ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes two guestworker programs, the Emergency Farm Labor Bracero program and the European Guestworker Program by focusing on the Turkish migrant workers in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Gastarbeiter in a comparative historical manner. The Bracero Program between Mexico and the United States of America, and the Gastarbeiter Program between Germany and Turkey were both bilateral labor recruitment agreements designed to meet the labor demand of the host countries, the US and Germany, where domestic labor supply failed to meet. Even though they were both effective temporarily, they had significant implications in the formation of immigrant communities in the receiving countries. By underscoring the basic similarities and differences between these temporary labor recruitment programs, this paper aims at showing that international migration is not solely a temporary phenomenon responding to economic necessities but has social and political repercussions. While both programs were based on the institutional differentiation and physical separation of the maintenance and reproduction of migrant labor force, each ended up paving the way for the formation and expansion of immigrant communities even long after the abolition of initial labor recruitment agreements