ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century, Austria was a country of both immigration and emigration. However, its migration history in the twentieth century is characterized by several major breaks, all of which led to important reconfigurations of the patterns of migration and the emergence of completely new migratory phenomena. In the post-war period, migration is largely associated with ‘guest worker migration’, which started in the early 1960s. Originally, ‘guest worker’ migration – as the very name suggests – was designed as a temporary, rotating migration, but the system developed into a mixed form of circular and permanent migration. Because of labour recruitment, immigrants from Turkey and former Yugoslavia – the major countries of origin of labour migrants – still form the majority of immigrants. Indeed, in 2005 they comprised 54 per cent of a total foreign population of approximately 788,000 persons. Yet, as a result of the ‘new immigration’ from other, mostly Eastern European, countries and from Africa and South-East and Central Asia, the immigrant population is increasingly diversifying.
