10.00 am - 4.00 pm
After World War II Berlin was effectively ethnically cleansed through the genocide committed by the Nazis. The nationalist consensus was broken "from above" not until the 1960s, when employers called for low-skilled and cheap labor. "Guest workers" came to West Berlin at first from Greece and Italy, later from Yugoslavia and in particular from Turkey. "Contract workers" in a larger scale from Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique were hired in East Berlin not before the 1980s. In both cities foreigners lived in highly segregated areas – in West Berlin in inner-city poverty neighborhoods, in East Berlin in shelters. In the late 1980s and in particular after the Berlin wall came down and the "iron curtain" between the two blocs was lifted, it became obvious that the wealth differential and geographical vicinity of Germany and the bordering eastern European countries would trigger new migration movements especially from Poland and Russia.
Today the old and the new migrants living in the city face discrimination on the labor market (double rate of unemployment; ethnicization of the informal sector and the low wage economy) and on the housing market (higher average rents; partly involuntary segregation). To this adds the terror of young Nazi preventing migrants from moving to East Berlin or the Berlin environs and thereby molding the socio-spatial structure of the city. While the urban elites do call for high-skilled migrants, it was the others who have been coming.
In this workshop we will deal with old and new migration to Berlin and with the structural and institutional discrimination migrants are facing today.