City Policy and Guest Workers in Stuttgart, 1955–1973.

FOREIGN workers; LEGAL status of foreign workers; EMPLOYMENT in foreign countries; ASSIMILATION (Sociology); GERMANIZATION; SOCIAL integration; NEWCOMERS (Sociology); TWENTIETH century; HISTORY

STUTTGART (Germany); GERMANYReport Available; GERMANY (West)

This article examines the development of city policy towards guest workers in the city of Stuttgart between 1955 and 1973. It argues that local-level institutional leaders almost immediately recognized the social impact of labour migration into the city. Initially Stuttgart officials emphasized the construction of guest-worker cultural centres that would take the guest workers out of public spaces and minimize their potential to create social disruption. However, by the mid-1960s, officials from the city administration and relief organizations realized that the foreign workers were not temporary and therefore began to pursue polices to integrate them into West German society—particularly in terms of providing proper family housing and schooling for guest-worker children. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the city administration began instituting various programmes to encourage more active civic engagement by the guest workers, now termed ‘foreign co-citizens’, through the creation of a Foreigner Advisory Committee and a model integration programme in a city quarter with a high density of foreigners. However, their efforts were significantly hampered because of the larger framework of federal and state policies that continued to treat the guest-worker presence as temporary, left guest workers uncertain about the duration of their residency in West Germany, and offered no long-term path to citizenship for guest workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]