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Migration and Mobility. The “Guest Worker’s Route” – A Transeuropean Migration Way.
| The labour migration, which was known as “guest work” in the second half of the 20th century, is an important phenomenon of the younger European migration history. Over a period of about 30 years millions of people were on the move and “oscillated“ along a north-south axis between their home and the place of employment. For many of the labour migrants this axis was synonymous with the E5, the so-called “Guest Worker’s Route“. The accident risk and the increasing number of casualties led to the negative connotation of the “Guest Worker’s Route”. At the same time the route represented the hope for a better future. This tensed relation created a place of ambivalence – a place of discursive conflicts: As „European Death Route“, „Street of Mass Migration“, but also as the „Way of Longing“.
The journeys along the E5 played an important rule in the history of the labour migrants. The journeys are constitutive for their migration experience. Among the countries of provenance and the countries of employment there is a transit-space. Austria as such a transit-space was confronted with the phenomenon migration and mobility. Migration is not an unique occurrence; it is a concept of movement within and between spaces, therefore it is important to ask for migration routes. The aim of the proposed paper is to show the importance of transit-spaces within migration movements. By using Austria as an example for such a transit-space, the paper will link various approaches of migration, mobility and space.
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