Austrian immigration history

Back to: History and Background of Migration in Austria

The history of Austria in the last 150 years has been marked by waves of emigration and immigration. Due to its geographical location, Austria has played an important role in the reception of refugees for decades.

Austria, and in particular the greater Vienna area, can look back on a long history of immigration. Already around the middle of the 16th century, Vienna was compared to the biblical Babel because of its confusion of languages. In the 18th century, Vienna was an attractive destination for the professional wandering system, which led to the fact that until the early 19th century a significant part of the craftsmen working in Vienna came from southern Germany, but also from Switzerland and northern Italy.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, the proportion of German immigrants to Vienna has gradually decreased. In the following decades the city became a Central European melting pot, and Bohemia and Moravia, but also Galicia and Bukowina became the most important regions of origin for the new migrants.

The population of Vienna increased continuously. The city reached its historic peak in 1916 with 2,239,000 inhabitants.

Critics and opponents of immigration often raise the objection that the mass migration of the late 19th century was mainly an internal migration within the borders of the Habsburg Empire at that time, which is why the situation at that time is not comparable with today’s. It is often overlooked, however, that the „homeland law“ in force at that time disadvantaged immigrants from other parts of the monarchy in a similar way and made them „foreigners“, as today’s laws on foreigners do.

Anyone who was not entitled to live in their community of residence and threatened, for example, to become a burden to the welfare of the poor, could be deported. Vienna was a „melting pot against will“ and complete assimilation was the dominant model. This affected by far the largest group of immigrants, the Czechs (and Slovaks), the so-called „brick Bohemia“ of the Viennese Gründerzeit. The exact number of Czechs living in Vienna at the turn of the century is no longer known; estimates vary between 400,000 and 600,000.

For immigrants, the price for successful integration was not only assimilation in the sense of adaptation to the dominant German-speaking culture, but also dissimilation, i.e. denial and suppression of their own origins. To be thrown in the same pot as the new immigrants questioned the success of one’s own integration. It was on this soil that xenophobia grew and continues to grow, especially in Austria, a traditional immigration country.