that both books reconstruct is similar. Turkey signed a guest- worker agreement with Germany in 1961 and Belgium in 1963. For Turkey it was a solution to underemployment, but both authors underline that the Turkish political elite also hoped that workers’ temporary stay in Western Europe would make Turkish society “modern” and Western. The scale of the recruitment in Germany and Belgium was different. West Germany recruited slightly fewer than...
