582
PARTISAN REVIEW
more successful than the pass laws and influx regulations with
which the white South Africans had tried to keep their laborers
from settling permanently in their cities? After all, it wasn't as
though such would-be migrants would find themselves alone in
the countries for which they were headed, if they managed to get
through. Hundreds of thousands, millions indeed, from Turkey
and North Africa, the West Indies, Latin America, and the Indian
subcontinent had preceded them to Germany and Switzerland,
Holland and Great Britain, France and the United States: to where–
ever, in fact, history and geography made it most convenient,
or
least inconvenient, for them to go. After the war, during the years
of economic boom, these countries had discovered that they
needed more unskilled labor than they could obtain locally. So
they went farther afield to find it: some initially to Yugoslavia and
south Italy; others still farther afield. The
Gastarbeiter
had come
into existence; and this usefully bland term, with its combination
of wishfulness and fake gentility (especially when one thinks of
the kind of
A rbeit
these
Gaste
were hired to do, and the conditions
in which they generally had to live) had been found for them. Like
the white South Africans, each of the "host" countries had hoped
that it could somehow take this kind of labor into its economy
without thereby compelling its inhabitants to take the laborers
into the society as well, and thus radically and irrevocably altering
its aspect at every level. Like the white South Africans, again, they
had intended that with the completion of the particular jobs,
or
series of jobs, for which these aliens had been hired, they would all
go away. But like the black South Africans, only some of the
newcomers had obliged by remitting their money home and then
obediently going after it, never to be seen again. Others remained
where they were; following and yet modifying a pattern more
familiar in the New World than in the Old, they sent for their
wives and children, fathers and brothers to join them; they settled
in ancient slums and new
bidonvilles,
the equivalent of those
previously mentioned "hostels" and "locations." They are doing
so still.
When I came to live in England in the mid-fifties (thus,
incidentally, becoming a migrant myself), the population of the
country was racially homogenous to a remarkable degree. That
was one of the features of the society which most attracted me to it,
after the strains and confusions of living in South Africa. As a
