(Spät)Aussiedler: From Germans to Immigrants

The German legal system has a category (“belonging to the German people”) that regulates the immigration of (Spät)Aussiedlers (“late emigrants”). Since Reunification in 1990 until the present day, there have been a number of legislative changes to this group's “right to return.” This article explores the usefulness of four partly overlapping explanations of these changes and discusses their interrelationship. Although many aspects of the policy were changed for pragmatic reasons (that is, to reduce this kind of immigration), the main category of “belonging to the people” was retained. As such, it may be proposed that legislative amendments occurred within the framework of an ethnocultural understanding of nation.