ABSTRACT
The general development of immigration policies in Austria, as in other European states, started from the internal end-points of migration and has gradually extended control towards the external starting points. Until World War I the emphasis of control over international migration was on exit rather than entry. The late Habsburg monarchy was a major source of emigration to the United States. During the following period, Austria developed a system of active recruitment of labour, which, in our understanding, is a form of proactive external immigration control that regulates and selects a wanted inflow by direct activity in the country of origin. An Austrian nation - in the sense of widely shared collective identity associated with a given state - only emerged from the experience with Nazism, but its birth in 1945 was marked by another ambiguity. The challenge to the Fremdenpolizeigesetz triggered indirectly a quite important shift of responsibility within the government.
