Postwar German guest-worker programs were designed for impermanence, not citizenship

Evidence

Foreign workers, whom West Germany engaged to offset labor shortages, assumed a different status because they were never supposed to become citizens at all. Hired in response to the scarcity of German workers and to meet employers’ desire for a mobile workforce, the German states assumed that imported labor would be temporary. Thus between 1955 and 1973, the FRG recruited thousands of ‘guest’ workers from Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Yugoslavia, and especially Turkey which in the latter case fulfilled the diplomatic objective of economic collaboration with a NATO ally. With the later influx of spouses and children, the number of foreigners exceeded four million by the late 1970s. The GDR recruited ‘contract workers’ from Poland, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, and Angola to fill the gap left by Germans who fled to the west. Like West Germany, the GDR’s program served a diplomatic purpose, in this case establishing fraternal ties with other socialist states. Yet the migration of foreign workers proved intractable over the long term because historical precedent and the terms of employment foreclosed the possibility of belonging. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the comparative analytic frame used for expellee integration elsewhere in this volume — foreign labor was kept permanently alien, whereas expellees were absorbed as citizens. — connects to: Guestworker systems meant to rotate labor instead produced permanent settlement via family reunification; Citizenship and economic boom eased postwar expellee integration in West Germany — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 196

Broader Connections

• Guestworker systems meant to rotate labor instead produced permanent settlement via family reunification #expands (0.88)
• Citizenship and economic boom eased postwar expellee integration in West Germany #qualifies (0.72) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 196