MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 459
not only in West Germany, but also in all other northern and western
European countries who had engaged in this kind of recruitment. Schol-
arship has come to doubt the signifi cance of the oil crisis in 1973 for this
abrupt end to recruitment; the crisis seems to have been just the “last in
a series of diff erent reasons.”^67 As early as the late 1960s, it had already
become clear that what was intended to be a temporary form of labor mi-
gration was turning into full-fl edged immigration. This led to intense de-
bates over the integration and assimilation of these workers, which only
seemed to be acceptable to the countries that had been recruiting foreign
workers if the brakes were put on any further immigration.^68 Yet the goal
behind this stop on recruitment, namely to end the infl ux of immigrants
who were not from the EEC countries, was never met. Indeed, because
the recruitment stop eliminated the chance to return to West Germany in
the future, it actually motivated many of the migrants who were already
in the country to put down roots and stay. In turn, this meant that even
more of the families who had been left behind in the home country began
to follow their relatives to West Germany. Only the Italian workers could
claim more leniency because Italy belonged to the EEC.
The Western model of “Gastarbeit” was sharply criticized in the GDR
as a prime example of capitalist-imperialist exploitation and proof of the
lingering legacy of the Nazis in the Federal Republic.^69 Nonetheless, the
GDR began to make its own eff ort to attract foreign workers at the begin-
ning of the 1960s in order to counteract the labor shortage in the country.
In 1957, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had already brought in
Bulgarian workers, and as of the mid-1960s, the idea of redistributing
workers from socialist states with a labor surplus to those with a labor
shortage was bandied about more and more.^70 In 1963, for example,
the GDR signed what was referred to as an “occupational qualifi cations
treaty” with Poland, which was followed by a commuter treaty in 1966.
The latter allowed workers from the Polish border areas to commute to
the GDR on a daily basis in order to work in the processing industry or
hospitality sector.^71 A treaty with Hungary followed in 1967 that provided
for “employment while completing vocational training,” which was sup-
posed to develop a new model that would bring Hungarian workers to the
GDR for three years.^72 The GDR legitimized these bilateral treaties under
the motto of vocational training and “international solidarity.”^73 There
was no offi cial mention of a labor shortage or labor transfers, however,
and the treaties were kept under wraps.
Until the mid-1970s, the GDR primarily recruited workers from other
European COMECON states. When these neighboring countries began
to put more demands on the GDR, the GDR began to sign treaties with
non-European socialist or nonaligned countries in the mid-1970s. The