Current Research and Findings on Migration of Workers at the Science Center Berlin

Abstract

What follows is a brief account of a project on international labor migration characteristics of the Mediterranean/West-European area which is presented with the single aim of informing the migration and development readers on the subject. The project, directed by the author, was initiated in spring 1973 at the International Institute of Management, one of the three institutes of the Science Center Berlin. In its early phase the project was designed as an investigation of minority housing with specific policy goals aimed at finding solutions in a tight and competitive housing market. This interest coincided with an acute public and political interest on the infrastructural burdens said to be introduced by foreign labor to the systems importing them. The data required for the housing project were collected in West Berlin, based on a sample of more than twenty-two hundred foreign workers composed of Turks and Yugoslavs, the city's two major ethnic groups. As the research proceeded, the governmental decision to put an abrupt stop to immigration was made. A number of researchers from the team then undertook a small scale econometric investigation to detect the effects of energy crises on the unemployment rates by sector and branch of the Federal Republic of Germany's economy, of the foreign and indige? nous workers.