From Guest Worker Recruitment to “Remigration”: Tracing the Origins of Germany’s Post-War Politics of Return
Arrival of guest workers at Munich train station in the 1960s Source: historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de / Stadtarchiv München, RD0668A1
Simon Ahrens, University of Oxford
This blog post examines the evolution of Germany’s politics of return migration after World War II. It shows that migration discourses and policies, driven by changing coalition governments and contexts of economic crisis, have transitioned from accommodating guest workers to advocating for deportations of the ‘foreign Other’. This shift reflects a broader securitisation of migration and re-emergence of ethnocentric nationalism, which has powerfully shaped the rise of the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) since 2013.
On 25 November 2023, high-ranking members of Germany’s far-right AfD and centre-right CDU parties, neo-Nazis and sympathisers of the identitarian movement convened for a secret meeting near Potsdam. According to the investigative outlet Correctiv, their agenda included plans for what the far-right euphemistically calls “remigration” – the deportation of millions of people with a family history of migration, including “non-assimilated German citizens”. Yet demands for more and faster returns are not limited to the far-right. The ruling government has made returns a key component of its campaign against “irregular migration”, focusing on individuals without the right to remain in Germany. In January 2024, the German parliament passed the Repatriation Improvement Act, which expanded police powers to detain migrants and facilitate their repatriation or deportation. This led to 4.700 repatriations and deportations in the first three months of 2024, a 30 percent increase compared to the previous year.
Forced and so-called assisted voluntary returns have thus become central to German mainstream politics. But when, how and why did the primacy of return start to shape migration policy and governance?
After World War II, West German discourses on migration gradually shifted from viewing immigration as a labour market issue to framing the “foreigner question” as a security threat, particularly in right-wing populist calls for repatriations. Between 1955 and 1973, the government recruited 14 million foreign guest workers to address labour shortages in the recovering economy. As the term “guest worker” suggests, this labour migration was intended to be temporary. However, following the halt in recruitment amid the 1973 oil crisis, the number of foreigners grew as three million guest workers and their families permanently settled in West Germany. This led to the formation of new ethnic minorities, predominantly from Turkey, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain and Portugal, who transformed West Germany into an Einwanderungsland [country of immigration].
During recruitment in the 1950s and 1960s, political parties unanimously denied that West Germany was a country of immigration. Parliamentary debates downplayed the need to integrate guest workers and merely emphasised that their temporary presence exemplified Germany’s post-war image as a cosmopolitan democracy. This mantra of Gastfreundschaft [hospitality] reached a turning point when foreigner demographics shifted and unemployment soared after the economic crisis of 1973. The number of foreigners reached four million in 1973, a stark increase from 2.7 million in 1970. Foreigners, almost a third of whom were from Turkey, now constituted 6.4 percent of the West German population. The German weekly Der Spiegel warned in an article: ‘The Turks are coming - run for your lives’. Rather than agents of economic recovery, the CDU/CSU opposition depicted guest workers as unworthy beneficiaries of social services, such as unemployment benefits. Tying economic uncertainty to immigration, Labour Secretary Arendt of the SPD/FDP government announced a recruitment stop of guest workers from outside the European Economic Community.
The recruitment stop set the tone for migration discourses in the 1970s. The government emphasised three principles: limiting immigration, promoting return, and encouraging the social integration of guest worker families. Notably, all parties reiterated that the presence of guest worker families was temporary. In 1979, Heinz Kühn (SPD), the first ombudsman for foreigners, forcefully questioned this consensus. His memorandum on the integration of foreigners became the first official acknowledgment of West Germany’s status as a country of immigration. Kühn urged the government to recognise that permanent settlement had turned “guest workers” into immigrants. In response, he suggested integration measures, including foreigners’ right to vote in local elections and the option of naturalisation for second-generation immigrants born in West Germany. Some left-wing members of the SPD, FDP and the Greens supported Kühn’s promotion of a multicultural society. But the SPD/FDP government rejected his proposals and upheld the myth of reversible guest worker settlement to appease working-class voters who feared foreign labour competition. Emerging right-wing populist factions of the CDU/CSU went a step further, criticising the government’s disregard for the security issue of Überfremdung [foreign infiltration].
This xenophobic backlash against Kühn’s multicultural reformulation of national identity dominated German politics in the 1980s. Debates on guest worker recruitment and the integration of their families gave way to the primacy of return. Fierce disputes between the governing SPD and FDP over measures to reduce family reunification paralysed the coalition. The lack of a coherent immigration policy and a sharp increase in unemployment following the second oil crisis of 1979 contributed to the CDU/CSU’s election victory in 1983. On the campaign trail, the conservatives had already conflated the presence of guest worker families and the supposed “asylum abuse” by Turks after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état as a threat to Germany’s post-war “economic miracle”. The CDU/CSU’s caucus leader, Alfred Dregger, noted that the repatriation of foreigners must not be the exception, but the rule. While labour migration from Italy or Spain was a desirable effect of European integration, according to Dregger, the “wave” of Turkish immigrants was intrinsically unable and unwilling to assimilate to German culture.
In his first government declaration, the new CDU Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, made the “Turkish problem” a key aspect of an emergency programme. Records of his meetings with British Prime Minister Thatcher in 1982 reveal plans to implement the right-wing slogan “Turks out!”: ‘Chancellor Kohl said [...] Over the next four years, it will be necessary to reduce the number of Turks by 50 percent - but he cannot yet say this publicly’. Kohl’s fear of a “clash of cultures” and his support for the repatriation of the 1.5 million Turks living in West Germany were widely shared in politics and society at the time. Even Kohl's social-democratic predecessor, Helmut Schmidt, insisted in Stern magazine in 1982 that no Turks should cross the German border. His Chancellery Minister, Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, mocked Muslims for ‘slaughtering their mutton in the bathtub’. An Infas survey in 1982 found that 58 percent of Germans supported a reduction in the number of foreigners.
The Return Assistance Act of 1983 marked the culmination of this gradual normalisation of ethnocentrism in migration discourses after the recruitment stop of 1973. As the first significant post-war repatriation initiative, the law promised jobless guest workers 10.500 Deutsche Mark plus 1.500 Mark for each child, if they returned to their home country. Cynically advertised as a measure to reduce foreigners’ uncertainty, the conservative government also offered to reimburse guest workers’ contributions to pension insurance and counselling services for those wishing to return. In effect, the government mobilised the public to support the “export” of unemployed foreigners, who were deemed burdens on the state budget. Out of approximately 4.5 million foreigners, only 300.000, including 240.000 Turkish citizens, left West Germany in 1984 as a consequence of the Return Assistance Act.
Pro-AfD demonstrations in Dresden: “Ending the asylum-lie! Remigration now!” Source: tagesschau.de / picture alliance / dpa
The emergence of a parliamentary majority in favour of limiting immigration and encouraging repatriation in the 1980s had a long-term impact on German politics. First, the restrictive turn led by the Kohl government mirrored a broader politicisation and securitisation of immigration. Particularly during elections and economic crises, right-wing populists turned “foreign Others” into scapegoats for rising unemployment and declining national unity. Second, this narrative conflated asylum seekers with guest workers and other migrants to construct a general “foreigner problem” that undermined Germany’s ethnic homogeneity. Third, in the guest worker era, the institutional responsibility for policies regarding foreigners shifted from the Labour Ministry to the Interior Ministry, which entrenched views of immigration as a domestic security issue. Underpinning these three developments was the long-standing political taboo to accept Germany’s status as a country of immigration. It was not until its 1991 Dresden conference that the CDU/CSU became the last democratic party to acknowledge this new aspect of post-war national identity.
Despite subsequent changes to citizenship and migration laws, decades of reform hesitancy and institutionalised xenophobia made repatriation demands susceptible to populist remobilisation. During the long summer of migration in 2015, the AfD aggressively rejected Chancellor Merkel’s welcoming policy towards refugees by referring to “the original sin” – the “flooding” of German society with foreigners after the arrival of guest workers. Recycling the language and logic of the CDU’s 1983 election campaign, the AfD adopted “clash of culture” narratives to link the dangers of “Islamification” to the need for “remigration”. In the name of “national survival”, the far-right party proposed closing off EU borders and deporting rejected asylum applicants regardless of personal safety in their home countries. To make sense of this increasingly popular rhetoric, we should systematically trace the evolution of ethnocentric backlashes against Germany’s identity as a country of immigration since the guest worker era.
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Simon Ahrens | University of Oxford