MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 467
To sum up the asylum and refugee situation in divided Germany, it can
safely be said that the number of refugees in the GDR was really quite
low. Things changed in the Federal Republic over the course of the 1970s
and 1980s as asylum became, in a certain sense, an “irregular channel
for labor migration.”^118 In 1975, the priority granted to West Germans
as opposed to foreign workers on the job market was lifted for asylum-
seekers. Along with the offi cial permission to work that was provided to
asylum-seekers, this partial lifting of the primacy of nationals on the la-
bor market made it clear that not only the migrants themselves, but also
the Federal Ministry of Labor had not lost its interest in the employment
of foreign workers after the Gastarbeiter regime had been brought to an
end.^119 As a result of the growing number of refugees, however, increas-
ingly restrictive measures were adopted over the course of the 1980s in
order to put a damper on this migration. Contrary to the provisions of the
Geneva Refugee Convention, for instance, a visa requirement was issued
for the main countries of origin in 1980. From 1982 onward, the social
aid that had to be provided to these refugees because of the two-year
prohibition against work was primarily paid out in the form of noncash
benefi ts; all the federal states also introduced housing in camps, as well
as residency restrictions for refugees. In the mid-1980s, the debates on
asylum intensifi ed, focusing more and more on the changes to the right
of asylum that were being demanded by the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU). These parties called for
passing a law that, akin to the time limit put on labor migration, would
redefi ne the country’s policy on asylum to limit immigration only to ex-
ceptional cases. Yet asylum is in fact based on a “logic of exception”: as
political scientist Elias Steinhilper puts it, “The emphasis on the real need
to protect a few has legitimized closing the door to many.”^120
Migration, Migration Policy, and the Redefi nition
of the Nation in the late 1980s and the 1990s
For the history of migration, the end of the Cold War represented a “ma-
jor break.”^121 The minimal amount of migration that had gone on between
Eastern and Western Europe due the prohibitions against leaving the
East quickly turned into mass migration within a relatively short amount
of time in the late 1980s. In part, this migration resembled what was
happening before World War II, and it drew upon this earlier experi-
ence.^122 Simultaneously, migration played a key role in tearing down the
“Iron Curtain.” In the case of Germany, for example, the mass exodus of
GDR citizens in 1989 via Hungary and the embassy in Prague ultimately