This article examines in a comparative perspective labour migration and workers' struggle in Detroit and Turin at the end of the Sixties. These two cases are well-known for the extent of radical protest that hit the automobile plants in that period, but they have never been studied in connection. While national studies highlighted in the Turin case issues of class and in the Detroit case issues of race, the comparative analysis focuses on the fact that in both cases the catalyst for a prolong period of industrial conflict were migrants. The article enquires into the motives for the shopfloor conflict and finds them well linked to the problems related to the quick urban change that ensued immigration and to the migrants' quest for first class citizenship in the new context.