As we have seen in previous chapters, the story of post-WWII immigration, and especially its domestic political and social effects, is a checkered narrative. One the one hand, as many scholars have observed, the influx of foreign workers into the host societies proceeded fairly harmoniously during the early post-WWII period. A few cases excepted, foreign workers were successfully, if unevenly, incorporated into the domestic economies and societies of Western Europe (de Wenden 2002; Ekberg 1994). Facilitated by the widely embraced myth that postwar immigration was a temporary and reversible phenomenon, its first wave neither seriously threatened the economic security of native workers nor challenged the foundations of the traditional domestic sociocultural order.

The economic, social, and political context within which the second wave of migration unfolded, on the other hand, was very different. By the mid-1970s the post-WWII economic boom had run its course. Stagflation, high unemployment, and painful structural economic adjustment all converged during the decade to erode the permissive political and social environment within which the first foreign workers had been received.