Immigrant Workers in an Emigrant Economy:
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.1986.tb00791.x |
| Published date | 01 June 1986 |
| Date | 01 June 1986 |
Immigrant
Workers
in an Emigrant Economy:
AN EXAMINATION OF REPLACEMENT MIGRATION
IN THE MIDDLE EAST
IAN
J.
SECCOMBE*
1.
INTRODUCTION: PRELIMINARY NOTIONS
OF
REPLACEMENT MIGRATION
Participation in the international labour market as
a
labour supplier frequently results
in the appearance, or exacerbation, of manpower shortages at specific skill levels. Such
shortages may, in the absence
of
adequate policies to increase the domestic supply of
labour in the short term, in turn be the catalyst for further international labour flows
into
the original labour sending economy. Although widely identified, particularly among
southern European labour-exporters, the phenomenon has attracted relatively little
research. By the mid-1970s such labour inflows were occumng in all the major
Mediterranean basin labour suppliers with the exception of'Turkey.
Poinard
(1
972)
commented on labour inflows from Cape Verde to Portugal;
Papademetriou
(1979)
recognised the presence of selective labour shortages in Greece from the mid- 1960s and
suggested that by 1973 some
40,000
immigrant workers from Egypt, Sudan, Somalia and
Ethiopia were working in Greece;
Findlay
et
a1
(1 979) noted that up to 80.000 Moroccans
were employed in Spain in positions released by Spaniards working in France;
Baucic
(1 972) noted an inflow of service sector workers from Poland and Czechoslovakia into
Yugoslavia;
Taamalah
(1
98
1)
examined Tunisian immigration into Sicily, while
Federici
(I
979),
Birindelli
(1
98 1) and
Birindelli
and
Gesano
(1
985) described foreign labour
immigration to mainland Italy.
In the Middle East the massive growth in labour circulation during the mid and late
1970s stimulated similar inflows into certain labour-exporting countries. In 1979, for
*Centre
for
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University
of
Durham, England, United
Kingdom.
377
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