Abstract
This article attempts to describe the regional distribution of foreign employees in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and to explain its dynamics in terms of the social, political, and economic processes involved.
There are only a few works that have dealed with the dynamics of the regional pattern of foreign employees, such as Hottes and Meyer (1977), Giese (1978), and Leib and Mertins (1980). But each paper has its own shortcomings in some respects. The diffusion processes of Italian, Greek Spanish, Portuguese, Yugoslav, and Turkish workers that Hottes and Meyer (1977) describe are unreliable because of lack of evidences in the 1960 s.
Although Giese (1978) adopts a viewpoint of spatial diffusion, too, and analyzes it in more detail than Hottes and Meyer (1977), his basic assumptions are irrelevant. He insists that the information concerning foreign workers diffused from Swiss employees to German partners, and further from the Stuttgart Metropolitan Area to the northern part of the FRG. We must, however, comprehend that there was scarcely time lag of the information flow, because the German government, namely the Federal Labor Office (die Bundesanstalt für Arbeit), its local branches or the Employment Exchanges (die Arbeitsämter), and its abroad branches in this case, plays the most important role of recruiting foreign workers. Moreover it is also irrelevant that Giese (1978) underestimates an economic factor, because the variables in his non-linear multiple regression analysis do not represent the real economic situation.
Leib and Mertins (1980) criticize the Giese's conclusion, too. They analyze the dynamics of the regional distribution only of Spanish employees, and conclude that they have been pconcentrated in the Rhein-Main-Gebiet, the Hannover Metropolitan Area and so on since 1961 and that a diffusion process like a wave cannot be found out. They put this phenomenon down to the immigration of chain-process type. But their description concerning the recruiting route of foreign workers seems to be incorrect, so that they underestimate the Feconomic factor, too.
After such a critical review, the present author shows first of all in which district of Employment Exchange foreign employees have accumulated (Figs. 3 and 4). It is clear that a large number of foreign workers are employed principaly in the Rhein-Bergisch-Märkisches Land, the Rhein-Main-Gebiet, the Stuttgart Metropolitan Area and the München Metropolitan Area, followed by the south of Baden-Württemberg, the Nüurnberg Metropolitan Area, the Rhein-Neckar-Gebiet, the Hannover Metropolitan Area, the Hamburg Metropolitan Area, Berlin (West), and Saarbrücken. In spite of business fluctuations, this pattern has been maintained since 1965 at latest, while the rate of increase of foreign employees was higher in some metropolitan areas during the boom and Bielefeld, Bremen and so on have appeared later as accumulation region. Each national group displayed a similar pattern during the period of 1965_??_1979 (Figs. 5_??_14), although it seems that there are some particular relations between each national group and some regions. Such relations can be shown most clearly in the map of location quotient (Fig. 17). However the degrees of correlations between each pair of distribution patterns of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Yugoslavs, and Turks are very high (Table 1).
The above mentioned pattern results from the economic situation in each district of Employment Exchange and the recruitment system rather than the chain migration. There are four routes for recruiting foreign workers in the FRG. The first route is through the Federal.
