Page - 75 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Petra Herczeg | Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Austria 75 3. The Situation of Migrants from the 1960s to the Present There had been few migrants in Austria before the late 1960s, when the so- called “Gastarbeiter” (“guest workers”), primarily from ex-Yugoslavia and Turkey, began to come to the country. Between 1961 and 1972, 265,000 immigrants came to Austria. For the most part, they were employed in heavy labour and, at any rate, did work that was not appealing to Austrians. They were not integrated into Austrian society and had a negative image within the Austrian population. To counteract negative reactions on the part of the general public and the media, the government started an awareness campaign to increase the acceptance of migrants. Posters showed a little boy and a big man, with the boy asking the man, “I haaß Kolaric, du haaßt Kolaric – warum sogn’s zu dir Tschusch?” (“My name is Kolaric, your name is Kolaric – why do they call you bad names?”) This campaign alluded to the fact that many Viennese citizens are descendents of Slavic immigrants, which could be readily demonstrated by reading the names in a Viennese telephone directory. This first distinctive wave of migration in the second half of the twentieth century was followed by constant immigration: the former guest workers attempted to bring their families to Austria, and their focus of interest shifted to Austria. Now, second and third generations of people of immigrant background live in the country. A second wave of migration arrived with the dissolution of former communist regimes in Eastern Europe. This migration could be seen as a return to the regional migration typical of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Austria, involving people from the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania (Hintermann 2000, 10). Between 1989 and 1993, the number of persons with foreign citizenship living in Austria increased from 387,000 to 690,000. Especially during the war in the Balkans, the number of citizens of former Yugoslavia emigrating to Austria increased, as did immigration from Turkey and other countries. In the early 1990s, about 90,000 refugees from the Bosnian war came to Austria. Approximately half of them remained there. According to official statistics, about 155,000 persons of Bosnian origin now live in Austria. About 41,000 are now Austrian citizens. Hence, tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees have been integrated into Austrian society.