4 - The Making of German Immigration Policy

Summary

This chapter examines Germany’s politics of economic immigration policy making over the course of five decades. The first case study examines the establishment of Germany’s guest worker system through a series of bilateral treaties in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1973 recruitment stop. After the recruitment stop, political elites used the experience of unintended and large-scale immigrant settlement to construct a national narrative of Germany as a “country of non-immigration.” The second case study examines the reopening of guest worker recruitment channels – this time with Central and Eastern European sending states – in the 1990s. The chapter’s third case study examines the Green Card program of 2000 which marked Germany’s first foray into high-skilled immigration and, despite its limited recruitment success, marked the beginning of a debate that sought to reframe (high-skilled) immigration as being in Germany’s national interest. Our final case study examines the passage of the 2004 Immigration Act by Germany’s first Social Democratic-Green government. The Act signifies the failure of paradigmatic reform: rather than being a historic milestone, it left in place the recruitment stop and provided for the admission of high-skilled immigrants only the basis of regulatory exemptions.