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485 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1986)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0485 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE

There are a number of public policy issues that are so durable that The Annals
returns to them again and again. During the nearly century-long publication of our
journal, the volumes we publish on a particular subject have become a kind of
mini-series. Taken collectively, they often provide an interesting longitudinal look
at the nature of a persistent public policy problem, or at least our perceptions of it.
This volume on the movement of guest workers into the developed economies takes
its place within such a mini-series, one dealing repeatedly with one or another aspect
of ethnic relationships around the world.
Most volumes in this series have been directed inward, probing the United States'
problems in dealing with its own ethnic and racial diversity. In the early years of our
journal, The Annals was concerned with the flow of immigration into the United
States. For several decades after the 1920s, increasingly restrictive immigration laws
and the Great Depression slowed down the immigrant flow, and ethnic relations in
the United States received relatively little attention. In the decades after World War
II, America's attention was absorbed by its intractable problems of race relations,
and they seemed to march to a drummer all their own.
Our concern with ethnic relations in the United States has come alive again as a
result of the recent surge of legal and illegal immigrants, and the reemerging salience
of ethnicity as a matter of personal identity. As part of the expression of these
concerns, in March 1981 we published the volume America as a Multicultural
Society, and in the volume Immigration and American Public Policy, to be
published in September 1986, we will deal more directly with immigration again.
The current volume of The Annals is part of an important substream in our
continuing concerns with ethnic relations: problems of conflict and integration
among ethnic communities around the world. The September 1977 volume, Ethnic
Conflict in the World Today, provided a general analytic survey of different
patterns of structures and problems of management of intra-country ethnic affairs.
Our July 1980 volume, Reflections on the Holocaust, considered that ultimate
pathology in ethnic relations. In May 1983 we examined refugee movements in The
Global Refugee Problem. And in the current volume we turn to the transformation
in ethnic relations that is accompanying the influx of largely unskilled workers from
less developed countries into the highly industrialized societies of the world.
Since many of these volumes-all of the recent ones-have appeared during my
tenure as editor of The Annals it might be useful for me to highlight some of the
interesting contrasts and similarities between the American and the European
situation as they have appeared in this literature. First of all, a quarter of a century
of major transnational population movements-whether economically motivated
as in the case of the European guest workers or the famine migrants of Africa,
politically motivated in the case of the refugees, or both in the case of Hispanic
migration to the United States-has given a new saliency to inter-ethnic relations in
very many countries of the world. Even if international migration were to stop
today, and even if the myth of return migration were to become a reality, the

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