German migration policy now stands at a major crossroad, caught between a fifty-year history of missed opportunities and serious new challenges. Focusing on these new challenges that German policy makers face, the authors, both internationally recognized in this field, use historical argument, theoretical analysis, and empirical evaluation to advance a more nuanced understanding of recent initiatives and the implications of these initiatives. Their approach combines both synthesis and original research in a presentation that is not only accessible to the general educated reader but also addresses the concerns of academic scholars and policy analysts. This important volume offers a comprehensive and critical examination of the history of German migration law and policy from the Federal Republic’s inception in 1949 to the present.

Inside Immigration Law analyses the practice of implementing immigration law, examining the different political and organisational forces that influence the process. Based on unparalleled academic access to the German migration management system, this book provides new insights into the ‘black box’ of regulating immigration, revealing how the application of immigration law to individual cases can be chaotic, improvised and sometimes arbitrary, and either informed or distorted by the complex, politically laden and changeable nature of both German and EU immigration laws. Drawing on extensive empirical material, including participant observation, interviews and analyses of public as well as confidential documents in German immigration offices, Inside Immigration Law unveils the complex practices of decision-making and work organisation in a politically contested environment. A comparative, critical evaluation of the work of offices that examines the discretion and client interactions of bureaucrats, the management of legal knowledge and symbolism and the relationships between immigration offices and external political forces, this book will be of interest to sociologists, legal scholars and political scientists working in the areas of migration, integration and the study of work and organisations.

Within Germany, policies and cultural attitudes toward migrants have been profoundly shaped by the difficult legacies of the Second World War and its aftermath. This wide-ranging volume explores the complex history of migration and diversity in Germany from 1945 to today, showing how conceptions of “otherness” developed while memories of the Nazi era were still fresh, and identifying the continuities and transformations they exhibited through the Cold War and reunification. It provides invaluable context for understanding contemporary Germany’s unique role within regional politics at a time when an unprecedented influx of immigrants and refugees present the European community with a significant challenge.

Publisher description

The United States is an immigrant country. Germany is not. This volume shatters this widely held myth and reveals the remarkable similarities (as well as the differences) between the two countries. Essays by leading German and American historians and demographers describe how these two countries have become to have the largest number of immigrants among advanced industrial countries, how their conceptions of citizenship and nationality differ, and how their ethnic compositions are likely to be transformed in the next century as a consequence ofmigration, fertility trends, citizenship and naturalization laws, and public attitudes.

This first open access book in a series of three volumes provides an in-depth analysis of social protection policies that EU Member States make accessible to resident nationals, non-resident nationals and non-national residents. In doing so, it discusses different scenarios in which the interplay between nationality and residence could lead to inequalities of access to welfare. Each chapter maps the eligibility conditions for accessing social benefits, by paying particular attention to the social entitlements that migrants can claim in host countries and/or export from home countries. The book also identifies and compares recent trends of access to welfare entitlements across five policy areas: health care, unemployment, family benefits, pensions, and guaranteed minimum resources. As such this book is a valuable read to researchers, policy makers, government employees and NGO’s.

The forms, policies, and practices of citizenship are changing rapidly around the globe, and the meaning of these changes is the subject of deep dispute. Citizenship Today brings together leading experts in their field to define the core issues at stake in the citizenship debates. The first section investigates central trends in national citizenship policy that govern access to citizenship, the rights of aliens, and plural nationality. The following section explores how forms of citizenship and their practice are, can, and should be located within broader institutional structures. The third section examines different conceptions of citizenship as developed in the official policies of governments, the scholarly literature, and the practice of immigrants and the final part looks at the future for citizenship policy. Contributors include Rainer Bauböck (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Linda Bosniak (Rutgers University School of Law, Camden), Francis Mading Deng (Brookings Institute), Adrian Favell (University of Sussex, UK), Richard Thompson Ford (Stanford University), Vicki C. Jackson (Georgetown University Law Center), Paul Johnston (Citizenship Project), Christian Joppke (European University Institute, Florence), Karen Knop (University of Toronto), Micheline Labelle (Université du Québec à Montréal), Daniel Salée (Concordia University, Montreal), and Patrick Weil (University of Paris 1, Sorbonne)

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this monograph on the rules on immigration and right of residence of non-nationals in Germany examines the legal and administrative conditions for persons not having the citizenship of a State to enter the country and to stay and reside there. It provides a survey of the subject that is both usefully brief and sufficiently detailed to answer most questions likely to arise in any pertinent legal setting. It follows the common structure of all monographs appearing in the International Encyclopaedia for Migration Law, thus allowing easy comparison between the country studies. As migration and economic activities are often interlinked, the analysis pays particular attention to labour market access and regulation of self-employed activities for non-nationals. The book describes the status of such specific categories of persons as students, researchers, temporary workers, and asylum seekers, as well as the position of family members, detailing applicable legislation and providing practical information on administrative procedures, sanctions, and legal remedies and guarantees. The impact of international human rights law and various bilateral and multilateral agreements is considered, along with the broader application of national and local law to non-citizens in such areas as family relations, labour, social security, and education. Lawyers, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, government administrations, and non-governmental organizations involved in the development, practice and study of migration law will find this book indispensable. It will be welcomed by lawyers representing parties with interests in Germany and immigration specialists in both public and private organizations. Academics and researchers also will appreciate its value in the study of comparative trends and harmonization initiatives affecting migrants.

Foreword: Jessica T. Mathews

This book traces the practices of migration control and its contestation in the European migration regime in times of intense politicization. The collaboratively written work brings together the perspectives of state agents, NGOs, migrants with precarious legal status, and their support networks, collected through multi-sited fieldwork in eight European states: Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. The book provides knowledge of how European migration law is implemented, used, and challenged by different actors, and of how it lends and constrains power over migrants’ journeys and prospects. An ethnography of law in action, the book contributes to socio-legal scholarship on migration control at the margins of the state. “This book is a major achievement. A remarkable and insightful study that through close analysis of the practices of migration control in 8 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland) provides powerful new insight into the power of the state at its margins and over those that are marginalised.” - Andrew Geddes, Director, Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute “Migrants Before the Law provides a much-needed account of the dizzying legal labyrinth that migrants navigate as they seek to survive in Europe. Based on multi-sited ethnography in detention centres, migration offices, police stations, and non-governmental organizations as well as on interviews with key government actors, advocates, and migrants themselves, this book explores the systems of control and forms of migrant precarity that operate along Europe’s internal borders, in multiple national and transnational contexts. Readers will come away with a deepened understanding of the perverse workings of power, the ways that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law foster both despair and hope, the degree to which the immigration “crisis” is both manufactured and experienced as real, and the ingenuity of migrants themselves in the face of Kafkaesque state practices.” - Susan Bibler Coutin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA “Migrants Before the Law is an excellent exposition of the dispersed sites of the law and the hinges and junctions through which this apparatus is actualized in the lives of migrants facing deportation, contesting their status as illegal migrants or seeking to regularize their precarious position. Written with great sensitivity and an eye to minute details this book is also an achievement in furthering the method of collaborative ethnography and new ways of staging comparisons.” - Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, USA