472 MAREN MÖHRING
minorities hardly any longer faced the threat of expulsion in their home
countries that came in the form of discrimination and oppression directed
against ethnic Germans—which meant that one of the “basic assump-
tions behind the admission of the Aussiedler” no longer existed—they
were hesitant to make any policy changes.^138 The SPD and the FDP called
for a revision of the Bundesvertriebenengesetz, which regulated the rather
liberal requirements for accepting Aussiedler into the country, a revision
that would introduce quotas, but their suggestions were blocked by the
Christian Democratic Union. Nonetheless, the CDU/CSU was later forced
to agree to these changes to the law as part of what was called the Asylum
Compromise of 1992/93. In accordance with another piece of legislation,
only people of German descent from the former Soviet Union were recog-
nized as Aussiedler as of early 1993, in part because it was assumed that
they were still being pressured to leave the former Communist bloc.^139
The actual practice of accepting the Aussiedler into Germany had already
changed successively since 1989. The Wohnortszuweisungsgesetz of 1989
regulated the assignment of where the Aussiedler were supposed to live
once they entered the country, providing for an equal distribution of this
migrant group across the whole country. This meant that these immi-
grants were rather limited in choosing where to live. Moreover, in keep-
ing with the Aussiedleraufnahmegesetz of 1990, they were also required
to submit their petition for permission to enter Germany before they left
their countries of origin. This was followed in 1996 by an obligatory lan-
guage test.^140 The government and the opposition had fought bitterly over
these tightened restrictions when it came to dealing with the Aussiedler
at a practical level.
The parties were only in agreement when it came to another group
of migrants from the Soviet Union, and then later its successor states,
who were permitted to immigrate to the Federal Republic as of 1991,
namely the “Jewish quota refugees.” In this case, migration policy drew
on the country’s historic responsibility for the expulsion and murder of
the European Jews. Consequently, these policies were never called into
question publicly, especially since Jewish immigrants were proof that the
country was overcoming its Nazi past and that the integrity and trustwor-
thiness of the new Germany was very much intact.^141 Between 1989 and
2005, a total of about two hundred thousand Russian Jews came to the
Federal Republic on the basis of the Kontingentfl üchtlingsgesetz (the law
that regulated quota refugees), which had been passed in 1980 to allow
for the rapid entry of the Vietnamese boat people. These Jewish immi-
grants accounted for almost a quarter of those Jews who emigrated from
the (former) Soviet Union between 1989 and 2005.^142