Do Policy Legacies Matter? Past and Present Guest Worker Recruitment in Germany.

Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies not only mould fundamental attitudes and institutions, but also leave behind national ideologies of immigration that delineate the range of legitimate and viable policy responses. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to a given immigration ideology even long after its first emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a policy legacy's substantive bounds? This paper grapples with these questions by examining the relationship between Germany's legacy of postwar guest worker recruitment and subsequent policy choices on foreign labor recruitment in the 1990s. The failure of the postwar system to prevent immigrant settlement left behind a no-immigration ideology that precluded the future pursuit of permanent economic immigration. The ability of government officials to resume guest worker recruitment in the 1990s, I argue, critically hinged on their ability to devise a recruitment system that could credibly commit to the prevention of immigrant settlement. Policy makers succeeded in doing so by devising a system that - in contrast to past policy - was premised on worker rotation, the denial of family unification, and the absence of labor market integration. These policy features reflected a process of failure-induced policy learning that sought to avoid the past from repeating itself. The paper thus shows that policy legacies do not only have constraining, but also enabling effects. By providing opportunities for policy learning, legacies can create opportunities for policy innovation even within the constraints of paradigmatic path dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]