but encouraged by the host countries who needed to increase their populations
rapidly in order to develop their economies and exploit their territory. In the
USA the waves of immigration have been of great importance socially and
politically. As early as the 1920s politicians were attacking the tendency for
everyone to be a ‘hyphenated-American’; they were referring to the way US
citizens described themselves as, for example, Italo-American, German-Amer-
ican or Irish-American. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 20th century less
than half the US population was second generation American. Similar exam-
ples can be found elsewhere: for example, only Athens itself has a larger urban
Greek population than Melbourne in Australia.
The golden days of immigrants being welcomed ended sometime during
the 1950s, as population and labour levels reached and exceeded optimum
levels. It was then that a different type of immigration came to prominence. It
was no longer the movement of, often highly skilled, populations from old
European societies. Immigration became, instead, the movement of largely
unskilled and uneducated peasants from the Third World, especially from ex-
colonies to the formercolonialistEuropean countries, and to a much lesser
extent to the North American/Australasian world. The latter, having achieved
their population goals, closed immigration down to a trickle. The former
colonial powers, above all France and the United Kingdom, started the post-
war period with a perceived obligation to the populations of their former
possessions. They also hoped to replace the colonial bonds with some more
tenuous relationship, through the British Commonwealth and the informal
gatherings of the Francophone countries, which would help retain their world
power status, and thus extending citizenship to their former colonial subjects
seemed politically rational. At the same time there was a need for cheap labour
in the immediately post-war economies. This was felt elsewhere, West Ger-
many being the best example. But in these non-colonial countries immigration
tended to mean a short-term importation of labour from poorer countries,
Italy and Turkey in Germany’s case, which did not involve any right of
permanent residence.
Before long the presence of alien cultures, languages and religions began to
irritate the British, and the slowing of economic growth also meant that the
need to import cheap labour declined. By the early 1960s race riots began to
break out, the government started to introduce severe restrictions on immi-
gration, which itself became an emotive political issue. It took somewhat
longer in France, but by the end of the 1970s France too had begun to find its
ex-colonial citizens politically embarrassing. By the early 1990s immigration
had, indeed, become more politically explosive in France, and also in Ger-
many, than it ever had been in the UK, where a consensus among the major
parties managed to strangle the more overtlyracistanti-immigration political
movements (seeneo-fascism).
Immigration