MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 471
Aussiedler (or Übersiedler, as they were known in the GDR) had already
been coming to West Germany, mostly from Poland, since the fi rst de-
cades after World War II; a far fewer number went to East Germany. The
GDR had been much more cautious than West Germany when it came
to encouraging the emigration of German relatives from Poland. In fact,
the GDR no longer offi cially recognized any German minorities abroad.^131
Consequently, only a few thousand Übersiedler came to the GDR in the
1950s to join their families, while around 250 thousand people emigrated
from Poland to the FRG.^132 For East Germany, the Übersiedler were not
just ethnic Germans but also a source of labor. The SED used this form of
migration to recruit workers; this subject thus overlaps with the topic of
Polish labor migration that was touched on above.
The countries of origin that West Germany declared to be Aussiedler
areas clearly refl ected the infl uence of the system rivalry on the state’s
policy toward the Aussiedler: the members of German minorities in the
Western world were not eligible for integration aid when they came to
the Federal Republic, for example, because they were not considered
oppressed. China, in contrast, was declared to be an Aussiedler area in
1957, despite the fact that West Germany did not need to step in to
help cushion any blows left over from World War II in the country in
keeping with the West German law on war restitutions (Kriegsfolgenge-
setz). The goal of this policy was therefore to make it as easy as possible
for West Germany to take on Germans who were living under Commu-
nist rule.^133
In terms of Aussiedler immigration, the year 1989 did not mark a clear
break of any kind, although this kind of migration had picked up dramat-
ically over the course of the transformation of Eastern Europe from the
mid-1980s onward.^134 Until 1990, the majority of Aussiedler came from Po-
land, followed by the Soviet Union and then its successor states. Between
1988 and 1989, a total of almost 1.6 million Aussiedler emigrated to the
Federal Republic, and two thirds of them came from the Soviet Union.^135
Although these Polish and Russian Aussiedler were considered to be
German from an administrative point of view, they were nonetheless con-
fronted with various forms of discrimination in daily life. The majority
of locals thought of them as foreigners: according to a survey done in
1989, only 31 percent of the German population considered them to be
German.^136 Many locals moreover, were often envious of new arrivals,
not least because some of these Russian-Germans were retirees who re-
ceived pensions from the German state without ever having paid into the
German social security system.^137 Despite, or rather because of, these
tensions, the federal government did not want to openly deal directly
with the issue of the immigration of (Spät-)Aussiedler. Even though these