This book offers an insight into the history of the settlement of immigrants in Western Europe. By displaying a wide range of experiences in different periods and countries it disaggregates the simple notions of migration and integration. Given the large differences in both the opportunity structure of the various European nation-states and in the characteristics of the migrants, this need not come as a surprise. Before shedding some light on the main paths of integration in Western Europe's past and present, we should first return to the US, the origin of this specific historical comparison. Compared with the rather clearcut distinction between old and new migrants in the current discussion among American migration scholars, transplanting this framework to Western Europe has proved to be both productive and problematic for at least three reasons.

First of all, defining the temporal limitations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ migration in Europe have proved difficult. Whereas in the US it is more or less agreed upon that ‘old’ refers to the period 1880-1920 and ‘new’ to the post-1965 era, the situation in the ‘Old World’ is much more intricate. Different states in Europe followed distinct political, cultural, economic, and demographic trajectories, which resulted in different migration rhythms and regimes. This is reflected in the dissimilar timing of labour migrations: high in inter-war France and the Netherlands and low in Germany and Great Britain. Moreover, migration from the colonies, predominantly after the Second World War, depended on the particular timing of the decolonisation process and on the existing colonial links in the British, Dutch, and French empires. Algerians in France, West-Indians in Great Britain, and Dutch Indonesians came in large numbers during the 1950s, whereas the immigration of Dutch Surinamese, and the Pakistanis and Indians in the United Kingdom peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Descendants of erstwhile German emigrants to Eastern Europe, known as Aussiedler, ‘returned’ massively in the late 1980s and 1990s. Thirdly, the many political reconfigurations of large parts of Europe in the twentieth century, especially pertaining to Germany, resulted in people moving over borders and borders over people as Klaus Bade once put it. This produced huge migration flows in Central Europe, both after the First and Second World Wars.