460 MAREN MÖHRING
workers recruited from these countries were supposed to stay in the
country only on a temporary basis. For instance, the GDR came to an
agreement with Algeria in 1974, Cuba in 1978, and Mozambique in 1979.
In light of the worsening economic situation and the growing depen-
dence on foreign workers in order to maintain production, a “mass im-
port” of labor migrants occurred in the 1980s that brought the number of
labor migrants up to about ninety-four thousand in 1989.^74 A large por-
tion of these workers came from Vietnam; the GDR had already signed
an agreement with Vietnam on schooling in 1973, which was followed in
1976 by a treaty that provided for job training only in production. Within
the socialist bloc, Vietnam was one of the largest labor exporters. As of
1989, the majority of the labor migrants in the GDR came from Vietnam;
fi fty-nine thousand of the ninety-four thousand labor migrants were Viet-
namese.^75 The GDR also signed treaties with Mongolia in 1982 and An-
gola in 1984, which were followed by treaties with China and North Korea
in 1986. The justifi cation that was originally provided for these treaties,
namely to provide training and development aid to these countries, had
become worthless by the 1980s.
In comparison to West Germany, labor migration set in much later in
the GDR—at a point in time when the recruitment stop had already put
an end to the Gastarbeiter system in Western Europe. Labor migration
also diff ered quantitatively between East and West Germany: Whereas
approximately 2.6 million foreigners were working in the FRG in 1973,
there were only about twelve thousand in the GDR in 1970; this fi gure
jumped in the GDR to twenty-six thousand in 1980, then sixty-one thou-
sand in 1986, before topping out at almost ninety-four thousand in 1989.^76
At the end of 1989, foreigners accounted for 1.1 percent of the population
in the GDR, compared to 7.7 percent in the Federal Republic.^77
Despite all the offi cial claims that the use of foreign labor in the GDR
had nothing to do with the recruitment policies of the West, there are
diverse parallels that can be drawn between these two practices. In both
countries, for example, this labor recruitment was ultimately a one-sided
transfer to a country with a more developed industrial sector; these trans-
fers took place on the basis of bilateral treaties between countries that
belonged to the respective blocs, but were nonetheless independent
nation-states. The interests of the countries who provided the labor re-
cruits were also similar; they sought to reduce their unemployment rates,
decrease the national debt through wage transfers, or tap into a source
of foreign currency.^78 In the East as well as the West, labor migrants were
mostly recruited for relatively poorly paid jobs that were often associated
with health risks and hard physical labor, as well as shift work. German
workers tended to avoid these jobs in car manufacturing, the chemical