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Johan Leman, 15 February 2024

Who does not know the title of the 1964 posters : ” Vous songez à venir travailler en Belgique ? “ When Belgium concluded a bilateral agreement with Morocco on 17 February 1964, it did in a soft version what it had done with Italy on 23 June 1946 and would repeat with Turkey on 16 July 1964. In a sense, these three dates were typical of a type of migration that took place between 1946 and 1974. These were migrations, explicitly wanted by the Belgian government in function of the labour market and, as far as Wallonia was concerned, also, in the case of the 1964 migrations, in function of diminishing a deficit in natality. (For the latter, see the Sauvy report). The migrations we see taking place afterwards, especially from 1989 onwards (with the fall of the Berlin wall and the start of a diversification of asylum migrations), are of a different nature.  The inclusion policies we know today in Brussels are limping between the two types of migrations. This is not very surprising, as we find the results of both types of migrations in our neighbourhoods. Our municipalities in the Canal Zone show a strong presence of people from the first type (e.g. the Maroxellois in Molenbeek), who are increasingly complemented by people from later and smaller migrant communities; or we see something similar with the Schaerbeekois and inhabitants of St Josse of Turkish provenance, who are joined by West-Africans a.s.o.. The expectation? Normally, this will eventually break a bit the trend towards communalisation. And this is not a bad thing. Back