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From Class to Culture: Immigration, Recession, and Daily Ethnic Boundaries in Belgium, 1940s–1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2008

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Abstract

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Each society has myths about the successful adaptation of former migrants. Historians need to deconstruct these myths by dealing with the imagined boundaries between “indigenous” and “foreign” people that give way to them. This essay does so by comparing how children of Polish interwar immigrants and children of Italian postwar immigrants came to be seen as insiders in the Belgian Limburg mining region. Oral testimonies, associational records, and population data reveal that Poles achieved the status of industrious, adapted people around 1960, due to the equal promotion of Polish and indigenous miners' sons in the mines and to the labour migration regime which constructed Italians as unskilled outsiders. Around 1980, the industrial recession caused unemployment among young Italians. However, migration politics has, since the recession, primarily focused on culture. Moreover, European legislation constructed foreignness as non-European. Consequently, it is not class, but European culture which has turned Italians into “integrated” people.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2008 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Footnotes

This article was written with the support of the Research Foundation Flanders – Belgium. I am grateful to Patrick Pasture and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the first version.