Revisiting the Right to Stay

Vietnamese Migrants in Contemporary Germany

Paige Newhouse

Newhouse’s monograph project, Revisiting the Right to Stay: Vietnamese Migrants in Contemporary Germany, examines Vietnamese migration both West and East Germany before and after 1989. During the Cold War, Germans across the Iron Curtain used division to control migration from the Global South. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political and legal terrain that explained migration changed shape. Western leaders quickly integrated the former GDR into a liberal and federalist legal framework, partly by building foreigner registration offices (Ausländerbehörden) across the East, sending asylum seekers to the East, and expanding a Western border regime along the Eastern frontier. Leaders of post-unity Germany embraced “open” borders within Western Europe while strengthening their eastern border with Poland and Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic).

Vietnamese were at the center of different German migration regimes: from refugee protection in the 1970s to the socialist labor programs in the 1980s to the increasingly unregulated labor that took shape after 1989-1990. German leaders introduced exclusionary measures to regain control over migration. They assigned Vietnamese laborers from the former GDR the legal label “contract worker” in effort to force them to leave the country. They introduced the right to reside regulation, giving Vietnamese workers a renewable permit to stay if they met certain conditions. They amended Article 16 of the constitution (the Basic Law), which promised to protect politically persecuted persons. As a result, people who traveled from European Community member states and countries that followed a Western framework for human rights no longer qualified for asylum. After the Vietnamese government refused to readmit Vietnamese nationals who were deported against their will, German leaders turned to readmission treaties with Vietnam and neighboring states to deport unwanted migrants. German leaders started to construct a “Fortress Germany.”

Despite the German state enforcing exclusionary migration laws, Vietnamese migrants circumvented them. Former workers from the GDR sued the Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees for asylum, and they sued the foreigners’ registration offices for stronger residency permits. Vietnamese from Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), the Soviet Union (Russia), and Vietnam migrated to Germany, using indeterminate borders across the former Soviet bloc as an opportunity to reach Germany’s eastern frontier. They made the best of new and previously unimaginable opportunities, seeking to stake a claim in post-unity Germany. Their stories shed light on German migration policies and the migrants whom they most affected.