Migration and Immigration

Historical Context & Motivation

The story of modern European migration begins amid the rubble of the Second World War, when the continent confronted an unprecedented displacement crisis. Roughly 60 million Europeans had been forcibly displaced by 1945—refugees, expellees, and survivors of concentration camps who required repatriation or resettlement. As Western European economies entered a period of sustained postwar growth during the 1950s and 1960s, labor shortages prompted governments to actively recruit foreign workers, inaugurating a new chapter in European migration history. These guest worker programs (Gastarbeiter in Germany, travailleurs immigrés in France) drew millions of laborers from Southern Europe, Turkey, and North Africa, fundamentally altering the demographic composition of host societies. The assumption that these workers would eventually return home proved largely unfounded, setting the stage for decades of political debate over integration, citizenship, and national identity.

These successive waves of migration raise a central question for historians of contemporary Europe: how did population movements driven by war, economics, decolonization, and political upheaval transform European states from relatively homogeneous societies into multicultural polities, and what tensions did this transformation generate? Understanding the push and pull factors behind these movements—and the political responses they provoked—is essential for mastering the AP European History framework on Cold War and contemporary Europe.

Core Principles & Definitions

Analyzing European migration requires a precise vocabulary and a grasp of the structural forces that drive population movements. Historians and social scientists distinguish between several interrelated concepts that are frequently tested on the AP exam. The following foundational ideas provide the analytical scaffolding necessary for interpreting primary sources, crafting DBQ arguments, and evaluating the long-term consequences of migration in Europe.

Visual Explanation: Waves of European Migration

The diagram above reveals a critical pattern: European migration did not follow a single linear trajectory but arrived in distinct waves, each driven by different push-pull dynamics and each generating distinct policy responses. The first wave (1945–1951) was predominantly a crisis of wartime displacement and ethnic cleansing, managed by international organizations such as the IRO and later UNHCR. The second wave (1955–1973) was economically driven, fueled by the labor demands of the postwar boom and by the dismantling of colonial empires. The third wave (1973–1989) was shaped by family reunification after the recruitment halt, demonstrating the limits of restrictive immigration policy. The fourth wave (1989–2004) resulted from the collapse of communism and EU expansion, while the fifth wave (2015–present) was triggered by the Syrian Civil War and instability across the Middle East and North Africa. Each wave's legacy persists in the demographic, cultural, and political fabric of contemporary Europe.

Mechanisms: How Migration Reshaped Europe

The Guest Worker System in Practice

The mechanism by which guest worker programs transformed European societies illustrates the gap between policy intent and demographic reality. Governments negotiated bilateral labor agreements—West Germany signed its first with Italy in 1955, followed by agreements with Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia—under the assumption of a rotation principle: workers would arrive, labor for a fixed period, and return home as new cohorts replaced them. In practice, employers who had invested in training workers lobbied to retain them, and workers themselves found return economically irrational given the wage differential between host and origin countries. When West Germany imposed its Anwerbestopp (recruitment ban) in November 1973, approximately 2.6 million foreign workers resided in the country. Rather than prompting departures, the ban paradoxically encouraged permanent settlement, as workers feared they would be unable to return if they left. Family reunification provisions enshrined in European human rights law then enabled spouses and children to join, cementing immigrant communities that the rotation model had never anticipated.

Decolonization and Return Migration

A parallel mechanism operated through the process of decolonization. As European empires dissolved, the metropole became a destination for two categories of migrants: colonial settlers returning "home" (the French pieds-noirs from Algeria, the Portuguese retornados from Angola and Mozambique) and colonial subjects exercising residual citizenship or residence rights. Britain's British Nationality Act of 1948 initially granted Commonwealth citizens the right to settle in the United Kingdom, producing the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants who arrived aboard the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. Subsequent restrictive legislation—the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968—reflected growing nativist anxiety, demonstrating how migration provoked legislative backlash even as it filled critical labor shortages in sectors such as the National Health Service and public transport.

The Schengen System and Free Movement

The third critical mechanism was the institutionalization of freedom of movement within the European integration project. The Treaty of Rome (1957) already included provisions for the free movement of workers among the six founding members of the EEC, but the Schengen Agreement (1985, implemented 1995) abolished internal border checks among signatories, and the Maastricht Treaty (1992) enshrined EU citizenship with attendant mobility rights. When the EU expanded eastward in 2004 and 2007 to include Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and Bulgaria, large-scale intra-European migration followed—an estimated 2.3 million Poles lived abroad in other EU states by 2010. This East-to-West migration within the EU became a flashpoint in the Brexit debate, where the inability of the United Kingdom to restrict EU migration was cited as a key grievance by the Leave campaign.

Types of Migration in European History

European migration since 1945 can be classified along several analytical axes—voluntary versus forced, temporary versus permanent, intra-European versus extra-European, and legal versus undocumented. For the AP exam, it is essential to distinguish between these categories because the historical causation, political responses, and social consequences differ markedly across types. The following diagram and table provide a systematic classification.

Worked Example: Analyzing a Migration-Related Document

The AP European History exam frequently presents documents related to migration for the DBQ and SAQ sections. The following worked example demonstrates how to analyze a historical document on migration using the HIPP (Historical context, Intended audience, Purpose, Point of view) framework.

Integration Models and Political Responses

European nations adopted strikingly different approaches to integrating immigrant populations, and these models—and their perceived failures—have driven some of the most consequential political developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Understanding the strengths and limitations of each model is essential for evaluating the causal arguments that appear on AP exam essays.

Connections to Broader AP Themes

Migration and immigration intersect with virtually every major theme in the AP European History curriculum. The exam's thematic learning objectives (TLOs) explicitly link migration to questions of national and European identity, economic development, social organization, and the tension between supranational integration and national sovereignty. The following table maps migration to these broader frameworks, helping you see how a single essay prompt can demand connections across multiple units.

Looking forward, migration remains one of the defining issues of twenty-first-century European politics. The ongoing tensions between the EU's commitment to free movement and member states' desire to control their borders—intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic's temporary border closures—suggest that migration will continue to test the boundaries of European solidarity and governance. For the AP exam, the most sophisticated essays will connect migration to the longue durée of European history, noting that the continent has always been shaped by population movements, from the Germanic migrations of late antiquity through the early modern Atlantic exchanges to the present day.

Practice Problems

Summary: Migration and Immigration in Cold War and Contemporary Europe