Introduction

In Austria, migration had long been seen solely as a labour market issue. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that the surrounding public and political debate expanded to include broader issues of family reunification, integration, asylum and the control of territory access. In 1989, the fall of the Iron Curtain heightened the perceived threat of illegal migration, thereby boosting the attention that public authorities paid to the control of illegal migration and human smuggling. At the beginning of this period, however, public perceptions of the impending migration wave from ‘the East’ were met more with rhetoric than actually imposed restrictions. The economic boom at the beginning of the 1990s actually led to a liberalisation of the labour migration regime, responding to severe labour shortages and boosting foreign employment in Austria. Most of the new foreign workers did not come from the newly liberalised Eastern Bloc countries as much as from Austria's traditional recruiting countries of labour, i.e. the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. It was also during this time of extraordinarily high migration that Austria instituted its only ever 1990 ‘legalisation’ campaign. This permitted foreign workers to regularise their status after very brief periods of residence with no questions asked (approximately 30,000 individuals took advantage of these special administrative procedures). In addition to this new wave of labour migrants and the ensuing migration of their family members, Austria admitted around 95,000 war refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. As a result of all these developments, the number of foreigners in Austria nearly doubled, from 344,000 in 1988 to 690,000 in 1993 (or around 9 per cent of the population), a level which has since more or less stabilised (Jandl & Kraler 2003).

Facing mounting public pressure to curtail both legal and illegal migration, the government decided to step on the brakes. It instituted a series of progressively tightening measures related to immigration, entry, residence, employment and asylum. Already in force by April 1990, an amendment to the Austrian Asylum Law introduced new accelerated procedures for asylum seekers without valid entry permits. Later in 1990, a quota for the employment of foreigners was introduced and, in 1992, a new Aliens Act tightened regulations on entry and residence.