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Germany's pre-2005 Aliens Act comprised several temporary legal statuses for foreigners residing in the country and a change from one status to another was possible. Usually, the foreigners would experience a downgrading of their status, nevertheless, an improvement was not impossible under certain circumstances. This paper compares two diametrically opposite strategies adopted by two Afghan families struggling to improve their legal situation. Whereas one family approaches the German administrative apparatus just as it would an Afghan one, adopting a strategy typical of a patron-client type of relationship, the other family reproduces the behavior expected by the German welfare state (punctuality, transparency, a striving for financial independence). An examination of the strategies adopted by the Afghan migrants in their approaches of the German bureaucracy reveals fundamentally different underlying models of the state and of citizenship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]