This chapter examines Germany’s politics of economic immigration policy making over the course of five decades. The first case study examines the establishment of Germany’s guest worker system through a series of bilateral treaties in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1973 recruitment stop. After the recruitment stop, political elites used the experience of unintended and large-scale immigrant settlement to construct a national narrative of Germany as a “country of non-immigration.” The second case study examines the reopening of guest worker recruitment channels – this time with Central and Eastern European sending states – in the 1990s. The chapter’s third case study examines the Green Card program of 2000 which marked Germany’s first foray into high-skilled immigration and, despite its limited recruitment success, marked the beginning of a debate that sought to reframe (high-skilled) immigration as being in Germany’s national interest. Our final case study examines the passage of the 2004 Immigration Act by Germany’s first Social Democratic-Green government. The Act signifies the failure of paradigmatic reform: rather than being a historic milestone, it left in place the recruitment stop and provided for the admission of high-skilled immigrants only the basis of regulatory exemptions.

This chapter lays out the making of Swiss economic immigration policy from the late 1940s to the mid-2010s. It begins with the establishment of Switzerland’s guest worker regime with the signing of the Swiss-Italian recruitment treaty in 1948. The second case study traces a series of regulatory reforms over the course of the 1960s, culminating in the creation of the global ceiling system in 1970. The chapter’s third case study is the Three Circles Policy which sought to reconcile the diplomatic imperative of free movement of European workers with the populist calls for closure. The chapter’s final case study examines policy making in the 2000s as the Swiss government opted for a treaty-based approach to market integration, followed by the 2008 immigration act which codified the policy changes enacted through bilateral treaties and executive directives over the previous years. In 2014, Swiss voters adopted the Mass Immigration Initiative which presented policy makers with the impossible choice between legislating the people’s will or maintaining its bilateral treaties with the European Union.