WI: 20th c. immigration to Europe consists mainly of Latino, Caribbean, and other Romance/Germanics.

fashbasher

Banned
Scenario: Instead of Turkey and the Maghreb, postwar European nations choose to recruit guest workers who already share a broad linguistic background in order to ease communication and integration. Believing it'll be more cost-effective to hire 100,000 Jamaicans who already speak a close relative of German vs. 100,000 Turks with minimal Indo-European fluency, Germany, Netherlands, and Austria begin recruiting from the British colonies in the West Indies and Mauritius, with smaller numbers from PNG, poor Latin American countries, the Philippines, and Suriname. France soon follows by recruiting Haitian and Central American laborers as well as Cape Verdeans, Paraguayans, and Brazilians. With the granting of independence and the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the recruitment of West Indian and Mauritian workers only accelerates in the continent. How well do these immigrants adapt with their broadly shared linguistic and to a lesser extent religious heritage and does this prevent or reduce the tensions that would later (starting in the late 1960s) affect much of Europe?
 
How well do these immigrants adapt with their broadly shared linguistic and to a lesser extent religious heritage and does this prevent or reduce the tensions that would later (starting in the late 1960s) affect much of Europe?


I believe the immigrants that Enoch Powell was railing against in his Rivers Of Blood speech were mostly from the British Caribbean, no? Didn't seem to make him or his followers much more amenable to their presence.
 

fashbasher

Banned
I believe the immigrants that Enoch Powell was railing against in his Rivers Of Blood speech were mostly from the British Caribbean, no? Didn't seem to make him or his followers much more amenable to their presence.

But I'd imagine that it would have to be a less intense hate, at least on the mainland, compared to that faced by Muslim and Roma immigrants. Britain, at least England and Wales, is a very crowded country and it's easy to see why they'd struggle with immigration.
 
(posted before I read the reply above)

There are basically two explanations for immigrant-related strife: the inability of the immigrants to assimilate(this explanation favoured by the right), or the racism of the host culture(this favoured by the left). I don't think either one is especially ameliorated by reducing the language barrier.

Anecdotally, when I was growing up in redneck western Canada, late 70s early 80s, the most vicious racism(I mean, like Nazi levels of dehumanization in terms of the rhetoric) was directed against First Nations(aka North American Indians), and East Indians. But both of those groups had more-than-adequate English-language skills.

And the same people who would abuse and insult "drunk indians" and "pakis" would also hold Chinese and other East Asians up as model minorities, who supposedly worked hard, didn't commit crimes, and didn't get involved in politics(which was seen as a negative for immigrants, who the hell are they to tell us how to run our country?). Even though many of the older generation of East Asians had pretty limited language skills, compared to the First Nations and East Indians.
 
Why should it be easier to integrate Jamaicans?
From the German perspective Jamaica is a foreign exotic far away place on the other side of the world. Most Germans don't know much about that place (except maybe 2-3 stereotypes) while we have a lot of common history and cultural exchange with Turkey in the last centuries.
 

fashbasher

Banned
(posted before I read the reply above)

There are basically two explanations for immigrant-related strife: the inability of the immigrants to assimilate(this explanation favoured by the right), or the racism of the host culture(this favoured by the left). I don't think either one is especially ameliorated by reducing the language barrier.

Anecdotally, when I was growing up in redneck western Canada, late 70s early 80s, the most vicious racism(I mean, like Nazi levels of dehumanization in terms of the rhetoric) was directed against First Nations(aka North American Indians), and East Indians. But both of those groups had more-than-adequate English-language skills.

And the same people who would abuse and insult "drunk indians" and "pakis" would also hold Chinese and other East Asians up as model minorities, who supposedly worked hard, didn't commit crimes, and didn't get involved in politics(which was seen as a negative for immigrants, who the hell are they to tell us how to run our country?). Even though many of the older generation of East Asians had pretty limited language skills, compared to the First Nations and East Indians.

I would add, though, that outside of the already developed Western puppets (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore), very few poor Asians migrate to the west, with most going either within the region or to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The Chinese immigrant who owns a little corner store in Botswana or Belize is of a very different social class than the average Chinese Canadian.
 
Scenario: Instead of Turkey and the Maghreb, postwar European nations choose to recruit guest workers who already share a broad linguistic background in order to ease communication and integration.

Arguably they did, at least substantially. The former French North Africa, as of the 1960s, had been under French rule for a half-century at a minimum, up to a century and a quarter in the case of Algeria. Millions of Arabs and Berbers in Algeria had been French subjects, while knowledge of the French language and awareness of the labour market conditions in France were widespread. Algerian migration to France, particularly, dates to the years before the First World War.

It might be possible to handwave away Turkish migration to western Europe if Turkey is not a possible source. One way to get this done might be to have Turkey end up in the Warsaw Pact, as a Soviet satellite state. It is not possible to likewise handwave away migration from the post-colonial Maghreb to western Europe.
 
In the case of Latin America as a source of immigrants for western Europe, one complication might be that Latin America--especially high-income countries in Latin America, places like Venezuela and Argentina particularly but also Brazil--was still in the 1960s substantially more of a destination for immigrants from Europe rather than the reverse. The big gap in living standards that opened up between high-income Latin America and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (especially the southern Europe that was the source of most immigrants to Latin America) was not really there in the 1960s.

This isn't to say that there might not be the potential for networks of Latin American migration to western Europe to come up, in the post-war era full of migration (from rural to urban areas, across national boundaries, et cetera). I can imagine, for instance, that many of the poor Brazilians who moved to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in our history might have moved to Rotterdam and Stuttgart if the opportunity was there. That said, you still have to create the opportunities. A TL where Latin America gets plugged into the Western alliance system, maybe?
 
fashbasher wrote:

very few poor Asians migrate to the west, with most going either within the region or to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The Chinese immigrant who owns a little corner store in Botswana or Belize is of a very different social class than the average Chinese Canadian

Well, yeah, that's kinda what I'm getting at. Socioeconomic status probably matters more than does language.

And it can be either high or low status that is the alleged "problem". The First Nations in Canada are disliked for being supposedly all being alcoholic criminals and welfare-bums. The East Indians are(or more accurately, were) disliked because they supposedly had high-paying jobs(in other words, shutting out white people), acted like they were the cat's meow(because they were used to having a high economic status), and got involved in politics and tried to change the system to better accomadate their culture(eg. Sikhs lobbying to get turbans allowed on the mountie uniform).

"But the Chinese, now those guys come here, work hard, don't get sent to jail, and don't march around in protests all day. We need more guys like that."

(And just for the record, it wasn't all fun and roses for the East Asians. When a Korean family(people at that time didn't see much difference between Koreans and Chinese) moved into our area, a bunch of neighbourhood kids welcomed them by spraying shaving cream all over their car one night.)
 

fashbasher

Banned
fashbasher wrote:

very few poor Asians migrate to the west, with most going either within the region or to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The Chinese immigrant who owns a little corner store in Botswana or Belize is of a very different social class than the average Chinese Canadian

Well, yeah, that's kinda what I'm getting at. Socioeconomic status probably matters more than does language.

And it can be either high or low status that is the alleged "problem". The First Nations in Canada are disliked for being supposedly all being alcoholic criminals and welfare-bums. The East Indians are(or more accurately, were) disliked because they supposedly had high-paying jobs(in other words, shutting out white people), acted like they were the cat's meow(because they were used to having a high economic status), and got involved in politics and tried to change the system to better accomadate their culture(eg. Sikhs lobbying to get turbans allowed on the mountie uniform).

"But the Chinese, now those guys come here, work hard, don't get sent to jail, and don't march around in protests all day. We need more guys like that."

(And just for the record, it wasn't all fun and roses for the East Asians. When a Korean family(people at that time didn't see much difference between Koreans and Chinese) moved into our area, a bunch of neighbourhood kids welcomed them by spraying shaving cream all over their car one night.)

Yah, the whole f-the-poor attitude of the 2010s would likely result in tensions regardless, and it's entirely possible for non-Muslim communities to be radicalized (let's not get into Chat stuff too much beyond that).
 
I'm pretty sure learning German as an English speaker isn't much easier than learning German as a Turkish speaker, especially if you speak Jamaican Patois which is technically a separate language. They also are totally different in skin colour than Turks are, which would have an effect. There's a sizable amount of Dutch speakers in the Caribbean which would work for Belgium and the Netherlands, and maybe Germany too (since it's closer to German than English is), but the majority of people in those islands speak languages like Papiamento (which is a Spanish/Portuguese creole, not Dutch) and wouldn't speak Dutch natively.

I would add, though, that outside of the already developed Western puppets (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore), very few poor Asians migrate to the west, with most going either within the region or to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The Chinese immigrant who owns a little corner store in Botswana or Belize is of a very different social class than the average Chinese Canadian.

Historically that isn't true, a lot of poor Chinese from Hong Kong and even the mainland migrated to the US as recent as several decades ago. There's still large segments of poor Chinese and Koreans in the US. If you talk about the late 20th century, you can't ignore that. Although regarding Europe, I don't know.
 
Would not being a more conspicuously different minority (skin colour) and speaking the language of their conquerors (English) make Jamaicans more disliked by Germans in the immediate post war years?

Just look at how mixed race children of French black soldiers were treated after ww1 in Germany.
 
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