On the History and Selectivity of Turkish and Moroccan Migration to Belgium

Abstract

The classic image of the labour migrant arriving in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s is one of an unskilled individual exchanging a life of work on the land for one of manual labour in industry.For Turks and Moroccans, in particular, the image of an undifferentiated immigrant labour force is reinforced by the commencement of migration from both countries during the same period of high labour demand, their common religious beliefs and the similar legal frameworks under which they applied to gain access to European society.This oversimplified image of an uneducated and undifferentiated migrating labour force is challenged in this article through the concept of selectivity. By using a combination of different data sources, a systematic comparison is made of leavers and stayers with respect to their region of origin and educational attainment. The (self‐) selection of the immigrants is, in other words, the empirical angle that is chosen to compare and characterize both migration systems.In bringing selection to the forefront, we explicitly focus on a topic other migration theories often have difficulties incorporating, i.e., explaining whysome people in a given country or region migrate and others do not. While Turkish and Moroccan migration overlap only partly in their nature, variances suggest a different logic underlying each. Two concepts of Petersen (conservative and innovative migration) are borrowed to characterize the two migration systems and to interpret differences observed in the selection of immigrants. The advantage of this typology is that it explicitly accounts for migration motives and migrants’ aspirations. This enables us to understand and formulate hypotheses with respect to the further evolution of both migration systems under the current context of legally restricted migration opportunities and also helps explain different integration strategies into the host society.Implicit in this article is a plea for the added value of the empirical operationalization of selectivity in terms of understanding migration systems. However, such an approach requires comparable data on the sending and receiving countries. In this case, data were combined from two national surveys conducted in Belgium between 1994 and 1996, with aggregated data from national statistical institutes of the sending countries, for the analysis of selection with respect to the region of origin. The same survey data were used in combination with the DHS surveys for Morocco (1992) and Turkey (1993) for the analysis of selection with respect to educational level.