478 MAREN MÖHRING
Some of these foreign labor migrants were ordered to return to their
home countries immediately after the Wall came down, such as those
from North Korea, China, or Cuba. The ones who remained in East Ger-
many found themselves in an extremely precarious legal and socioeco-
nomic situation because of the many lay-off s (contrary to the terms of the
respective contracts) that were made even before reunifi cation. Although
there had never been an issue with giving job priority to German workers
because of the permanent shortage of labor in the GDR up to this point,
all of the sudden the protection of jobs for Germans became a pressing
issue; the vehement calls for action sometimes even led to strikes and
threats of violence.^166 As early as May 1990, far more than half of the for-
eign workers in East Germany no longer had jobs. Many of them willingly
returned to their home countries or were deported. By the end of 1990,
only twenty-eight thousand of the former “contract workers” were still in
the country.^167 They had been given the choice of either to leave the coun-
try or to stay in Germany until the end of their original contract period if
they could provide proof that they had a job and a permanent residence.
A large portion of the labor migrants who stayed in the country came
from Vietnam, and they kept their heads above water by running diff erent
kinds of small shops because they had been permitted to receive busi-
ness permits if they wanted to stay. Some of them went to neighboring
countries such as Czechoslovakia. In general, there was a great deal of
migration among Vietnamese workers between diff erent states of the for-
mer Eastern Bloc after 1989/90, despite the fact that Vietnamese workers
had also lost their jobs in these countries as well.^168 Even today, most
Vietnamese are self-employed.^169 Present-day wholesale markets such as
Dong Xuan Center/Asiatown in East Berlin were started up by former Ver-
tragsarbeiter from Vietnam. The fact that these workers were able to rely
on contacts that they had made back in the GDR, however, made it clear
that despite all the attempts to isolate foreigners, Vietnamese immigrants
and Germans had not lived entirely separate lives.^170
After reunifi cation, the former East German labor migrants from Viet-
nam came face-to-face with the boat people living in West Germany, but
the two groups hardly have any contact with one another. This split within
the Vietnamese minority in present-day Germany resulted in part from
the diff erent legal status enjoyed by these two groups, which is clearly
refl ected in diff erences in social status. Whereas the approximately twen-
ty-three thousand boat people who came to West Germany as quota ref-
ugees between 1979 and 1982 had been promised the chance to become
permanent residents,^171 many of the former “contract workers” from Viet-
nam do not have valid residence permits. This example points to the fact
that so-called integration issues do not stem from “the culture” of the