Contenu du sommaire : Les communautés étrangères en Europe - Foreign Communities in Europe

Reception and dispersal of political refugees in Belgium Since the beginning of the eighties, Western Europe is facing an enormous increase of the number of asylum-seekers originating from Third World countries. Many of them are actually economic migrants, trying to get access to one or other European country by applying for the status of political refugee. Most of the European nations have since adopted stricter rules to put the brake on this continuing influx. Belgium had not taken any specific measures until 1986, when it was literally overrun by asylum-seekers refused elsewhere. Two kinds of actions have been taken. On the one hand, like in the other countries, conditions of admission and attribution of political asylum have been rendered more severe. Moreover, a dispersal plan has been worked out, with the aim of relieving the big cities, which had attracted until then almost the totality of asylum-seekers. In order to solve the lack of housing there and to come to a fair burden-sharing, an appeal was made to the solidarity of every Belgian commune to absorb a certain number of refugees.

Learning the hard way: the government programme to resettle the Vietnamese refugees in the U.K. Experiences with earlier refugee groups (Jews, Poles, Hungarians, East African, Asians, etc.) have conditioned British government policies seeking the dispersal of refugee populations as a way of preventing concentrations. These policies were applied to the Vietnamese from 1979 onwards, but without adequate measures being taken to ensure the availability of housing or to promote the integration of the refugee population. Evidence collected here suggests that the policy of dispersal of the Vietnamese was not as successful as had been intended by government, with the emergence of strong clusters right from the outset. There has also been an intensive pattern of secondary migration by the refugees since their arrival in the U.K., with flows predominantly towards London and other major cities already housing strong Vietnamese communities.

Although most foreign workers in Western Europe are wage labourers there are also other forms of work organisation present. In Vienna there exists an intermediate category of the self-employed who are at the same time under contract to a major employer - in this case newspaper firms. Most of the street newspaper vendors are Egyptian, with high levels of educational qualifications. Stays in Vienna are short, with immigration still being possible because of the workers' self-employed status. Migrants live in groups without family. Their position is very tenuous and they are amongst the most exploited groups in the labour market.

Socio-economic integration of new immigrants: the case of Mauritians in France A survey of the employment, family and housing conditions of the Mauritians in France, reveals the new characteristics of the recent waves of immigration. Their integration is considered to be a replication of the French colonial past in the former «Isle de France». It is characterised by their large scale introduction into the urban informal economy. In two activity sectors investigated, namely domestic services and clothing industry, it is shown how social relationships in the workplaces prevail over the economic aspects. This trait is fundamental to a paternalistic socio-economic system internalised by these immigrants. It is one of the factors, besides the emergence of an ethnic entrepreneurship that explains a continuous migration flow.

Ethnie Residential Patterns in a Welfare State. Lessons from the Netherlands 1970-1990. The relation between residential patterns and the development of the overall social position of immigrant groups has been a major topic in the study of residence for almost a century. The general assumption, corroborated mainly by studies of American cities, is that there is a positive correlation between residential dispersion and success on the labour market. However the Amsterdam situation does not confirm this accepted wisdom. The housing situation of the immigrants in Amsterdam has developed positively during the last decades, whereas at the same time their situation on the labour market has deteriorated. This discrepancy is explained by the strong welfare state control over housing that makes the distribution of houses independent of the distribution mechanisms operative on the labour market.

Government policies to promote the integration of guestworker families, and especially the second generation, have been confused in Germany by the often repeated statement that Germany is not a land of immigration. Nevertheless, since the late 1970s there has been a rapid process of family reunification creating an important ethnic minority community in the country. Whilst certain indicators of the integration of young people (for example school achievement) show improvement, the residential segregation of guestworkers remains a considerable barrier to further inter-ethnic mixing. Analysisjof residential patterns and of migration flows between urban sub -areas, shows that in Diisseldorf there has been little improvement in the living conditions and levels of segregation of guestworkers over recent years. There is evidence that they are more constrained in housing choice now than used to be the case, shown by a reduced level of intra-urban migration. It is argued that the key to future integration processes must lie in the improvement of housing opportunities for guestworker families.

Problems relating to immigration and immigrants have become of increasing political and public interest within Denmark in recent years. In an international perspective the number of immigrants as well as the problems associated are small and insignificant, and the actual knowledge and research in immigrant problems is limited. However immigrants or foreigners are «hot» political «stuff» and the lack of actual knowledge is unscrupulously «used». The present article attempts to gather some factual information on immigrants in Denmark. Furthermore it attempts to show how housing policy deliberately as well as accidentally influences immigrant location and thus the public perception of the «problem».

The foreigners in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg: demographic and socio-economic aspects Although the Grand-Duchy of Luxemburg is not well known abroad, more than a quarter of its population has a foreign nationality. Many of them come from the neighbouring countries, but the Italians were also present since the early industrialisation of the country and the Portuguese arrived from the sixties on. The latter represent today more than one third of the foreigners in the country. Foreigners contribute considerably to the demographic and socio-economic development of the country. Their spatial distribution on the level of the country reflects their immigration grounds. At the level of the city of Luxemburg, the spatial segregation between nationalities corresponds to the socio- economic spatial structure of the city. As shown by some aspects of social life, educational and linguistic problems and the rise of anti-immigrant movements, living together is not an easy task.