The number of asylum applicants arriving in the European Union increased sharply in the first half of 2015, and many countries chose to react by shutting their borders and refusing to accept further applications for asylum. Under the Dublin Regulation, which came into force in 1997, the first European country reached by an asylum seeker is responsible for examining their application. Germany announced in August 2015 that it would stop enforcing the Dublin Regulation for citizens of Syria—the largest but, by no means, the only source of the spike in asylum applicants—and thus effectively agreed to process Syrians who had been shut out of the asylum process in other states. By the end of 2015, over one million new asylum seekers had been registered in Germany. This sequence of events is reshaping German politics. The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered the Bundestag after the 2017 elections, having received the third-highest number of votes running on a promise to undo the state's response to the refugee crisis.
When speakers declare a migratory situation to be a “crisis,” they suggest not just that the situation is a departure from what is normal, but also that it is untenable in the long term, and that it requires a decisive solution.Footnote 1 While the language of crisis evokes the idea of a situation without precedent, this article argues that forced migration must be at the center of any new narrative of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Federal Republic has been confronted continuously with forced migrants since 1945 and has also found ways to incorporate these forced migrants as labor power. At particular moments, the ongoing migration that has been a structural feature of the Federal Republic has been suddenly rediscovered as a crisis.
Politicians from across the ideological spectrum have proposed solutions that focus on better regulation of migration, arguing that Germany, and, by extension, Europe, can better filter “desirable” from “undesirable” migrants within mixed migration flows. These arguments often rest on a distinction between the “genuine refugee” and the “economic migrant” (or even the “economic refugee” [Wirtschaftsflüchtling]).Footnote 2 In order to preserve the ability to grant asylum to “genuine refugees” who are fleeing political persecution, the state must exclude “economic migrants,” who are supposedly deceptively seeking material gain, a category described by one scholar as “the most reviled of asylum seekers of the global era.”Footnote 3
Despite the demonization of those who are purportedly “economic refugees,” the “genuine refugees” are also consistently described as potential demographic and specifically economic assets. In the summer of 2015, Der Spiegel was one of many media outlets to report that the Syrian refugees could be “an opportunity to help companies grow,” whereas the German Institute for Economic Research, a think tank based in Berlin, enthused that, even if the initial costs were heavy, the refugees would undoubtedly benefit the economy in the long term by reinvigorating an aging German workforce.Footnote 4
When politicians stress refugees’ ability to work—while simultaneously insisting that tough policies are needed to keep out opportunistic “economic refugees”—they reiterate a paradoxical dichotomy that has characterized not only the German but also the international refugee regime. It has always been crucial that new arrivals not only be willing and able to work, but also that they never intend to work. The category “economic refugee” describes a deceitful individual who blurs the distinction between the political and the economic out of self-interest. It stigmatizes in foreigners precisely those features considered desirable in citizens: the desire to work, the will to self-improvement, and the willingness to invest one's own human capital where it will produce the highest return.Footnote 5 “Real” refugees are supposed to be so afraid for their lives that they can scarcely function, whereas people suspected of making rational choices fall out of the tolerated category of “refugee” and into the stigmatized category of the “economic refugee,” precisely by displaying independence and making purposeful calculations.Footnote 6 In the current international refugee regime, states that accept refugees are expected to use economic logic to make their selection, but the refugees themselves must be without economic motivation.
While this distinction between the economic and the genuine refugee is common across Europe, the Federal Republic's unique constitutional guarantee of asylum means that it has long received more asylum seekers than anywhere else in Europe, and, as a result, that it has also played a decisive role in shaping European and international refugee regimes.Footnote 7 This article traces the ways in which the Federal Republic's permanent refugee crisis has repeatedly redrawn the distinction between desirable and undesirable migrants.Footnote 8 Forced migrants have always played a key role in providing a mobile labor force, while the figure of the “economic refugee” has repeatedly functioned as the villainous outsider used to justify shifts in policy. As the category of the “economic refugee” attaches itself to new groups of migrants, the Federal Republic continually produces new narratives of crisis, ensuring that each new migration is treated as if it were the first of its kind rather than the latest chapter in an ongoing history.
Born in Crisis: Displaced Persons and Expellees in the Early Federal Republic
The Basic Law of the Federal Republic, adopted in 1949, included one of the world's most generous guarantees of asylum in Article 16: “Persons persecuted on political grounds shall enjoy the right of asylum.” Described by Klaus Bade as “Germany's historic response to the experience of National Socialism,” this constitutional guarantee of asylum represented a new emphasis on protection, especially when compared to the Weimar Republic, where roughly one million refugees from the Russian Revolution and the upheavals of World War I had found themselves in legal limbo.Footnote 9 But the Basic Law's guarantee also prompted an unanswered question: what does it mean to be persecuted on specifically political grounds?
Because World War II had left millions of people displaced from their homes, the lawmakers of the Federal Republic were not the only people grappling with questions about the right of refuge in the postwar era. Eight million forced laborers from across Europe, including Jewish survivors of concentration and death camps, found themselves on German territory. Although roughly seven million returned to their former residences within the first year, another million remained in defeated Germany because they were unwilling or unable to return home. Germany had also lost one-third of its pre-1937 territory to Poland and Czechoslovakia, which were, along with other states, forcibly expelling a diverse group of ethnic Germans from the new countries of Eastern Europe to the occupation zones. By 1950, 12.5 million ethnic German expellees were registered in the two German states.
International organizations defined the “refugee” for the postwar world through their engagement with this diverse population of displaced people in the German occupation zones. The Federal Republic's own definition of those entitled to asylum—“persons persecuted on political grounds”—was, in fact, far more capacious than the international definition of a “refugee” codified two years later by the United Nations. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defined the refugee as a person who,
as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.Footnote 10
Scholars have examined this definition in great detail, drawing attention to its focus on “well-founded fear,” its strict temporal boundaries, the limited categories of persecution that it enumerates, its privileging of political freedoms over economic rights, and its emphasis on the refugee subject as either unable or “unwilling” to return home.Footnote 11 The definition also reflected the composition of a Central Europe undergoing a novel process of ethnic homogenization. By defining the refugee as a person whose nationality necessarily did not match their current location, the new international definition explicitly excluded the 12.5 million ethnic German expellees now living in the German occupation zones. Roughly 43 percent had not been German citizens before the war, and, in fact, up to 40 percent of these “ethnic Germans” did not identify themselves as such in a 1946 survey.Footnote 12 Their self-understanding did not matter: their forced migration “marked the drawing of a new political border,” and the fact that others identified them as German meant that they were now inside the country of their nationality and therefore written out of the postwar international humanitarian regime.Footnote 13 West German officials would protest for over a decade that these expellees should be recognized as refugees under the 1951 Convention, to no avail in the end.Footnote 14
This situation created a kind of zero-sum competition in the Federal Republic among the different groups of forced migrants, most of whom found themselves living in rural areas with intact housing stock. In hundreds of small towns and villages across Germany, locals were forced to share their already scarce resources with foreigners who had the potential to be recognized as refugees under international law, and with expelled ethnic Germans considered, by the same international standards, already to be “home.”Footnote 15 West Germans used the term displaced person (DP) to designate “an undesirable mass of foreigners burdening a country already struggling with its ‘own’ refugee problem,” and to use the term refugee (Flüchtling) as “a synonym for specifically German refugees and expellees,” creating a kind of inversion of the international definition.Footnote 16 As Anna Holian and Atina Grossmann have both argued, the distinction between “refugees” and “DPs” racialized the former population as part of the German community and the latter as external to it, a distinction that gained its coherence from preexisting anti-Slavic and antisemitic attitudes.Footnote 17 In the long-term, this coexistence of multiple groups of refugees arguably abetted the social integration of the ethnic German expellees: despite tensions between locals and expellees, they were often able to unite in common cause against the DPs and the drain on resources they allegedly represented.Footnote 18
To be recognized as “genuine refugees,” DPs had to convince officials from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and later the International Refugee Organization (IRO) that they were not motivated by hopes of economic gain; this created “strong incentives to overemphasize the political nature of their flight.”Footnote 19 Convincing aid workers of political motives was necessary to attain refugee status, but, in order to leave that status behind and start a new life, DPs then had to switch their strategies and demonstrate their economic utility. The DP camps became “battlegrounds for laborers,” with labor recruiters from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom sorting through DPs to find men who were able to perform manual labor and single women who could be recruited as domestic servants.Footnote 20 Recruiters were not looking for well-educated refugees. Intellectuals and doctors tended to be extremely difficult to place; Canada, for instance, rejected women with postsecondary education.Footnote 21 In addition, countries including Canada and the United States were reluctant to resettle families that were expected to burden the welfare system. As a result, refugees who were sick or disabled also had a difficult time leaving the camps, as did those who were unwilling to leave behind their disabled family members.Footnote 22
Whereas the DPs needed to be economically useful in order to leave Germany, the expellees needed to be economically useful in order to rebuild Germany. With one in every five residents a newly arrived expellee, the Federal Republic was forced to find a way to use its own refugees—unacknowledged as such by the emergent international refugee regime—as human capital. Many of the expellees initially found themselves in the rural parts of the Western zones—particularly in Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, and Bavaria—before moving on to industrial regions, where demand for their labor was higher. Some 1.7 million moved between Länder (federal states) of their own volition in the 1950s; the state undertook four projects to encourage the resettlement of another one million, roughly three-quarters of whom were moved to either North Rhine Westphalia or Baden-Württemberg. The state stepped in to influence internal migration patterns, redirecting the population in response to the needs of the labor market.Footnote 23
By the late 1950s, the architects of Germany's postwar economic miracle frequently recognized that the refugee population had contributed to its success. As Ludwig Erhard, the Federal Republic's first minister of economics, wrote in his 1958 book, Prosperity for All, “the countless refugees who during the first post-war years exacerbated the terrible plight of our people, now in a time of full employment have become an asset.”Footnote 24 Erhard built on ideas previously articulated by economist Friedrich Edding, who had used his position at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy to argue that the expellees would be an asset to the German economy if their presence led to “a breakdown of all those old traditional and parochial restrictions which curtail free competition.”Footnote 25 These economists saw the presence of refugees as an asset for the German workforce: without their own land or capital, and highly motivated to take any job available, they served as what Karl Marx might have called a “doubly free” economic asset. These early economic evaluations of the German refugees influenced later arguments that they had served as a modernizing force.Footnote 26 Economic historians have argued that the expellee population shaped the economic miracle: expellees allowed the Federal Republic to expand its industrial base while making relatively low investments in human capital.Footnote 27
The definition of the expellee was codified by the May 1953 Federal Law on Expellees and Refugees (Bundesvertriebenengesetz). This law created a legal framework not only for the economic and social integration of the expellees already in Germany, but also for the continuing migration of ethnic Germans to the Federal Republic. The 1953 law guaranteed that the Federal Republic would provide refuge for “repatriates” (Aussiedler), i.e., ethnic Germans from Communist countries who were welcomed because they had presumably experienced “ethnically-based pressure to emigrate [Vertreibungsdruck].”Footnote 28 German ethnicity did not suffice to claim repatriate status, as only those Germans who could claim that they had been forced to leave Communist countries were eligible. Ethnic Germans in Denmark or France could not migrate as repatriates, but ethnic Germans from China or Albania could.Footnote 29 Although the category was initially expected to exhaust itself quickly, repatriates continued to arrive for decades, their fluctuating numbers depending on the Eastern bloc's willingness to issue exit permits. Yugoslavia had a relatively liberal emigration policy, compared to other Communist countries, and the high numbers of Yugoslavian repatriates—and the fact that they could leave relatively easily—led to suspicions of economic opportunism in the early 1960s.Footnote 30 The number of repatriates rose most significantly in the late 1980s, as more and more Communist countries loosened their requirements for an exit visa.Footnote 31 The establishment of the “repatriate” as a category of forced migrant underlines the importance of the category of the “genuine refugee”: in order not to be suspected of economic opportunism, ethnic German repatriates needed to be able to say that they were fleeing Communist rule because of their ethnic identity.
The two categories of forced migrants who shaped the early days of the Federal Republic both found themselves required to be economically useful, even though they were defined by their supposed lack of interest in economic gain. The initial groups of expellees were integrated into German society by emphasizing their hard work and by serving as the first mobile labor reserves of the so-called economic miracle. Meanwhile, displaced persons seeking to leave the German occupation zones were required to feign economic disinterest, denying any possible economic motives to authorities even as their ability to perform labor became their ticket out of the camps and to a new life.
Finding the “Genuine Refugee” among Emigrants from the Soviet Zone
In the early years of the Federal Republic, ethnic German expellees overlapped with another group of Germans on the move, namely, the roughly 3.5 million people who had left the Soviet zone of occupation for the Western zones before 1961. One-third of these Soviet zone emigrants were, in some sense, “refugees” twice over, since many of the expellees who had initially lived in the Soviet zone chose to move yet again in hopes that conditions would be better in the West.Footnote 32
What the East German state experienced as an emigration crisis, the West German state perceived as a refugee crisis. Both understood the mass movement across the border as an existential threat that needed to be mastered. The East reacted by sealing the inter-German border, constructing the Berlin Wall, and criminalizing emigration. The Federal Republic's response to the refugee crisis also shaped the nascent state. In the first years after 1949, there was a serious debate about whether West Germany should accept refugees from the Soviet occupation zone when it was already struggling to integrate millions of German expellees.
Both arguments against accepting Soviet zone emigrants can only be understood in the context of the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. First, many people in the Federal Republic feared that mass emigration of ethnic Germans from the Soviet zone would enable the transformation of the area into a permanent Soviet colony devoid of Germans, ultimately to be lost to the Soviet Union just as East Prussia had been lost to Poland.Footnote 33 The second argument against accepting Soviet zone emigrants was the fact that the Federal Republic's resources were already strained. Bavarian radio journalist Walter von Cube famously referred to the acceptance of Eastern zone refugees as an act of “suicidal humanitarianism,” whereas Ernst August Farke, a representative of the Deutsche Partei (German Party) in Lower Saxony, used an arresting metaphor in the Bundestag to argue against their acceptance: “We find ourselves in a lifeboat. The boat is overflowing, and the more who come aboard, the more it is in danger of capsizing and sinking.”Footnote 34 Officials such as Wolfgang Jaenicke, state secretary for refugee affairs in Bavaria, believed that the refugee crisis had, in fact, been engineered by the Soviet occupation authorities in order to undermine the Western Allies, a rumor that circulated widely among the general public.Footnote 35
Another common argument against accepting arrivals from the East was the belief that the majority were emigrating for disreputable reasons—which meant that “the problem of the ‘misuse’ of the right to asylum [had] emerged in German-German relations even before the Federal Republic was founded.”Footnote 36 In March 1950, the Ministry for All-German Questions believed that only 15 percent of the emigrants from the East were “genuine refugees” fleeing political persecution.Footnote 37 Officials who looked at East German emigrants did not see them as desirable citizens, but rather as criminals trying to avoid imprisonment, as sex workers who hoped to find clients among the occupation forces, as young men skipping out on unwanted pregnancies, and as people who wanted to shirk the hard work of reconstruction and take it easy in the “Golden West.”Footnote 38 Some Western border guards acted on these stereotypes, forcing “illegal border crossers” back into the Soviet zone. Informing him that “we have enough of your sort here,” one border guard in the town of Neustadt even drove a self-declared refugee “like a cow back over the border.”Footnote 39
Though unaware at the time that this particular emergency would continue for nearly forty years, the fledgling Federal Republic established the Emergency Reception Procedure (Notaufnahmeverfahren) for Soviet zone emigrants in August 1950. The procedure was intended to distinguish those emigrants who were “genuine refugees” from those who were economic opportunists. Those accepted as “political refugees” were entitled to special privileges. Those who belonged to a second group of emigrants were accepted as citizens of the Federal Republic “on discretion” and given residence permits, but without the same special privileges as those in the first group.Footnote 40 The final group of applicants was rejected because its members could not give a convincing explanation of the political persecution that had forced them to flee. Just as had been the case with DPs who had made their case to international organizations, Soviet zone emigrants who could only tell stories of economic hardship were not recognized as refugees deserving of assistance. The Federal Ministry for Expellees made this exclusion explicit in February 1951: “Economic grounds, without accompanying personal danger, will without exception not be considered as grounds for acceptance.”Footnote 41
What happened to the East Germans whose claims to refugee status were rejected? The Federal Republic was unwilling to deport rejected applicants, since that would mean conceding sovereignty and legitimacy to the East German state. Although they were citizens of the Federal Republic, these rejected applicants also became some of the first “undocumented” migrants in the Federal Republic: they could not be deported, but they could not register their residence or receive permission to work.Footnote 42 Suspected of economic motives, rejected refugees were legally excluded from the very labor market they had wanted to join.
The Federal Republic's attitude to East German refugees only changed after 1952, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) responded to its emigration crisis by securing the German-German border. This ensured that the vast majority of people who wanted to enter the Federal Republic would do so through West Berlin. West Germany's ongoing refugee crisis suddenly became concentrated in the island city. Over one thousand new people arrived in West Berlin every day—31,613 in February 1953 alone. Because they could not receive the documents that would have allowed them to travel, rejected applicants were stuck in West Berlin and unable to move onward to the Federal Republic. As refugees continued to strain the city's resources, pressure grew to streamline and liberalize the procedure to relieve West Berlin.Footnote 43
The sealing of the German-German border and the new visibility of the refugee problem in West Berlin contributed to a shift in public opinion about the new arrivals. In the West, the continuing flow of refugees from East Germany was increasingly depicted as proof of the illegitimate nature of the East German state, and the refugees themselves as deserving victims of totalitarianism rather than as dishonest opportunists.Footnote 44 Despite these shifts in public perception, officials continued to object to the idea of a general amnesty for applicants whose claims had been rejected, fearing that this would only serve to stimulate economic emigration further.Footnote 45
In May 1953, the Federal Constitutional Court issued a ruling that limited the state's previous ability to discourage emigration. The court ruled that, because those Germans living in the so-called Eastern zone were also citizens of the Federal Republic, the guarantee to freedom of movement, set forth in Article 11 of the Basic Law, also applied to them. This freedom of movement could not be restricted for any German citizen who had access to “adequate means of support.” Most of these applicants had been rejected initially because their interrogators believed that they were coming to the West for solely economic reasons. But, after May 1953, these presumed opportunists discovered that their labor power was now an asset: if they could find a job in the Federal Republic, they could bypass the interrogation and use the job offer to receive a work permit and a residence permit. This court ruling thus turned the rejected into another group of “doubly free” workers, unconnected to property and exceptionally willing to move in order to take jobs considered undesirable by the native population of the Federal Republic.Footnote 46 The refugees from the Soviet zone and later the GDR tended to be young, healthy, and often skilled. In fact, one historian has estimated that they represented roughly 2.6 billion deutschmarks (DM) worth of human capital each year, an addition to the West German labor force whose economic significance “cannot be overstated.”Footnote 47 By the late 1950s, top officials at the Ministries of Economics and Labor acknowledged the key role that Soviet-zone emigrants played in providing a mobile labor force.Footnote 48
After the May 1953 court ruling blunted the impact of rejection by allowing rejected applicants to work and travel, the Federal Ministry for Expellees also came to support a more liberal acceptance procedure for those leaving East Germany. Over the next eight years, fewer than 10 percent of all East German emigrants were rejected outright, and the vast majority of new arrivals were accepted as refugees and as residents of the Federal Republic “on discretion.”Footnote 49 Harald M., who fled in 1960, recalled that he had been accepted despite his failure to tell a story of persecution: “only when one came before an official … who asked: ‘Why did you leave the Soviet zone?’—then one began to think. Most thought for too long and the official wrote: ‘Reason for flight: the general political and economic circumstances.’ The person being questioned then only needed to nod.”Footnote 50
People like Harald M. might have been easily accepted “on discretion,” but they were also unlikely to be among the 25 percent of applicants who received the status of “political refugee” entitled to special privileges.Footnote 51 Volker Ackermann has argued that, although one may be tempted to see the procedure after 1953 as a “farce,” it was kept in place because it allowed the Federal Republic to “uphold the fiction of the ‘genuine’ political refugee.”Footnote 52 Though refugees from the GDR could not be returned to their place of origin, officials remained reluctant to issue an open invitation to the discontented. Western authorities valued the interrogation for intelligence purposes, but they also valued it, at least in part, as a deterrent.Footnote 53 The continued insistence on an “emergency procedure” to separate the “genuine” refugee from the economic “opportunist” also supported the narrative that emigration from the East was a temporary crisis that necessitated a punctuated response, rather than an increasingly indispensable component of the Federal Republic's continued economic growth. The Federal Republic was coming to depend on GDR emigrants as a renewable resource of mobile labor.
Maintaining Mobile Labor: Mediterranean Workers Vote with Their Feet
When British journalist Robert Kee visited the Federal Republic in 1960, his guides were proud to show him an empty displaced persons camp from which all the former residents had finally been resettled. Kee felt his heart sink, however, when he noticed that, “on the other side of the road were three familiar ex-Hitler wooden-type barracks.” Kee's guide stepped in to reassure him: “Those aren't refugees … they're foreign workers, Italians mainly, imported to work in the Mercedes factory.”Footnote 54 The explanation leads to further questions: with thousands of people still living in refugee camps in the late 1950s, why was the Federal Republic seeking to import yet more people? West German officials still seeking international recognition of their own refugee problem were forced to defend the decision to sign a labor recruitment contract with Italy in 1955.Footnote 55 If the movement of refugees from East to West placed the state in a crisis, as its officials claimed, why did that same state also want to recruit additional foreign workers?
Foreigners already had begun, in fact, to self-mobilize and migrate in response to the continued demand within West Germany, as bilateral state contracts to recruit foreign workers were often state attempts to bring preexisting migratory patterns under state oversight.Footnote 56 Italians were already obtaining work permits in the southern part of West Germany as early as 1952—three years before the first official recruitment agreement in 1955.Footnote 57 Moroccans had begun to work in the Federal Republic as early as 1959, but Morocco and the Federal Republic only signed a bilateral agreement in 1963.Footnote 58 A Spanish worker who arrived without a visa in early 1960 explained: “We needed no papers, no permission, nothing. You just began.”Footnote 59 Spain and West Germany signed a bilateral agreement in March 1960 in order to be able to exercise slightly more control over Spanish labor migration.Footnote 60
Meanwhile, the situation with regard to Soviet-zone labor was changing. The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 cut that source off overnight, most obviously in Berlin—where over 56,000 people were no longer able to commute daily from the East to work in the West—but also in the rest of the Federal Republic, where employers could no longer rely on a steady stream of recently recognized East German refugees. The so-called guest worker program effectively replaced these workers as the next large-scale state scheme for making labor power mobile. Because the state had already stepped into the role of migration broker six years beforehand, there was no break in the flow of human capital.Footnote 61
The Federal Republic was never fully in control of “guest worker” migration. Even after the bilateral agreement, roughly one-third of Spanish migration to West Germany continued to be “irregular,” meaning that would-be migrant workers arrived in the Federal Republic without work visas. During the period of “full employment,” West German employers actively encouraged this irregularity because it provided access to skilled workers and female workers whose visas Spanish authorities were reluctant to approve.Footnote 62 In cities where employers were looking for labor, local Foreigners’ Offices routinely approved the papers of migrants who entered irregularly, including almost any family member who wanted to work.Footnote 63
Some foreign workers sought jobs in the Federal Republic in lieu of seeking asylum. The irregular route was particularly important for these workers. For example, authorities in Spain often rejected emigration applications from workers who were known to oppose Francisco Franco, fearing that they would be particularly susceptible to democratizing influences abroad.Footnote 64 One guest worker from the Basque region recalled that he had emigrated, in part, because it was easier to speak his mother tongue in West Germany than in Franco's Spain.Footnote 65 Turned down by the official recruitment program, politically active Spanish workers could still enter West Germany either on tourist visas or without papers, and then formally legalize themselves after the fact.Footnote 66 The same dynamics applied elsewhere. In Portugal, many men signed up for the guest worker program to avoid the draft.Footnote 67 One woman recalled that she had decided to become a guest worker because her father was a political prisoner in Greece. She had participated in Communist youth organizations, which made it impossible for her to advance in her career under the military junta. She and her husband decided to become guest workers in order to escape. As her daughter later explained, “my father had a good job and didn't have to leave. It was only the political situation that brought them to Germany.”Footnote 68
In other words, just like those East Germans who wanted to start again in the “Golden West,” foreign workers from the Mediterranean had a wide variety of economic, personal, and political reasons to “vote with their feet” for the Federal Republic. These heterogenous motives were repeatedly collapsed into a single category of “economic migrant” by the “guest worker” category.Footnote 69 The West German state used the idea of the “guest worker” to reassure nervous constituents that only transient labor power was being recruited, without causing any durable change to the demography of the Federal Republic, while simultaneously undercutting any claim migrants might advance for social rights.
Tolerating the “Economic Refugee”: Socialist Citizens in the Federal Republic
While citizens of Mediterranean countries were actively using both tourist visas and official recruitment agencies to move to the Federal Republic in order to work, some citizens of Central and Eastern European countries were using the asylum process to find their own path to the economic miracle. Christopher Molnar has shown that some officials were effectively “recruiting economic refugees from Yugoslavia,” encouraging them to apply for asylum in order to access the labor market.Footnote 70
Most of the people who applied for asylum in the Federal Republic in the 1950s and early 1960s came from Eastern and Southeastern Europe.Footnote 71 Yugoslavians were consistently the largest single group among asylum seekers: in 1963, 91 percent of all new asylum seekers came from Yugoslavia alone.Footnote 72 These asylum seekers had much in common with the East Germans who had fled across the German-German border. Officials believed that most asylum seekers from the Eastern bloc were inspired less by the fear of persecution than by the desire for economic gain. Despite purportedly illegitimate motivations, rejected asylum applicants from state-socialist countries were difficult to deport because of foreign policy considerations. Since 1955, the Hallstein Doctrine had dictated that the Federal Republic would not maintain diplomatic relationships with states that recognized the GDR—which meant that it could not easily deport people to any of these countries.Footnote 73 Just as with the East Germans, the impossibility of deportation forced West Germany to tolerate rejected asylum seekers from socialism.
The specific term economic refugee appears to have developed in the late 1950s or early 1960s in order to describe such asylum seekers. Werner Kanein, then the foreigner expert in the Bavarian Interior Ministry, described it as a “deliberately ironic” term that “emerge[d] from practice” to describe asylum applicants with no claim to political persecution.Footnote 74 The term was vigorously contested. For example, the American authors of the 1958 Zellerbach report on the European refugee crisis objected to the implication of the term, pointing out that many of the Yugoslavian emigrants were complaining about state-imposed atheism and political repression.Footnote 75 Even as the authors of the report ascribed the Yugoslavians noneconomic motives for flight, they also argued that other states should be willing to accept the Yugoslavians primarily on economic grounds, since, “as potential immigrants,” they were “one of the most desirable groups that ha[d] emerged since the end of the war.”Footnote 76 Even the humanitarian critics of the new term economic refugee accepted the idea that states would act primarily out of economic motives.
In 1958, during a period of nearly full employment, the Interior Ministry accepted this economic logic when it decided that Eastern Europeans waiting for their claims to be adjudicated in the central refugee camp in Zirndorf—outside of Nuremberg in Bavaria—could receive a work permit and leave the camp as long as they could find a job outside of Bavaria. Like the transit camps for East German refugees, Zirndorf would become known as a reliable source of willing labor for West German employers, but when asylum seekers began to arrive in the Federal Republic already carrying company recruitment material, experts began to worry about the misuse of the asylum procedure. Werner Kanein of the Bavarian Interior Ministry complained that the refugee camp had become “a central employment agency for citizens of certain states, and the filing of an application for asylum only a necessary formal requirement,” while refugee expert Günter Schöppe warned that “a foreigner who wants to work temporarily in the FRG can force the FRG to submit to his will.”Footnote 77
The camp's neighbors saw Zirndorf not as a source of labor, but as a hotbed of criminal behavior and an unwanted presence in their town. In 1965, the Bavarian police responded to such concerns when they expelled from the camp four hundred asylum seekers suspected of being “economic refugees.” News of the deportations alarmed other countries, including the United States and France, both of which prevailed on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to lodge an official protest with the Federal Republic.Footnote 78 The international scandal precipitated by the expulsions found its way to the floor of the Bundestag in January 1966, when, in a rare exception to the usual silence about migration in the Bundestag, a routine question period became a debate about “economic refugees.”Footnote 79 A total of fifteen representatives representing all three major parties took turns criticizing the category of the “economic refugee,” as well as the deportations carried out by the Bavarian police. Fritz Büttner, a Social Democrat representing Moers in North Rhine-Westphalia, asked, “Who invented the term ‘economic refugee’—a horrible term, by the way—and in this way created two kinds of refugees?” Hans Schäfer of the Interior Ministry responded by distancing himself from the term: “I share your opinion about this term … I can't tell you who invented it, but it wasn't us. It developed in the press or somewhere like that.”Footnote 80 Herbert Wehner, the chairman of the Social Democratic fraction and a former member of the German Communist Party (KPD), met with universal acclaim when he argued: “What is called economy in Communist-ruled countries is so tightly linked with politics and persecution, that our bureaucracy should not put the burden of proof on the refugee to show what he is.”Footnote 81 According to Wehner's logic, communism had perverted the natural separation between the political and the economic, and those who were fleeing it were necessarily refugees as a result.
A few days after this discussion, the Interior Ministry issued guidelines stating that, from now on, rejected asylum seekers from the socialist countries would be extended even more courtesy than rejected East Germans had once received: they would not be deported, and would also be permitted to work legally.Footnote 82 This official shift in policy initially excluded Yugoslavians because, in contrast to other socialist citizens, they had other legal routes into the Federal Republic. They could try to find an employer who was willing to sponsor them for a work visa, or they could enter on a tourist visa and then attempt to regularize their status. When Foreign Minister Willy Brandt negotiated a bilateral labor recruitment agreement with Yugoslavia in 1968, there were already over one hundred thousand Yugoslavians living in the Federal Republic, mostly on expired tourist visas or employer-sponsored work visas.Footnote 83 The bilateral recruitment agreement served West German interests by helping employers to access skilled laborers and female laborers.Footnote 84 The agreement also serves as an illustration of the fact that migration movements that establish themselves extralegally can, and frequently do, achieve official status. In this case, a migration that had first been experienced as a “crisis” of “economic refugees” became part of a well-regulated routine within a decade.
With Yugoslavians incorporated through the “guest worker” program and other refugees from socialism officially tolerated and allowed to work, the term economic refugee was rarely applied to people from the Eastern bloc after 1966.Footnote 85 Key officials such as Ludwig Adenauer, the secretary of the minister of the interior in North Rhine-Westphalia, continued to believe that the vast majority of rejected asylum seekers were, in fact, better understood as “illegal guest workers.”Footnote 86 Despite these suspicions, their origins behind the Iron Curtain had enabled them, in the court of public opinion, successfully to transmute economic motives into political motives and thus to be removed from the stigmatized category of the “economic refugee.”
Nach dem Boom: Excluding the “Economic Refugee” from the Labor Market
The category of the “economic refugee” attached itself to a new population in the 1970s as mass unemployment and underemployment became a structural feature of the Western European economy.Footnote 87 In 1973, the Federal Republic announced a ban on further labor migration, which came as a shock to labor migrants and would-be labor migrants.Footnote 88 Although many foreign workers chose to leave the Federal Republic after 1973, others remained, had children, and encouraged their family members to join them. Between 1970 and 1980, the number of people from the six primary “guest worker” countries—Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey—grew from 2.2 million (3.6 percent of the total population of the Federal Republic) to 3.3 million (5.3 percent), with most of that population increase coming from Turkish citizens. The Labor Ministry reacted to the increase by no longer granting work permits to family members who arrived in West Germany after November 30, 1974. Between 1974 and 1979, this ban excluded roughly half a million new arrivals from the legal labor market—making their residence legal, their labor illegal.Footnote 89
New applications for asylum increased sharply during the same period: from 5,289 applications in 1972 to 11,123 in 1976, 33,136 in 1978, and a previously unimaginable 107,818 in 1980.Footnote 90 In response to the rising numbers, the Interior Ministry decided to distribute asylum seekers across the country beginning in 1974, effectively transforming asylum policy from a specifically Bavarian concern into a national issue. In order to alleviate the financial burden on local governments, the Labor Ministry decided, starting in March 1975, to allow asylum seekers to work while waiting for a decision on their application.Footnote 91 The Labor Ministry had intended to reduce costs for local welfare offices, but the fact that this decision followed both the 1973 recruitment halt and the 1974 decision to deny work permits to family members meant that filing an application for asylum suddenly became the only way for foreigners to work legally in the Federal Republic.
The term economic refugee resurfaced in this context, now joined by economic asylum seeker (Wirtschaftsasylant).Footnote 92 The majority of asylum applications in this period came from India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Palestine, and especially Turkey, with Turkish citizens representing half of all new asylum applications by 1980.Footnote 93 Officials often believed that Turkish asylum seekers were trying to manipulate migration categories, switching from family reunion to asylum solely in order to work.Footnote 94 The very fact that Turkish citizens arrived under multiple categories—as guest workers, family members, and asylum seekers—was taken as confirmation that most of these Turkish citizens were lying about their true motives for migration.Footnote 95
Although the Federal Administrative Court had ruled in 1975 that the state could not take its own interests into account when ruling on granting asylum, asylum continued to be difficult to obtain in practice.Footnote 96 The Federal Republic recognized Turkey, a NATO ally and an associate of the European Economic Community, as a “safe country” even after the September 1980 coup there. The asylum bureaucracy operated from a narrow definition of “political persecution” that did not recognize asylum claims made on the basis of state persecution of the Kurdish or Yazidi ethnic groups.Footnote 97 As a result, between January 1979 and August 1983, only 2 percent of all asylum seekers from Turkey were accepted as “genuine refugees.”Footnote 98
The Federal Republic did not just routinely deny applications for asylum from Turkish citizens, but also sought to keep them from filing applications in the first place. In June 1980, officials introduced an “Emergency Program to Limit the Entrance of ‘False’ Asylum Seekers” as a temporary measure, supposedly to be revisited in three years.Footnote 99 The “emergency program” consisted of two parts: reinstating a visa requirement for Turkish citizens that had not been in place since November 1953, and removing the supposed incentive to apply for asylum by rescinding work permits for asylum seekers.Footnote 100 These two measures had an immediate effect on the number of asylum seekers, but officials assessing the emergency program tended to single out the work ban as the cause for its success, while ignoring the fact that the visa requirement prevented many from entering West Germany. The exclusive focus on the work ban became, in turn, a powerful confirmation of the underlying belief that most asylum seekers were “economic refugees.”Footnote 101
The state moved to make the “emergency” work permit ban permanent—and thus to insulate it from court challenges—in March 1981, when the new “Waiting Period Law” created a “waiting period” for both family members and asylum seekers before they could enter the labor market. Spouses of “guest workers” had to wait for four years and their children two years. The majority of asylum seekers had to wait for two years, with an exception made for those who came from socialist states, who were only required to wait for one year. This distinction reflected the long-held assumption that the economic motives of asylum seekers from the socialist countries were inherently political, and thus more legitimate than those from elsewhere. Each successive draft of the text justifying the “Waiting Period Law” further deemphasized its intended effects on family members and emphasized its intended effects on asylum seekers. The justification that was finally published explained that, ever since the work ban had gone into effect, the percentage of asylum seekers who were Turkish citizens had dropped from 60 percent to 30 percent. The justification failed to mention that visa requirements for Turkish citizens had gone into effect at the same time.Footnote 102 This forced exclusion from the labor market undoubtedly served to delay the integration of those asylum seekers who would stay in Germany, but officials saw this as a price worth paying to deter the imagined “economic refugee” motivated only by the prospect of economic gain.
Local Deterrents for a National Challenge: Excluding the “Economic Refugee” from the Cash Economy
Although most asylum seekers entered the Federal Republic and filed their applications at one of three locations—the port city of Hamburg, the Frankfurt airport, and West Berlin, where they were able to take advantage of the surprisingly porous border from East to West—they were subsequently distributed throughout the Federal Republic according to a quota system. This practice of redistribution was meant to act as a deterrent to applying for asylum, since asylum seekers could not necessarily choose to stay in communities where they may have had friends, relatives, or a cultural infrastructure.Footnote 103 The federally imposed work ban also meant that local communities found themselves responsible for the financial support of asylum seekers, who were condemned to idleness while waiting for a decision on their application.
Local authorities experimented with different techniques for encouraging asylum seekers to leave before their cases were concluded. Practices such as housing asylum seekers in closed camps and restricting their mobility created an escalating “deterrence spiral” among the federal states, many of which competed to be unattractive locations for finding asylum.Footnote 104 Some spent considerable effort pressuring the federal government to do more to limit the number of asylum seekers. The interior ministers of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg threatened to repudiate their obligations to house asylum seekers if the federal state did not take radical actions to master the crisis.Footnote 105
Just as it had been after the sealing of the German-German border in 1952, West Berlin was once again the center of the refugee crisis. By 1985, over 50 percent of new asylum seekers were entering via the border between East and West Berlin, the latter still an island city with a weak economy and no space to expand. Heinrich Lummer, the West Berlin senator of the interior and a Christian Democrat, became a proponent of many of the most radical procedures for discouraging asylum seekers, including a plan to offer “temporary asylum” (Asyl auf Zeit), a status that would have required recipients to reapply every two years.Footnote 106 West Berlin was also particularly notorious for making work a condition for financial assistance. Asylum seekers in West Berlin were required to clean streets and subway cars for 1.25 DM per hour, a policy that allowed the city to benefit from migrant labor at far less than its market value.Footnote 107 Finally, West Berlin provided aid to asylum seekers largely as vouchers: 55 DM in cash a month and 185 DM in vouchers, initially in large denominations that did not entitle the person using the voucher to receive any change.Footnote 108 Asylum seekers had to spend nearly one-quarter of their monthly stipend every time they went shopping in order to receive the full value of their aid—a difficult proposition for people who did not have access to refrigerators or even private storage space. The Federal Social Security Act specified that social assistance had to be given in cash unless there was a reason to suspect that the cash was being used for unlawful purposes.Footnote 109 By giving asylum seekers vouchers instead of cash, officials also hoped to deter “economic migrants” who planned to use their welfare payments to send remittances to their home countries. When challenged, officials who defended the use of vouchers often insisted that they did not suspect asylum seekers, but rather the “smugglers” (Schlepper) and human traffickers who demanded cash payment for illegally bringing people into the Federal Republic.Footnote 110
In 1984 the Alternative Liste (AL) of West Berlin, a political alliance of left-oppositional groups, began a campaign against the vouchers, in which citizens purchased vouchers from asylum seekers in order to give them access to cash.Footnote 111 Eckhardt Barthel, a Social Democrat in the Berlin Senate, purchased the vouchers through his church and attacked them at public hearings, arguing that they worked as “an instrument of labeling, on the basis of a widespread belief that the asylum seekers are here in order to feast on the blessings of the Federal Republic's prosperity.”Footnote 112 Initially justified by the widespread belief that asylum seekers were, in fact, “economic migrants” trying to defraud the welfare state, their exclusion from the cash economy also worked to reinforce that belief further.
West Berlin fought the voucher exchange by instructing businesses to refuse to accept vouchers from those customers who were “clearly not asylum seekers.” But how was a cashier supposed to decide whether the person handing them a voucher was an asylum seeker? Activists readily recognized the instruction as a tacit order for cashiers to racially profile their customers, and they antagonized the Senate by posing questions such as, “How do you make sure that Polish refugees, who are easily mistaken for Germans because of their appearance … can use their vouchers?” or “Does the Berlin Senate plan no longer to accept vouchers from Germans, and how does one recognize a German (besides his upright gait)?”Footnote 113 The West Berlin administration never engaged with this line of questioning, focusing instead on enforcing the requirement that customers who used vouchers carry documentation identifying them as asylum seekers.Footnote 114
When activists asked how cashiers could visually distinguish asylum seekers from those who were “clearly not asylum seekers,” they were articulating a criticism about the assumed limits of the national community. What exactly did it mean to look like a “German” as opposed to an “asylum seeker”? This aspect of the anti-voucher campaign points to the ways in which the category of “desirable” refugee was increasingly racialized in this period. Forced migrants in the form of ethnic German repatriates continued to arrive in the Federal Republic, particularly from Poland. Although some Polish citizens applied for political asylum in the Federal Republic, nearly 80 percent of Polish migration to Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s belonged to the category of the ethnic German repatriate.Footnote 115 The repatriates’ status as “genuine refugees” was no longer unconditional. In 1977, the Federal Administrative Court ruled that, because conditions had improved in some countries of origin, it could not be automatically assumed that ethnic Germans in those countries were experiencing an ethnically based “pressure to emigrate.”Footnote 116 One way that an ethnic German repatriate could cast doubt on his or her claim to be a forced migrant was, in fact, to file an application for political asylum, since this was taken to imply that their migration was motivated by economic considerations rather than forced by ethnic discrimination.Footnote 117 Applicants for political asylum from “Turkey, the countries of the Indian subcontinent, black Africa [Schwarzafrika], and the Middle East” were generally assumed to be “primarily economically motivated,” whereas those ethnic Germans fleeing communism were still largely considered “genuine refugees”—until a perceived misstep, such as claiming political asylum, demoted them to the category of undesirable “economic refugee.”Footnote 118
As activists contested policy on the ground, the international community was also paying close attention to West German asylum policy. In the summer of 1983, the UNHCR sent a fact-finding mission to the Federal Republic to investigate what it called “dissuasive measures unique in Europe,” including the use of in-kind benefits, the ban on legal work, and restrictions on mobility. The final report caused a minor diplomatic incident when it concluded that these measures “affected genuine refugees more than economic migrants,” and that the Federal Republic was setting “a dangerous precedent in Europe which may be imitated by other countries.”Footnote 119
In the Federal Republic, by contrast, many officials were coming to believe that the “dangerous precedent” was not to be found in their treatment of asylum seekers, but rather in the pull factor exerted by Article 16 of their own Basic Law: “Persons persecuted on political grounds shall enjoy the right of asylum.” An interministerial commission on asylum policy that met in March 1985 struggled to finalize its report because the Justice Ministry, controlled by the Free Democrats, and the Interior Ministry, controlled by the Christian Social Union (CSU), could not agree on the future of Article 16.Footnote 120 Anticipating the creation of a free travel zone within Europe, Interior Ministry officials argued that the Federal Republic could not afford to have a more liberal asylum policy than those of its neighbors. Indeed, many of those neighbors—including Sweden, France, Switzerland, and Denmark—were already pressuring the Federal Republic to do a better job of controlling its borders, since asylum seekers often moved from the Federal Republic to other locations in Europe.Footnote 121 The commission finally published the second part of its report in August 1986, devoting several pages to the differing opinions on Article 16. Some of the commission members insisted that the Federal Republic had to revise Article 16 in order to “regain its capacity for action … to decide on its own when asylum can and should be granted.”Footnote 122
Conclusion: The 1993 Asylum Compromise and the Permanent Crisis
The consensus turned in favor of “crisis”—and thus rhetorically mandated decisive action—in the early 1990s in the wake of German unification. The number of yearly arrivals in all categories of forced migration rose sharply in this period. The number of ethnic German repatriates from the Eastern bloc increased as restrictions on exit loosened in the late 1980s, peaking at 397,073 in 1990, a development that placed the Federal Republic's formerly generous acceptance policies for the repatriates under political pressure. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of Yugoslavia also swelled the number of applicants for asylum in the Federal Republic, with the number of people filing an application for asylum reaching a new record high of over 438 thousand in 1992.Footnote 123 The addition of these applicants meant that the Federal Republic had received a total of 1.4 million applications for asylum between 1983 and 1992, far more than the next two countries in Western Europe (France received 318 thousand and Sweden 225 thousand).Footnote 124 Ernst August Farke's 1950 warning that “the lifeboat … is sinking” returned in the early 1990s as the phrase “the boat is full.”
Another important catalyst for the shift toward a consensus of “crisis” was the racist and xenophobic violence that rocked the newly expanded Federal Republic between 1991 and 1993. Although observers had already registered an uptick in violence in the first half of 1990, the September 1991 riot against a hostel for asylum seekers in Hoyerswerda captured national and international headlines.Footnote 125 Politicians frequently cited these riots and the deadly attacks that followed in Mölln, Rostock, and Solingen as proof that the enlarged Federal Republic had already surpassed its limits of tolerance for difference. They claimed that, in order to integrate the foreigners who were already in the Federal Republic, the state needed a restrictive asylum policy to keep out illegitimate arrivals, often described as “economic refugees.”Footnote 126 Even Arbeitsplatz Deutschland, the state's official magazine for foreign workers, explained the Hoyerswerda riots to its readers as a reaction to the arrival of “economic refugees”:
It always turns out that most asylum seekers are not politically persecuted at all, but are only emigrating for economic and social reasons, because they seek work and bread … The costs generated by this flock of economic refugees elicit resentment and rejection in some sections of the population … but these concerns cannot be equated with the “xenophobia” that is rightly criticized and denounced… It may happen that foreign workers are also victims of violent acts. Even so, one can say: the current wave of xenophobia [Fremdenfeindlichkeit] is not about them, because they are a permanent part of the German economy.Footnote 127
The editorial described the rioting as a reflexive response to economic pressure, naturalizing racist violence as a side effect of market forces. Following the editorial's logic, one might expect that xenophobes make a habit of asking foreigners whether they work before beating them up. The evidence offered by foreigners told a different story: the everyday racism that intensified in the wake of unification was not in the habit of making distinctions between productive and parasitic foreigners, or, for that matter, between Germans of color and foreigners of color.Footnote 128 Asylum seekers and foreign workers might, in fact, have had interests in common when it came to opposing the xenophobic attitudes that the magazine sought to explain, but, in describing the new arrivals as “economic refugees,” the author designates a new community of interest. In this conception of the community, the foreigner looking for work is self-evidently a problem—but the foreigner also gains his place in German society entirely through his status as somebody who has work and who is therefore “a permanent part of the German economy.” The editorial asserts the primacy of market logic in defining the community, while simultaneously denying supposed “economic refugees” the right to use that logic.
In an attempt to bring this moment of perceived crisis to a close, in December 1992 the CDU/CSU, the FDP, and a large portion of the SPD were able to muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass the asylum compromise, which added a clause to Article 16 of the Basic Law that limited the Federal Republic's obligation to the politically persecuted. The compromise introduced several new restrictions on access to the asylum procedure. Asylum seekers judged to come from a safe country of origin can now be turned away at the border, while those who have entered a safe third country between leaving home and arriving in the Federal Republic can be deported back to that third country. Every country that borders the Federal Republic is considered a “safe third country.” These measures placed the Federal Republic on the cutting edge of a global trend toward extraterritorial determination of asylum claims.Footnote 129 The new geography of distant determination also applied to ethnic German repatriates, who were now subject to a yearly quota and required to apply for the new legal status of “late repatriate” (Spätaussiedler) from their current place of residence.
The idea of “safe third countries” for asylum seekers was reiterated in the Dublin Regulation, the Europe-wide asylum policy that went into effect in 1997 and that accords responsibility for asylum seekers to Europe's borderlands. The Italian Coast Guard patrols the Mediterranean because Italy knows that it will be held responsible for the asylum seekers who reach its shores; Hungary's decision to erect a wall against asylum seekers in the summer of 2015 must be seen in the light of the fact that countries to its West have used Hungary—and the other countries on the European Union's Eastern border—as their own “wall” against asylum seekers who travel overland. The Federal Republic's response to the crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s put in place the institutions and practices that strongly influence the form taken by the migration crisis that has dominated headlines since 2015.
The compromise also legitimated many of the local deterrence strategies that had been controversial in the previous decade, and, in so doing, has guaranteed their continued and even more systematic application in the present. For example, the Asylum Seekers’ Benefits Act of 1993 explicitly legitimated the vouchers that activists had once protested in the 1980s when it explicitly allowed local governments to choose whether they would distribute social assistance for asylum seekers as vouchers or as in-kind benefits. The October 2015 Act on the Acceleration of Asylum Procedures includes a new provision that, whenever practicable, benefits for asylum seekers should be provided as vouchers and as in-kind benefits.Footnote 130 Once again, just as in the 1980s, the justification for issuing vouchers is to deny smugglers their ill-gained profits and to deter the unscrupulous, grasping economic migrants driven by “false incentives.”Footnote 131 There is virtually no public acknowledgment that these practices had been tried a generation earlier without any notable success. Instead, these measures and others like them are invariably presented as unprecedented, exceptional, and imposed by events that have spiraled out of control.
Vouchers are not the only example of an old measure that is back on the political agenda. The current visa requirement for Turkish citizens was first erected in 1980 in order to keep out Turkish asylum seekers. In 2016, Turkey struck a bargain with Europe: it would accept Europe's unwanted Syrian asylum seekers in exchange for a number of concessions, including visa-free travel to Europe for its own citizens. The deal is currently in effect, with Europe trading a small number of its unwanted asylum seekers for recognized refugees who are deemed more desirable, but Turkey has repeatedly threatened to cancel the exchange if Europe fails to grant visa-free travel to Turkish nationals. Nobody seems to have recognized that the visa requirements themselves began as a temporary expedient in order to avert a previous “refugee crisis.” How long will it take before the current set of strained solutions are replaced by a new set of “emergency measures”—officially temporary, but endlessly renewed in the face of fresh conditions that are homologous to the old ones but experienced and decried as utterly without precedent?
Within the political culture of the Federal Republic, migration has persistently been understood as an aberration that somehow recurs every single day. The postwar Wirtschaftswunder—perhaps the key legitimating narrative of the Federal Republic—required a steady flow of dislocated labor, beginning first with expellees and then with those East Germans who moved across the German-German border in the late 1940s and 1950s. Employers’ access to this mobile labor fueled economic growth and continued to legitimate relatively unrestricted policies on migration for decades. Those migrants initially stigmatized as economic opportunists have repeatedly been able to legitimize themselves—as long as they can become a “permanent part of the German economy.” This process of legitimation is already underway for the refugees who arrived in 2015. The president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations told journalists in December 2018 that Angela Merkel's promise that “we can do it” had proved accurate, since “many migrants” had indeed become a “pillar of the German economy.”Footnote 132
The Federal Republic has never experienced a decade without a “refugee crisis.” Even though the presence of new groups of migrants has consistently been depicted in terms of unprecedented “crisis,” basic features of these so-called crises—especially the distinction between “genuine” refugees and “economic” migrants—have been part of German political culture since even before the Federal Republic was formally founded in 1949. A petitioner from East Germany pointed to this longer history in February 1990, when he wrote to the Central Round Table, a newly established forum for citizens to discuss reforms in the GDR, in support of a law that would expand the right to asylum in the GDR and allow for dual citizenship for foreign contract workers. “Now everybody is talking about economic refugees,” he observed, “But aren't the refugees who left East Germany also economic refugees?”Footnote 133 The petitioner reminds us that the “economic refugee” has always been a fungible category: it does not inhere in the bodies of individual migrants, nor is it even a feature of their self-understanding. Rather, new regimes of control attach it to new subjects as conditions change. Likewise, “refugee crisis” is the framework in whose terms all such new conditions are continuously interpreted. When the “refugee crisis” finally ends, the Federal Republic, as we have known it, will have ended too.
