Why Germany’s guestworkers were largely Europeans: The selective principles of post-war labour recruitment policy

The article demonstrates that West Germany in the 1950s to 1970s not only recruited millions of foreign workers but also systematically excluded potential migrants of African and Asian origins. Like many other countries in the post-war decades, West Germany practised a migration policy that entailed exclusion on the basis of national origins. But unlike other countries, it never officially lifted these restrictions, and there was never a wide-ranging public debate about the principles of an at least partly racially motivated selection underlying West Germany’s guestworker policy.