476 MAREN MÖHRING
tress Europe,” but rather to a new form of migration management that
has made borders more permeable for certain people, such as highly
qualifi ed professionals, but also led to a steady increase in the number of
illegal migrants whose (underpaid) labor has become essential for large
portions of the European economy.
Post-reunifi cation Germany
from the Perspective of Foreign MigrantsMany historical accounts of the period after 1990 focus on the confl icts
and diff erences between East and West Germans. They have rarely looked
at the way in which foreigners living in Germany or people with immi-
grant backgrounds have perceived the reunifi cation process. A consider-
able portion of the migrants living in West Germany had come to feel like
a genuine part of society over the course of the 1980s, especially from
a retrospective viewpoint after 1990. There have hardly been any aca-
demic studies on migrant responses to the migration debates that heated
up after the Wende, even though these discussions called into question
their place in German society. Some initial research has indicated that
reunifi cation, and especially the racist pogroms of the early 1990s, was a
“shocking experience” for many migrants, who have come to see this as a
decisive turning point in their own lives.^153 Most of the Turkish people in-
terviewed in the 2000 documentary Duvarlar-Mauern-Walls, by the Turk-
ish-American director Can Candan, stressed that they were overjoyed at
fi rst with the fall of the Wall, but that the violent racism that emerged
thereafter had called into question the work that they had done, as well as
their hard-won rights.^154 Since professional success no longer seemed to
provide a path into mainstream society, some of them chose to withdraw
back into the confi nes of the Turkish community.^155
Not only East Germans, but also many migrants found themselves fac-
ing a loss of social status after reunifi cation, which they responded to
with diff erent strategies. One option for West German migrants was to
try to boost their image over that of the East Germans by depicting them-
selves as “well-educated, highly motivated, and reliable workers as well
as demanding consumers with a great deal of purchasing power.”^156 In
doing so, they implied that they were harder workers and better consum-
ers than the East Germans, thereby justifying their right to stay in the
country. At the same time, however, this implicitly questioned the seem-
ingly automatic acceptance of East Germans and Aussiedler as part of so-
ciety in the Federal Republic. By calling on the shared experience of the
West and pointing out the extent of their integration within society, these
migrants sought to defend their position within a new unifi ed Germany.^157