Bracero and Gastarbeiter

Braceros on the Driggs farm (Driggs on the left) California, 1944.

 

Germany and the United States have both attempted to deal with labor shortages by importing workers from other countries. The Bracero program during World War II was an attempt to alleviate the worker shortages in agriculture that were caused by men going off to war. West Germany's booming post World War 11 economy also experienced a shortage of workers. The solution in both of these cases was to import workers.

Both of these countries were then faced with a similar problem ; how to make good use of these workers when they needed them and then how to remove them from their midst when they were done. A key strategy in both instances was the denial of citizenship rights, although this was more pronounced in the case of the German gastarbeiter.

 

Sheila Liberman