Work and the Welfare State: Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics

Chapter 11 Good Intentions and Institutional Blindness: Migrant Populations and the Implementation of German Activation Policy

11 Good Intentions and Institutional Blindness Migrant Populations and the Implementation of German Activation Policy Martin Brussig and Matthias Knuth G ermany has the largest share of immigrants among the larger European countries.1 This presents an enormous challenge: how to address the exclusion and marginalization of migrants from the labor market. Following increasing national unemployment in the course of successive business cycles, in 2005 Germany introduced major labor-market reforms using activation services and work requirements as central policy instruments. These policy initiatives, known as the Hartz reforms, extended work-activation requirements, not only to the native German population, but also to migrant populations. Migrants comprise more than one-quarter of those made subject to activation requirements. Yet, as we will discuss, neither the formal provisions of activation policy nor administrative reforms designed to implement them contemplated the special circumstances facing migrants in the labor market. This chapter focuses on Germany’s migrant populations as a special case for understanding the policies and practices of activation. It analyzes the relationship between activation reforms and migrant populations from two perspectives. First, from a policy perspective, it draws attention to a mismatch between key features of activation policy and the migrant experience and considers what this mismatch means for the implementation of activation requirements. Second, from an organizational perspective, it examines how Germany’s activation bureaucracy addressed—or failed to acknowledge—differences between migrant and native populations. This perspective highlights a paradox that emerges out of the German bureaucracy’s tendency to operate according to Weberian principles—that is, 185 186 martin brussig and matthias knuth a commitment to rules and their equal application—even when dealing with groups of unequal standing and circumstances. Although a bureaucratic approach that emphasizes equal treatment under the law aims to avoid intentional discrimination , it can produce institutional discrimination in effect by failing to adjust to the specific circumstances of the migrant population. The main argument of this chapter is that the bureaucratic practices of activation are likely to disadvantage migrant job seekers when there is a mismatch between formal policy, informal practices, and the specific circumstances of migrant populations. We begin by providing background on German activation reforms and migrant populations. In the second section we look more closely at characteristics and experiences of migrant populations that are subject to activation requirements. The third section explores the mismatch between activation requirements and the special circumstances of German migrants. This lays the foundation for the fourth section, in which we analyze what happens in job centers, where the activation bureaucracy and migrants meet. We conclude with observations about the perverse effects of what we see as ‘‘institutional blindness ’’; that is, activation’s failure to formally recognize or informally respond to the special circumstances of Germany’s migrant populations. Activation Reforms in Germany: The Special Case of Migrants Although Germany tends not to perceive itself as a country of immigrants, its history has seen considerable immigration, emigration, and internal migration (Bade 2002). After World War II, over 12 million refugees and displaced persons flooded into West Germany, followed by nearly 4 million East Germans until the border was sealed in 1961. Between 1955 and 1973, so-called guest workers were recruited from southern Europe and later also from Turkey, partially replacing the labor supply lost by the closing of the eastern German border. Recruitment from southern Europe largely ceased after oil-price shocks jolted the economy in 1973, yet the number of nonnational residents living in Germany continued to grow, fueled largely by family reunification, asylum, and war refugees. The subsequent decline in manufacturing, including the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, meant that those who had once come to fill jobs in lowerskilled industries experienced increasing difficulties in the labor market. A second wave of immigration occurred after the breakup of the Soviet Union. During the 1990s, ethnic German repatriates (the descendants of eighteenth-century settlers) as well as non-Germans from the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Southeastern Europe arrived to encounter a tight labor market.2 Consequently, Germany’s now sizable foreign-born population has a good intentions and institutional blindness 187 disproportionate rate of unemployment. Since the 1970s, unemployment among migrants has grown faster than that of German nationals, reaching a level more than double that of nationals by 2005.3 Migrant populations now constitute a significant sector of the unemployed and, thus, a sector...