In many ways, this book completes an agenda that I implicitly promised to pursue in my book review essay in the journal World Politics (October 1996). In that essay, I offered two sweeping and somewhat provocative criticisms of the state of the then scholarly literature on postwar migration to Western Europe. First, I argued that due to the emotionally charged nature of many immigration-related subjects, scholars of immigration too often fell into the trap of staking out inadequately substantiated claims. Specifically, the prospect of influencing public policy debates led some toward hyperbole and exaggeration in their analysis of immigration-related phenomena and to offer inappropriate or unworkable policy prescriptions. Second, I lamented that a growing trend toward specialization within the literature on postwar immigration and the concomitant insularity of scholarly inquiry threatened to fragment our understanding of the general phenomenon. In elaborating upon the second problem, I urged that new scholarly initiatives be pursued to synthesize and unify the disparate literatures on postwar migration in order “to stitch together the various strands of scholarship on post-WWII migration to Western Europe in a manner that better illuminates its whole.”

This study is a direct, albeit an obviously tardy, response to the previously cited exhortation. Perhaps more so than others within its genre, this book is the product of years of reflection, research, and writing and, more importantly, a rejoinder to many of the stimulating arguments and much of the impressive evidence presented in the intellectual marketplace by three generations of scholars of migration to Western Europe.