ABSTRACT
The heritage of Germany’s guestworker history has played a central role in shaping its immigration law and the associated system of migrants’ rights. Despite the well-known intention to recruit foreign labour on a temporary basis to drive post-war economic expansion (see Castles and Kosack, 1985) it soon became apparent that the guests had come to stay. The reasons behind this transition are interesting, and have been cited as a classic example of the expansion of migrants’ rights by virtue of universalistic claims to ‘personhood’, as opposed to nationally bounded rights based on citizenship (Soysal, 1994). However, the impulse to consolidate the position of the guestworker population did not derive directly from trans-national commitments, but from both the nature of employer demand and the recognition of a moral responsibility on the part of national politicians (see Joppke, 1999:64). More specifically, the rights of guestworkers to establish residence and seek family unification were upheld through a series of rulings by the Constitutional Court in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Guiraudon has therefore argued (1998:280) that the extension of rights to aliens was enacted domestically, on the basis of constitutional commitments (dating from 1949) which pre-dated the emergence of a post-war human rights discourse.
