MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 449
East and West German asylum policies, which can be seen as a reaction
to common global challenges.
Two very specifi c forms of (labor) migration are usually left out, namely
study abroad and the stationing of foreign troops in Germany. In fact,
around ten million Soviet soldiers had been stationed in East Germany
at some point before 1994.^6 In the history of migration, the British and
American troops that occupied the West also need to be taken into consid-
eration because they contributed to an often neglected wave of marriage
migration in which about twenty thousand German women emigrated to
the United States and another ten thousand or so left for Great Britain.^7
The late 1980s were therefore very much a turning point in German
migration history. The new waves of migration unleashed by the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union represented a very direct confrontation with
the transformations that were taking place in Eastern Europe. In addition
to dealing with the wave of emigration from the GDR in 1989 and the
huge number of East Germans who immigrated to the western regions of
post-reunifi cation Germany in the years that followed, this chapter also
traces the discussions that surrounded the Aussiedler, the members of
German minorities living for the most part in Eastern Europe who came
to West Germany and, later, reunifi ed Germany under the Federal Ex-
pellees Act (Bundesvertriebenengesetz). It will look at the contours of the
asylum debates in the early 1990s that played an important role in the na-
tional reordering processes brought about through the upheavals in East-
ern Europe as well as new global challenges. Moreover, the increasing
Europeanization of migration policy will also be factored into this con-
text. Over the course of reunifi cation, as one theory suggests, the non-
German migrants represented the fi gure of a “third other” that allowed
for German-German reconciliation and the negotiation of a new German
identity. For migrants who had been living in Germany for a while, reuni-
fi cation resulted in insecurity and a loss of status. The increasing pro-
cesses of exclusion that even went as far as the violent pogroms at the
beginning of the 1990s have realigned the relationship between Germans
and non-Germans in reunifi ed Germany. Accordingly, this chapter con-
tributes to an analysis of the simultaneity of pluralization and homogeni-
zation as well as present-day politics of diff erence within a contemporary
history perspective.
Migration and Mobility: Current Research Perspectives
Since a great surge in migration research has taken place over the last
few decades, a great number of theories and empirical studies have been