ABSTRACT

The history of workforce migration – be it skilled or unskilled labour – has a long and complex history, with different features characterizing the phenomenon in different historical periods. Sometimes it has been viewed with suspicion by certain political authorities and by those social classes and categories which have felt threatened by the newcomers; and very often it has been the selfsame political élites – together with a certain hostility of the majority towards particular minorities in their midst – which have triggered the process of migration in the first place. However, there is no denying the importance that such migratory movement has had on the spread of knowledge and know-how between various areas of the world, and within Europe in particular: according to Heinz Schilling, for example, ‘in Early Europe unlike present times, the propagation of innovations and their interregional penetration did not come about primarily through books or technical and professional journals. It took place rather through the migration of skilled craftsmen, financiers and entrepreneurs, setting out voluntarily or in consequence of expulsion from foreign countries’.1 Though one may not be able to agree with these observations in their entirety, they do serve to show how, in itself, migration is a phenomenon that inevitably runs into conflict with all those policies that aim at establishing and maintaining some sort of social equilibrium within a specific territory. As Harald Kleinschmidt makes clear, a rigidly functional interpretation – ‘which defines societies as territorialized groups of settlers under the control of norm-setting institutions’2 – can only lead to some

1 Heinz Schilling, ‘Innovation through Migration: the Settlements of Calvinistic Netherlanders in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Central and Western Europe’, in Histoire sociale – Social History, 16/31 (May 1983): 7-33.