German History from the Margins

Twelve: The Difficult Task of Managing Migration: The 1973 Recruitment Stop

I In Germany’s post-1945 migration history, 23 November 1973 marks a turning point. On this day, almost eighteen years of organized foreign labor recruitment , and thus a major period of primary immigration, ended. A long phase followed in which West Germany tried to at least partly revise the process of immigration, and it was only in the year 2000 that a new citizenship law marked the of¤cial acceptance of the former guest workers and their descendants as regular members of German society. The reasons behind the government’s decision to stop foreign recruitment have until now not been a cause of major controversy. Most accounts assume that the oil crisis prompted the government to act and that politicians were unaware that their decision might encourage migrants—faced with the alternatives of leaving or staying for good—to opt for ¤nal settlement in Germany. German politicians were supposedly “blind to the future,”1 and it was years before they realized that labor recruitment had instigated processes of permanent immigration. Or, as probably the most famous version of this account puts it, they did not realize that “while they had asked for workers, what they had received was human beings” (Max Frisch). Ignorance and the dominance of economic interests are thus seen as the reasons why German politicians allowed settlement but were unprepared for the emergence of a multiethnic German society. As will be demonstrated in the following pages, at least some of these established assumptions have to be revised. More archival sources have now become available,2 and they enable us to investigate the real motives and considerations guiding West German government actions. As it turns out, the switch 252 Twelve The Dif¤cult Task of Managing Migration The 1973 Recruitment Stop Karen Schönwälder to a restrictive migration policy was no more motivated by the oil crisis than was the German government blind to ongoing immigration processes. In fact, there had even been some discussion about openly acknowledging Germany’s transformation to a country of immigration and reforming its citizenship laws. Although this was not done, politicians had nonetheless consciously allowed immigration to proceed, even though permanent settlement on a large scale was generally seen as unwelcome. So what eventually prompted them to stop immigration, and how can we explain a half-hearted policy that was neither consistently for nor against immigration? In seeking to answer these questions, it will become clear that Germany’s migration policy was shaped by a complex set of factors and can be understood only against the broad context of West Germany’s political and social history. II When, in 1969, the reform coalition under Chancellor Willy Brandt came to power, about one and a half million foreigners were employed in the Federal Republic. A brief slowdown of the economy (in 1966–67) had been overcome, and the number of foreign workers had already exceeded the 1966 peak of 1.3 million. Recruitment now expanded at an unprecedented pace. In March 1971, the number exceeded two million,3 and by mid-1973, German factories and services employed 2.6 million non-German nationals. In 1969, neither Social Democrats nor Liberals questioned the continuation of foreign recruitment. As Karl Schiller, minister for the economy, explained during the debate on the ¤rst government program in the Federal Parliament (Bundestag), an expanding labor force was an indispensable prerequisite for sustained economic growth and could be achieved only through further recruitment of guest workers.4 Two years later, Labor Minister Walter Arendt still publicly emphasized that foreigners were not a burden and that, like their German fellow workers, they contributed to economic growth and “increasing our prosperity.”5 The government believed that not only economic growth in general but more speci¤cally its ambitious program of social reforms depended on this additional supply of labor. If school attendance was to be extended, if more young people were to go to university, and if workers were to be allowed longer holidays and earlier retirement, they had to be replaced in the factories. Otherwise, as German industrialists warned, growth rates would decline and this would endanger the government’s reform program .6 And yet, while foreign recruitment was still publicly described as indispensable , in autumn 1971 reconsiderations of migration policy began within the government machinery, and by mid-1972 it was widely agreed that the number of foreigners in the Federal Republic should at least not be allowed to rise much further. Important aspects of migration policy...