Austria - Country Report: Legal and Policy Framework of Migration Governance
Josipovic, Ivan; Reeger, Ursula | Austrian Academy of Sciences
In the past decades, Austria has clearly turned into a country of immigration. Looking back briefly at the migration history after the Second World War, two groups of migrants have been of particular importance until the mid-1990s: 1) refugees from communist countries – until the end of the 1980s – and 2) labour migrants and their families. Due to the country’s neutrality during the Cold War period, Austria received three major waves of refugees, namely from Hungary in 1956, from Czechoslovakia in 1968 and from Poland in 1981. However, for many of these refugees Austria was only a transit country on their way to other destinations. At the beginning of the 1960s, Austria saw a growing need for additional labour and actively started to recruit workers in Turkey (1964) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1966). Contrary to what had originally been planned (namely the rotation model of ‘guest workers’), many of the workers stayed and brought their families to Austria.
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