On September 12, the Institute of European Studies in collaboration with the Center for German and European Studies, the German Historical Institute Washington, the UC Berkeley Department of German, the UC Berkeley Department of History, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the UC Berkeley Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, and the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender hosted Professor Lauren Stokes of Northwestern University to present and discuss their most recent book Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. Professor Stokes engaged with an audience of fourty-four people in discourse on West German guest worker policy in the 1950-1970s, how the dialogue about guest worker policy was racialized and created consequences for guest worker families.
Professor Stokes began their lecture with a historical overview of guest worker policy in the Federal Republic of Germany beginning in 1955 and formal recruitment ending in 1973. During this period, 2.6 million people from Portugal, Spain, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey arrived in West Germany as guest workers. Stokes argued that this migration began a new kind of discourse regarding social topics such as gender roles, north-south and east-west distinctions, and racialization. Stokes particularly focused on the role of race in the formation of guest worker policy, connecting West German policy makers' line of thought with American neoliberal racial hierarchy. Stokes primarily argued for the claim that anti-ghettoization and anti-foreigner policy in the Federal Republic of Germany stemmed from a desire to avoid creating “little Harlems in Germany”, using American alegories to describe racialized spaces. Finally, Stokes highlighted the consequences of these policies for guest worker families whose right to stay together was undermined by age restrictions for entry into the Federal Republic of Germany.
The lecture concluded with questions from Professor Hirota of the UC Berkeley History Department and audience members on topics such as anti-immigrant discourse, the response to guest worker policy from the Turkish community, and the role of employers in the formation of immigration policy.