ABSTRACT
The parents of the TIES respondents came to Germany in the course of ‘guest worker’ recruitment and subsequent family reunifications. The ‘guest worker’ recruitment was supposed to utilise foreign workers temporarily to fill short-term gaps in the German labour market. Based on a concept of work rotation, the idea was that each contingent of workers would return to their countries of origin after a limited period of time (Bommes 2004b). The Federal Republic of Germany signed bilateral recruitment agreements with Turkey in 1961 and with Yugoslavia in 1968. Between 1961 and 1973, the foreign workforce increased from 549,000 to 2.6 million, and the total foreign population to 4 million. Of these, 893,000 were Turks and 673,000 were Yugoslavs (Herbert 1986). It was not until the oil crisis of 1973 and the subsequent recession that recruitment bans were announced in West Germany as well as in other European countries (Bade 1984).
