This chapter examines Germany’s politics of economic immigration policy making over the course of five decades. The first case study examines the establishment of Germany’s guest worker system through a series of bilateral treaties in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1973 recruitment stop. After the recruitment stop, political elites used the experience of unintended and large-scale immigrant settlement to construct a national narrative of Germany as a “country of non-immigration.” The second case study examines the reopening of guest worker recruitment channels – this time with Central and Eastern European sending states – in the 1990s. The chapter’s third case study examines the Green Card program of 2000 which marked Germany’s first foray into high-skilled immigration and, despite its limited recruitment success, marked the beginning of a debate that sought to reframe (high-skilled) immigration as being in Germany’s national interest. Our final case study examines the passage of the 2004 Immigration Act by Germany’s first Social Democratic-Green government. The Act signifies the failure of paradigmatic reform: rather than being a historic milestone, it left in place the recruitment stop and provided for the admission of high-skilled immigrants only the basis of regulatory exemptions.