Do policy legacies matter? Past and present guest worker recruitment in Germany

Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies create national immigration ideologies that delineate the range of viable policy responses well into the future. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to an immigration ideology even long after its emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a legacy's substantive bounds? This article examines the relationship between Germany's legacy of postwar guest worker recruitment and subsequent policy choices in the 1990s. The failure of the postwar system to prevent settlement left behind a no-immigration ideology that precluded the future pursuit of economic immigration. I argue that the ability of government officials to resume recruitment in the 1990s critically hinged on their ability to devise a recruitment system that could credibly commit to settlement prevention. Policy-makers pursued policies that—in contrast to the past—were premised on worker rotation, annual quotas, the denial of family unification and the absence of labour market integration. This article shows that policy legacies not only have constraining but also enabling effects. By providing opportunities for policy learning, legacies can create opportunities for policy innovation even within the constraints of paradigmatic path dependence.