Introduction

One of the first migration scholars who stressed the value of comparing old and new migrants in Western Europe was the French historian Gérard Noiriel. Inspired by American scholarship he used the concept of the ‘melting pot’ to characterise the settlement process of migrants in France since the 19th century. In one of his earlier studies, on the city of Longwy, situated in the northeast of France, Noiriel used a comparison which may be typified as ‘diachronic-convergent’. Focusing on Longwy, which emerged as a centre of heavy industry in the period 1880-1980 he showed how in the course of time different immigrant groups settled in this region and to a certain extent had similar experiences, both with regard to migration and integration.

In this paper I use a related comparison, juxtaposing old (Poles) and new (Turks) migrants in the German Ruhr area. In itself such a comparison is not new. Several authors have hinted at the resemblances in the migration and integration process of these two groups, but only rarely has the comparison been systematically explored. One of the few attempts is the study by Aloys Berg. In his dissertation, however, he could only map the settlement process of the Turks until the end of the 1980s. Moreover, his study did not analyse in depth a number of important aspects of the settlement process in the long run. Following up on Berg's pioneering work, in this chapter I will focus on the migration process and the reception by the German society by concentrating on the key domains of the integration process: the migration process, stereotyping, housing, work, education, intermarriage and transnationalism.

The central question of this chapter is, to what extent the integration process of these two groups was similar or different and to what extent the experiences of the Poles then help us to understand better the current settlement process of the Turks now. At a more general level, this case study and the application of the diachronic/convergent comparison is meant to contribute to the ongoing debate about the comparability of old and new migrants and the added value of historical migration studies.