With few exceptions, immigrants who have made their way to Europe since the Renaissance have remained, in the short run at least, distinct from the dominant populations. While their physical difference has played a large role in this process, their place in European society has also confirmed their differences. Newcomers to Europe have, initially at least, lived separately from the dominant populations, usually in worse accommodations, carrying out jobs which members of the dominant ethnic groupings shun, especially after 1945.

Immigrants in any European society have usually become ghettoized, largely because of their occupational patterns but also because of the hostility of members of the dominant society toward them. The Chinese community in nineteenth-century Britain, which evolved mainly from sailors, concentrated in London, Liverpool, and Cardiff. Similarly, black people, who also consisted largely of seamen, settled in Cardiff, Liverpool, Bristol, and North and South Shields. These groups remained concentrated in enclaves within these locations, as did the Algerians who settled in French cities from the late nineteenth century.

Such patterns intensified further in the postwar period. In the case of some states, including both West and East Germany, the housing policies of employers and the state made concentration inevitable. In both of these countries, many immigrants from all parts of the world found themselves initially accommodated in company barracks, in mostly all-male surroundings, with virtually no space or privacy. In France the lack of housing meant that shantytowns (bidonvilles) sprang up on the outskirts of many cities. One official inquiry from 1966 counted 225 of these concentrations of foreign workers, 119 of them in Paris. Altogether they housed seventy-five thousand people. In the British case immigrants from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent initially found accommodation in some of the worst inner-city areas, but many have subsequently made their way into wealthier suburban locations. The Japanese offer an exception to the above picture of immigrants confined to the poorest parts of cities. Arriving as professionals, they have settled in wealthy parts of European cities, as the example of the Japanese in Dusseldorf indicates.

Immigrants have tended to move to urban areas. Only 8.1 percent of foreigners in France lived in rural areas in 1981, compared with the 27.3 percent of the French population living outside towns. Immigrants often gravitate to capital cities. In 1982 Paris housed 39 percent of France's Tunisians, 37 percent of its Algerians, and 28 percent of its Moroccans. North Africans have also moved to many of the other large French cities, including Marseille, where they made up 6.9 percent of the population in 1982. Surinamese immigrants to Amsterdam have concentrated in two particular areas of that city. South Asian and West Indian immigrants to Britain have focused exclusively in urban areas, especially inner London but also many of the largest cities, notably Birmingham and Manchester, together with smaller cities such as Bradford and Leicester. In the latter, Asians form over a quarter of the population.

Immigrants from beyond Europe have clearly changed the demography of many European states, both because of the number of arrivals and, in the short run at least, their higher fertility. In this sense a vast difference exists between the few individuals who made their way to Europe before 1945 and the communities who arrived subsequently. By 1995 ethnic minorities in Britain totaled 3.2 million people, or 5.7 percent of the population. Most European states have a foreign population of between 5 and 10 percent, although in many of these the bulk of the minorities consist of other Europeans. . .

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