This chapter explores the asylum crisis of the 1990s. We examine how officials in Germany and the UK dealt with growing evidence of a sizeable population of irregular migrants by deploying the three main strategies for responding to ignorance: denial, elucidation and resignation. Although both governments pursued forms of denial and resignation, these took different forms. In the UK, pragmatism about the limitations of state capacity implied that officials were sanguine about their ‘ignorance’, with pressure emanating from external political scrutiny. In Germany, officials faced an acute conflict between bureaucratic and legal norms of the rule of law. Both cases reveal profound state ambivalence about elucidating a social problem over which they had limited control.

The German state is often presented as an archetypal example of a bureaucratised system of migration surveillance and control. The Central Foreigners Register, introduced in West Germany in 1953 and digitised in 1967, is a central pillar of this infrastructure, and one of the most comprehensive tools of migration control in any liberal democratic state. Through analysis of federal and state records, this chapter reconstructs the challenges of coordination and resources that impeded the effective operation of the register in the post-war years. Nevertheless, despite its operational deficiencies, it has played an important symbolic role in bolstering the self-image of Germany as a modern state with a high capacity to control its population.