Infrequently used today, the word “Gastarbeiter” was invented to describe an emerging phenomenon in the second half of the 20th century: the foreign worker who came to Germany or Austraia, or even Switzerland, although it is true that the Swiss did not let many people in, unless they were considerably wealthy, so it refers mainly to the first two countries, Austria and Germany. 
The word “Gastarbeiter” was thought of in order to replace the term ”Fremdarbeiter”. Both of them are compound words, words made up of two individual lexical items, which is a phenomenon which we much admire about the German language. The translation of “Fremdarbeiter” into English is “foreign/alien worker”/”worker from abroad”. To cut a long story short, this concept, in a more politically correct period after the defeat of the Nazi empire, seemed a little bit too strict for a modern German society, and thus it was replaced by the word “Gastarbeiter”, the “guest worker”. Even if during its time, the word was politically correct, it has already started to have a racist connotation, in the age of the European Union, where persons and goods circulate freely, and a worker coming from another country does not have any need for an “invitation” to move and find work elsewhere, and therefore cannot be seen as a “guest”.
We are talking about a historic word, which today, overheard in the streets, provokes smiles, and which is sometimes used ironically to refer to yesterday’s customs and society. The “Gastarbeiter” of yesteryear are now considered first-generation immigrants, and in many cases, today they are the heads of numerous families living in the country of their former destination, who often only speak German to a native-speaker level, and sometimes, even the local dialect of the villages and towns they live in.
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