Introduction

Abstract

In the United States and Europe immigration is a hotly contested terrain that has generated intense debates at every level of society. The media, policy makers, and politicians, among others, have entered into a discourse that examines immigration from seemingly every possible angle. Within the academic world, numerous single-authored works and collections focusing on immigration and its consequences in postwar Western Europe have appeared in the past several years, especially on issues such as the economic and social impact of migration, its cultural dimensions, the integration of immigrants, national security, and the new role of Islam. An emphasis in much of this literature is the impact of immigration on the host society, and there is a continued tendency in the academy to see migrants, as Castles and Kosack did in their pivotal 1973 text, as powerless and voiceless.¹ Yet, migrants are political actors, as Mark J. Miller recognized in Foreign Workers in Western Europe (1981), whose permanent and growing presence in Western Europe was sure to have a dramatic impact on the politics of Western European nations. As Miller wrote more than two decades ago: “Foreign workers have become political actors in their own right through a number of distinctive channels or avenues of inf luence that, although often unorthodox or obscure, have made them a characteristic component of advanced industrial political systems.” ² Miller documented numerous instances of foreign worker involvement in trade unions, political parties, and civil rights organizations and remarked on the ramifications of strikes and other protests in which large numbers of foreign workers participated.