Introduction
What role have foreign families played in the transformation of the European welfare state? French, Dutch, and British authorities all found that family policies were a major component of negotiating their relationship with colonial and later post-colonial migrants.Footnote 1 Migrants have also used their family ties to claim a form of social belonging: for example, many immigrants to France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used their status as ‘reproductive citizens’ who procreated and supported families in order to gain social rights.Footnote 2 While Germany has been much slower than France to recognise itself as an ‘immigrant nation’, this article argues that families of guest workers also used their reproductive labour to make claims on the West German welfare system in the 1960s and 1970s. Their claims met pre-existing state assumptions about the role of the family in welfare provision: specifically, that family members performed care work in order to provide new workers for the labour market while relieving the state of the burden of paying for social welfare programmes that would otherwise be necessary to attain that objective.
The conservative familial West German welfare state relied on a specific model of the family: the male breadwinner and the female ‘consuming housewife’ tasked with the work of social reproduction.Footnote 3 It further relied on the ‘subsidiarity’ principle, a bedrock of social Catholic thought, whereby ‘the state shall only interfere in “private life” when the capacity of smaller social units, such as the family or the business, to guarantee their members’ social security has been reached’.Footnote 4 As it formulated this family policy, West Germany consistently defined itself against two regimes that were understood to have violated the sanctity of the family: the defeated Nazi regime and the socialist East German state. Officials from across the political spectrum came to understand the preservation of the male-breadwinner, female-homemaker family as a moral imperative.Footnote 5 This imperative subsequently guided policy. For instance, the West German state chose to adopt half-day school and not to invest in state-funded childcare, two decisions that made it difficult for women to combine waged work with housework and that therefore upheld the state's vision of the family.Footnote 6
The state's decision to recruit ‘guest workers’ was also intimately related to West Germany's preference for a conservative-familial welfare state. As West Germany reached full employment in the mid-1950s, German women already had a role in the household, and the state did not make efforts to bring them into the waged labour market. Ludwig Erhard, in his capacity as the country's first economics minister, pushed for the first bilateral agreement for labour recruitment, made with Italy in 1955, in part because he saw increased efforts to bring German women into the labour market as unacceptable state incursions into the economy.Footnote 7 His ministry would only seek to place German women in the work force on a part-time basis, one that was still compatible with their primary role in the household.Footnote 8
Labour recruitment was guided by the semi-official doctrine of conservative familialism, but also tested its limits. Employers chose to recruit both foreign men and foreign women as workers in West Germany, often explicitly recruiting married couples and thus significantly accelerating the process of family migration to West Germany.Footnote 9 Previous scholarship about the 15 to 30 per cent of guest workers who were women in any given year has underlined the importance of gender to understanding the guest worker programme.Footnote 10 This article builds on that work by showing how the decision to recruit foreign women as workers also exposed the gaps in a welfare state that assumed women would stay at home. Familial welfare states tacitly assume the existence of a group of individuals – principally women – who are always already available to do the work of social reproduction in lieu of the social welfare programmes that might provide the same. This assumption failed to cover families in which both parents had been recruited to West Germany on the basis of fulltime employment outside the home.
This article examines how the state identified the problem of providing childcare for the children of foreign workers, and how foreign workers’ attempt to solve this problem led to the 1973 court case that established a legal right to family reunification. Using the records of welfare agencies, the German Council of Municipalities and regional state archives, I show that local municipalities identified providing childcare for foreign children as a challenge alongside that of education.Footnote 11 Some guest workers responded to this situation by politicising their situation and demanding employer and state investment in childcare.Footnote 12 Others improvised solutions to their need for childcare, including the single most common solution used by those native-born German women who sought to balance motherhood with waged work: the extended family. Many guestworker parents left children in the care of the extended family abroad. Others, however, sought to recreate the extended family in West Germany. Federal officials understood this unanticipated family migration not as an example of foreigners integrating into the welfare state by adopting the same solution as Germans but as proof of the fact that foreigners had a different ‘sense of family’ that made them pathologically dependent on their extended family members. In this attempt to essentialise family migration in terms of innate ‘Southern’ or ‘Mediterranean’ values, German officials engaged in a long tradition of defining their values in opposition to Southern Europe.Footnote 13 Via such characterisations of the ‘Southern family’, officials implied that foreigners were the cause of the welfare state's problems. This article will argue that it is more useful to see them as the most acute observers of its pre-existing tensions.Footnote 14
It is in this context that we can understand the full implications of the 1973 court case that established a legal right to family reunification for guest workers in West Germany. A married couple from Spain who had come to Germany as workers subsequently had children. When they decided to bring the wife's mother as well, they fought for the grandmother's residence permit at the Federal Administrative Court. The court's reasoning in the ‘Spanish grandmother’ case upheld the central assumptions of the conservative-familial welfare state, making this case an example of how the logic of the welfare state had structured migration law already during the postwar economic boom. The court granted the right to family migration not based on the language of human rights or family unity, but rather on a fantasy that specific configurations of the foreign family could make it easier for that family to care for itself without recourse to the welfare state. The ‘market-conforming’ foreign family could help the welfare state to function without creating any reciprocal obligations from that same state.
Guest Worker Recruitment and the ‘Southern Family’
As West Germany hit full employment in the 1950s, foreigners came to West Germany looking for work while employers pressed the state to be able to recruit labour from elsewhere. Starting in 1955, West Germany signed bilateral recruitment agreements with Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey. Organised labour was initially quite anxious about the widescale recruitment of foreign labour and resisted wide-scale recruitment. Forced to acquiesce to a deal struck between the state and employers, the unions had a more positive experience with migrant labour than union leadership had initially anticipated.Footnote 15 By the late 1960s the German Trade Union Confederation understood migrant workers as a net good for the German state because they paid the same taxes as domestic workers but would presumably make fewer claims on the welfare state in their life course.Footnote 16
The West German welfare state incorporated foreigners in a way that further ethnicised those workers, whose passports were taken to signify their religious identities and thus the appropriate para-state organisation to look after their affairs. Presumably Catholic guest workers from Portugal, Spain and Italy were assigned to the Catholic welfare organisation Caritas, while guest workers from Greece were presumed to be Greek Orthodox and assigned to the Evangelical welfare organisation Diakonie. In the absence of a Muslim welfare association, Yugoslavian and Turkish citizens were assigned to Workers’ Welfare [Arbeiterwohlfahrt], the organisation which was linked to the socialist labour movement.Footnote 17 Presumed religious identity determined welfare provision, and the pre-existing diversity within each national group was erased in the process of linking national groups to service providers.Footnote 18
The assignment of foreign workers to religious service providers based on citizenship rather than personal choice sometimes led to clashes between social workers and their clients. Many individuals had migrated to Germany in part because they opposed the political regime in their home country, and subsequently resented the pastoral care of social workers who supported those regimes. Caritas social workers tended to idealise a kind of Catholic family which they imagined to exist in rural Spain and Italy. These social workers complained that some guest workers appeared to have come to Germany to escape their own families, and chastised couples where both parents worked and left their children in institutional care.Footnote 19 The social workers of Diakonie were also committed to their idealisation of the Greek family: they tried to devise solutions for Greek women who gave birth to children out-of-wedlock in Germany. They wanted the women to be able to give the children up for adoption and return to Greece without anyone knowing, preserving the women's ability to get married in their hometown.Footnote 20 AWO, the socialist welfare organisation, joined the other two organisations in advocating for generous policies towards family reunification, although it was less committed to a specific ideal of the family.
Social workers advocated for family reunification because they believed that the family would protect guest workers from the dangers of life in Germany as well as protect Germans from guest workers. Giacomo Maturi was a law student from Northern Italy who positioned himself as a kind of ‘native expert’ for welfare organisations, a role in which he reproduced stereotypes that Northern Italians had about Southern Italians and extended them over the entire cultural space of the European ‘South’, from Portugal and Spain to Yugoslavia and Turkey.Footnote 21 Maturi persistently argued that male guest workers needed wives to take care of them both domestically and sexually. At a 1960 presentation at a conference on problems associated with labour recruitment, he explained that for ‘Southerners [Südländer] . . . taking care of the home and preparing food is an exclusively female affair. The southern man is far more inept at these household tasks than the German.’ He also strongly suggested that family reunification could solve ‘problems’ regarding ‘the Southerner's attitude to women and the consequences in relation to German girls and women’, effectively portraying family reunification as a way to sate the sexual desire of foreign men.Footnote 22 The argument was even stronger when applied to foreign women, as Maturi explained at another presentation at the same conference: ‘These girls and women do not have the footing of the family and the environment . . . without special supervision they are exposed to many dangers that can have negative effects. Successful employment of foreign women will only be possible through the reunification of families.’Footnote 23 The situation of male workers undoubtedly improved as part of families, but women workers were almost unthinkable outside of it.
Municipal authorities made similar arguments behind the scenes. City representatives were particularly concerned by the presence of illegitimate children, made even more visible due to recent changes in the West German legal system. Before 1961, a child born out-of-wedlock was automatically assigned a legal guardian from the local Youth Office, a state guardian who had more power over the child than its own mother. In 1961 a new family law reform allowed single mothers to apply to receive legal guardianship over their own children and judges to rule on the mother's suitability for legal guardianship.Footnote 24 As single mothers petitioned for guardianship, they told judges that the fathers of their children were foreign men. Social workers perceived this as a problem in part because the guest workers largely came from countries that did not allow women to ask men for child support unless the men had already recognised the child as their own. Foreign men might flee the country without acknowledging their responsibilities, leaving the West German mother with no recourse to appeal for child support.Footnote 25
Municipal authorities advocated for family migration as a prophylactic measure to protect the state from having to support single mothers. The mayor of Stuttgart wrote a 1962 letter to the German Council of Municipalities where he demanded a solution to ‘the problem of illegitimate children . . . because many of the fathers [of illegitimate children] are already married and have a family in their homeland, it is clear that the endangerment of German girls through the many foreign men separated from their families . . . is closely connected to the crucial issue of family reunification.’Footnote 26 When the German Council of Municipalities conducted a survey of its members about their experiences with ‘guest workers’ in January 1964, every single city administrator responded that they were in favour of family reunion, and many were explicit about the role of the family in containing the consequences of sexual activity. Reutlingen hoped that family reunification would ‘transfer the foreigners’ private lives from the waiting room in the train station and the street into apartments’,Footnote 27 while Duisburg advocated for family reunification in order to prevent the male guest worker from ‘develop[ing] illegitimate relationships with German girls and women, with all of their undesirable side effects’.Footnote 28
These arguments in favour of family reunion proceeded from two assumptions: first, the belief that the ‘family’ was somehow particularly important for ‘Southern’ workers, and second, the idea that the German and foreign family should not mix with each other.Footnote 29 The second assumption was not specifically German. Sarah van Walsum has shown that the Dutch state began to allow family migration for male guest workers after riots broke out around the sensitive issue of foreign men approaching Dutch girls at dance halls.Footnote 30 Even though family reunification was understood as one way to preserve the German family, state officials tended to describe foreign workers’ desires to live with their family members as feelings that distinguished them from Germans rather than an impulse that they shared with Germans. Migrants who tried to keep their families together were not understood as emotionally or psychologically similar to Germans. Instead, their actions were interpreted as part of a ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘Southern’ cultural pattern that made migrants incapable of functioning properly outside of the family. This stereotype contributed to the fact that officials were exceptionally slow to understand family migration as evidence of a long-term settlement process, even though families had already begun to constitute themselves in West Germany in the early 1960s.
The Childcare Problem
Just as they had been early to sound the alarm about illegitimate children, municipal authorities were also some of the first state officials to register the fact that foreign families who were settling in West Germany as foreigners brought their children with them. The central state had no way of registering this migration in part because child migration was not registered in official statistics until children turned sixteen. Cities were the first level of government that experienced parents making demands for their children. Childcare proved to be a particularly contentious issue, in part because the decision to draw on foreign labour in the first place had been a decision to keep married German women in the home and thus not to prioritise childcare as a task of the welfare state. During the 1960s there were only enough places in institutionalised childcare for roughly one-third of children.Footnote 31 West German women on waiting lists for kindergartens and day cares relied on their extended family to balance domestic responsibilities with their work outside of the home. Newly arrived migrant women were at the bottom of these lists, and their social networks In West Germany were composed primarily of other full-time wage workers. What options did they have when they were looking for childcare?
When the German Council of Municipalities circulated a 1964 survey asking city administrators about their experiences with ‘guest workers’, dozens of cities responded with reference to the challenges of providing childcare. Different cities had different policies about how to respond to needy foreign families. In Munich the municipal Youth Office rejected all foreigners’ applications for kindergarten and daycare ‘because otherwise an uncontrollable flood of such applications will rush in, creating massive costs for the city’.Footnote 32 In Kassel, ‘young women with children, who make do with the most primitive housing in order to save money and avoid family separation’, found that their husbands did not make enough money to support the family in Germany. ‘The wives are therefore forced to take a job and allow their children to be watched by relatives who they have brought in. In some cases, public support has been granted for the care of foreign families.’Footnote 33 Wilhelmshaven employed foreign women in the textile industry, but constantly worried about the possibility that these women might bring husbands and children with them: ‘if they were to bring their husbands, their wives’ companies could not find jobs for them . . . with multiple small children the housing of the family would become difficult, the working mother would have to look after the children, and her labour assignment would be put into question . . . the family would become needy and would revert to public welfare.’Footnote 34 As these letters make clear, employing foreign women was not a foolproof solution to avoid building childcare infrastructure. The decision to employ foreign women just raised a new set of questions about whether the state was responsible for providing care for non-citizen children.
Several cities reported that although they gave residence permits to foreign wives in order to stabilise male workers, they only granted said wives work permits when the women in question could prove that their children were already being looked after without the help of the state.Footnote 35 In practice, foreign women who worked and could not find childcare options outside of the home often relied on their older children to look after their younger children. One social worker in Frankfurt reported on the human costs of this policy. She had worked with a family where an older daughter brought to look after her younger sister while the parents were at work attempted suicide ‘because she can no longer stand the loneliness that she has gotten into’. She had also counselled a thirteen-year-old who became pregnant when she was visited ‘by an acquaintance of the family’ while her parents were at work.Footnote 36 At a 1968 meeting in the Interior Ministry, social workers complained that ‘unfortunately the trend . . . is that [foreign women] give their children to other people during the day . . . every now and then the children are also left to their own devices.’ At this meeting, some social workers suggested that the state ought to consider whether there was any legal way for it to deport minors, arguing that deporting a child with negligent parents could be a ‘more humane solution’ than allowing the child to live in Germany.Footnote 37 Another Frankfurt social worker explained that the ‘completely different mentality and value system of the Southerners’ made their work difficult: ‘The term “child abuse” cannot be explained to, for example, Orientals. They see their children as their own property, which they can use as they see fit.’Footnote 38 As with the arguments in favour of family reunion, stereotypes about the ‘Southern’ or ‘Oriental’ family – a characteristic slippage of ‘Orientalism, Mediterranean style’ – enabled officials to depict child neglect as a foreign problem.Footnote 39 The welfare state had failed to consider that foreign workers might have children, but stereotypes allowed the state to shift the responsibility for the consequences of its decisions to those foreign workers whose parenting practices were now cast as atavistic and illiberal.
Migrant women often articulated their demands in ways that were similar to those of West German women, including through calling on the welfare state to expand to meet the needs of their families.Footnote 40 A group of Spanish and Italian women in Frankfurt demonstrated for a ‘multinational kindergarten’ in 1973. The flyer announcing the demonstration was addressed to ‘German women, female colleagues and neighbours’, and it made an appeal from their shared position as women: ‘Many of us are forced to leave our children with relatives in the South of Italy, but we have to be here and work, otherwise we would starve. We are separated from our children as mothers, and we suffer from this just as our children do.’ They went on to explain: ‘our children have already paid far too much for this situation . . . one of our daughters was struck dumb after the shock of separation from her parents who had to send her back home to her grandmother: the parents had to work and there was no kindergarten that the child could go to.’Footnote 41 Spanish women in Essen were initially excited when they heard that the local branch of the Catholic welfare association Caritas planned to open a new kindergarten, but when they discovered that it planned to open two hours after most women went to work, and would send the children home without lunch, they entered the local Catholic church during a German-language mass and remained there overnight, refusing to leave until they secured a promise from the local bishop that the kindergarten would respond to the needs of women who worked full-time.Footnote 42
When foreign women demanded kindergartens, they were arguably part of a much broader political movement that sought to expand the welfare state to meet the needs of families in Germany. Women in the German Confederation of Trade Unions had also called for an expansion of kindergartens, and the contemporaneous ‘mother's movement’ created autonomous childcare collectives.Footnote 43 While politicians largely failed to adopt the feminist argument that childcare could contribute to women's emancipation, parties did support the expansion of kindergartens based on their own ideas about social welfare. For Social Democrats, this meant stressing the educational benefits of kindergartens for children from the working class – drawing on the model of Head Start in the United States – while the Christian Social Union hoped that kindergartens would work to increase birthrates.Footnote 44 Between 1965 and 1974 the number of kindergartens increased by nearly 50 per cent, from 14,113 to 21,841, although this expansion in childcare still only covered half of the children in West Germany.Footnote 45 Foreign women were particularly likely to live in places where childcare infrastructure continued to be poorly funded. One 1982 investigation found a correlation between a high percentage of foreigners in a district and a low number of kindergarten spots for children. Politicians who scolded foreign parents for not sending their children to kindergarten rarely stopped to first consider whether such a thing was actually feasible within the infrastructure of the welfare state.Footnote 46
The ‘Grandmother Solution’
Many foreign mothers decided to integrate into the German welfare state by adopting the same solution as most mothers who worked for wages in West Germany – grandparents. Half of all working German mothers in 1962 relied on grandparents to look after children while they were at work, and despite the gradual expansion of childcare facilities, the simultaneous expansion of women in the workforce ensured that this proportion would remain largely unchanged through at least the 1980s.Footnote 47 All three of the social work agencies issued a joint statement in support of what the agencies called the ‘grandparent solution’ by early 1970. Throughout that year, social workers, Social Democratic politicians, and representatives from the home countries of guest workers raised the idea in the Bundestag and in meetings with the federal president. At the Bundestag, the suggestion received a swift rebuke: relaxing the principle of only allowing reunification for the nuclear family would lead to the ‘resettlement of extended families and entire clans’.Footnote 48 The use of the term ‘clan’ underlines the continued relevance of the idea of the foreign ‘Southern’ family.
Despite resistance to the ‘grandparent solution’ on the national level, migrants continued to bring grandparents with them. Individual federal states developed their own policies on the ‘grandparent solution’. Baden-Württemberg began to let in grandparents on a case-by-case basis in 1968 but tried to ensure that it remained the exception rather than the rule.Footnote 49 Those migrants who found their applications denied could, and did, submit petitions to the Interior Ministry.Footnote 50 They could also appeal their cases in court. In one case, a widowed Greek woman who had two sons living in West Germany and two daughters living in Greece wanted to stay with her sons and look after her grandchildren so that her daughter-in-law, who brought in 45 per cent of the family's income, could continue to work. The local Foreigners’ Office refused to give her a residence permit, a decision upheld in court in December 1971.Footnote 51 The same court ruled in April 1972 that a forty-eight-year-old woman from Greece could not stay with her son, his wife, and their three children. Her lawyer argued that it was in the public interest for the grandmother to stay and look after the children so that the foreign workers would not be ‘fully isolated and without support, but would lead an orderly family life’, but this argument did not persuade the judge, who used the idea of the ‘Southern European’ family to justify his decision to exclude the woman:
In light of the well-known fact that particularly for Southern and Southeastern Europeans, who compose the largest portion of guest workers in the Federal Republic, the extended family has an especially pronounced cohesion, we can expect that if it were allowed, migration of the further family members would also occur. It is clear that if we were to relinquish the principle of only allowing family migration for the nuclear family, this would lead to a severe additional burden on the internal order in the Federal Republic and its social and economic structure.Footnote 52
West Berlin was one of the most vocal proponents of the ‘grandparent solution’. It had the highest proportion of female guest workers of any city in West Germany because it employed women in its electronics and textile industries.Footnote 53 Starting in 1970 West Berlin began to allow foreign grandparents to visit in order to look after children for up to six or nine months at a time instead of the standard three months.Footnote 54 Officials in West Berlin suggested that other states should also follow their lead and allow grandmothers to stay for six or nine months at a time, explaining that ‘we should accept the foreigners’ different definition of the family [andersartige Familienbegriff] and, for example, allow the grandmother to stay, when she can be used to look after the unattended children.’Footnote 55 Here the ‘Southern family’ is used to argue for inclusion, but the disingenuous suggestion that a grandmother represented a ‘different definition of the family’ from German definitions allowed West Berlin officials to understand themselves as generous.
Foreigners who brought grandparents with them to care for children were in fact demonstrating an exceptional level of integration into the West German welfare state and its pre-existing assumptions about working motherhood. German mothers were also only able to manage waged labour through reliance on the reproductive labour of their extended families. Foreign women had not invented the ‘grandparent solution’ – they just needed residence permits to make use of it. When they tried to obtain those permits, however, the widespread assumption that Southerners had a ‘different definition of the family’ functioned as a double-edged sword. State officials understood foreigners’ requests for residence permits as a request for special treatment and the state's willingness to provide those residence permits as an act of generosity. In this context, migrant efforts to achieve family reunification no longer appeared to be political activism. Their demands could be dismissed as another sign of the ‘excessive family sense’ of the Southerner rather than recognised as an attempt to integrate into a welfare state that assumed that care work was the responsibility of the individual family.Footnote 56
Migrants continued to bring grandmothers, and individual Foreigners’ Offices continued to approve and deny their residence permits. One of these denials would be appealed all the way to the Federal Administrative Court in 1973. In this particular case, a Spanish woman had come to West Germany in 1961. In 1965 she married a Spanish man. The couple now had three children, all born in Germany. In 1968 they tried to bring the woman's mother to live with them and to look after the three children so that both parents could continue their full-time jobs. The local Foreigners’ Office denied the grandmother's residence permit, claiming that if it gave her a permit, the consequence would be ‘an unlimited migration of family members’.Footnote 57 The Chief Federal Attorney supported this reasoning in court. He also argued that the grandmother could become sick at any time and begin to cost the state money. This would be a disaster: ‘if the plaintiff were to become sick and no longer be able to take care of the grandchildren, the daughter would have to give up her job. Then her insurance would also be cancelled.’ One bad bet on a grandmother might lead to the state supporting an entire family of sick Spaniards.Footnote 58
The Federal Administrative Court rejected both arguments on the principle that foreigners were also protected by Article 6 of the West German Basic Law, which states that ‘Marriage and the family shall enjoy the special protection of the state’. The court argued that Article 6 created a ‘duty of care towards the family’ of the guest worker. Drawing on the social Catholic principle of subsidiarity, whereby social tasks should be performed by the smallest possible social unit, the court reasoned that the state was required to help the family achieve self-sufficiency if possible.
The grandmother had the potential to make the family more self-sufficient and in so doing to unburden the welfare state. Normally families with sick children ‘can only cope through breaking off work, giving up income and endangering the mother's job’, but for this family, the grandmother would be able to look after the sick children. Her presence also meant that the children would not cause problems for the state: ‘they will not increase the number of so-called “latch-key children”. They can be crossed off the waiting list for kindergarten spots, already inadequate for the German population. When the children get sick they will not need to be brought to already-overcrowded hospitals for the sole reason that they do not have someone to look after them, and prevent the acceptance of those children who truly need hospitals.’Footnote 59 The state would not have to assume any of these costs – as long as the grandmother remained healthy.
This ruling is embedded in several assumptions about the family's relationship to German society and to the German welfare state. First, the grandmother's care work gains value in part because her daughter and son-in-law both already work full time. If the parents needed to spend more time on childcare it might ‘endanger the mother's job’. By enabling the mother to focus on work, the grandmother enables the state to extract as much labour as possible from its laboriously recruited guest workers. Second, she gains value because the court assumes that the family will only remain in Germany temporarily. The court posited that the family would leave more quickly if they had the grandmother with them, as ‘they bought their own apartment in Madrid at the beginning of 1968 and have to pay off their debts’.Footnote 60 If the mother had to reduce her hours at work for any reason, the couple would have to remain in Germany for longer to repay their debt. Finally, in some sense she gains value because the family is disciplined by debt. Their existing debt in Madrid means the mother is not a flight risk at work – she is motivated to make money. The grandmother enables two adults to work and to save so that they can leave quickly and make few claims on the welfare state. She enables the family to be a welfare state unto itself.
As the first court case to establish that the Basic Law also guaranteed rights to foreigners, this case provided migrants with an important precedent in future legal battles. But the right to family reunification was never grounded in an abstract ideal about family unity. It was based on a concrete understanding of the role of reproductive labour within the West German welfare state. The grandmother's claim to residence is based on the fact that she frees the mother up for more obviously ‘productive’ labour, and the fact that she is cheaper than a kindergarten. If the children grew up, if the mother lost her job, if the grandmother became ill, or perhaps even if the family finally paid off its debt on the distant apartment, her claim would evaporate overnight.
The limited understanding of the utility of the grandmother's reproductive labour is clear from the March 1974 meeting where the federal meeting of Foreigners’ Offices discussed how to put the court's ruling into practice. They closely followed the court's reasoning that the grandmother's claim to stay was based on her labour for her family and by extension for the conservative welfare state. According to the administrative circular – which was not publicly available – a residence permit should only be granted to ‘one grandmother who is healthy, who enhances the functioning of the family [familienfunktionstüchtige], and who is not a burden on the public sector of the Federal Republic’. Bavaria and Hamburg both wanted to additionally specify that permits only be granted for a limited period of time, so that the grandmothers would have to go home as soon as the children were old enough to look after themselves, although they did not specify the precise age at which this would occur.Footnote 61 The circular also specified a grandmother rather than a grandparent – a change from the original demands of foreigners and social workers, who had consistently described residence permits as the ‘grandparent solution’. The state's entire argument for family reunion had always assumed that ‘family members’ were people who performed care work, a category that bureaucrats continued to equate with women. Foreign women made (presumed male) workers less likely to enter either romantic or political entanglements, while foreign families with enough caring women could also keep workers from burdening the West German welfare state.
The ‘Spanish grandmother’ case proved difficult to use as a precedent for family members who were not healthy older women looking after the children of dual-income couples. Seven years later, a teenage girl from Turkey tried to argue for a right to stay in Germany because she looked after the children of her aunt and uncle. Her case was rejected by the Federal Administrative Court, which responded that because of her age, the teenage girl could be expected to try to access the labour market after caring for the children. The uncle and aunt whose children she took care of were also deemed not to be dependent on the dual income – in this case, the wife's smaller income was deemed inessential, so that the court ordered the wife to return home to perform care work instead.Footnote 62 A grandmother in Berlin who went to the same court in 1983 was rejected because the court deemed that the grandmother's labour was not necessary. Her son-in-law had been unemployed since September 1981 and ‘it is not probable that he will have a job again in the foreseeable future’. Because he was unemployed, the father could be expected to look after his own children, and the grandmother's reproductive labour was suddenly nonessential.Footnote 63
The ruling that a man had to take care of his own children is particularly stunning. The Berlin Senator for the Interior had long made decisions based on a principle first articulated by the Bavarian Ministry for the Interior: that fathers who performed childcare were ‘incompatible with Western beliefs about the family’. A foreign man who claimed that he took care of his own children was presumably using his residence permit for a more nefarious purpose.Footnote 64 Following the grandmother precedent, however, care work for foreigners is primarily valuable when it helps the state extract more paid labour. The logic of the market can override the logic of gender: in both cases, the person whose paid work had the least value on the market had to return home to care for the child. A dual-income couple was not allowed to leverage their niece for care work – the mother was forced back into the home. A single-income couple was not allowed to bring their mother to perform care work – the father was forced into the home. Families must conform to the demands of the market, caring for each other and doing so in the way that frees up the most valuable labour for the market.
The grandmother precedent was also eroded because the West German attitude towards grandmothers as caregivers changed as foreign children began to be discussed as potential long-term residents of West Germany. In 1973 the grandmother was imagined as a cheap source of childcare provision that would enable the family to return home more quickly. By 1983, however, the Labour Ministry would be justifying a new blanket exclusion on the entry of foreign parents of German citizens by arguing that foreign grandparents endangered the ‘integration’ of their grandchildren.Footnote 65 The 1973 case had recognised that families are sites of essential reproductive labour, labour that the state will have to perform if the family fails to do so. By the early 1980s, foreign families were coded as sites of excessive and deviant reproductive labour that failed to socialise their members into German culture. When expert attention turned increasingly to the socialisation of foreign children and to another set of welfare state institutions, grandmothers who might teach their children how to speak Spanish or Turkish began to be seen as a threat rather than an asset. Once the grandmother's care had been understood primarily as a way to keep children from taking up space in kindergartens and hospitals – now that same care was understood as pre-programming them for a later encounter with the juvenile justice system.
Conclusion: The ‘Market-Conforming’ Family in the Twenty-first Century
In West Germany, foreigners who sought to meet the demands of a conservative-familial welfare state by reunifying their families within that state were able to do so only when they framed those rights in a way that was consistent with the pre-existing logic of that welfare state. Foreign families won the right to reunify when their reunification would allow them to be self-sufficient. In the future, historians of other welfare states might investigate how those welfare state regimes have treated foreign family members. Did social democratic welfare states such as Norway and Sweden or ‘Mediterranean’ welfare states such as Italy and Spain make the same choices when they were confronted with the challenges of family migration?Footnote 66 The answers to these questions could help to determine whether different welfare regimes adopted different approaches to family migrants, or whether the German experience was typical. Perhaps families deemed ‘foreign’ were always expected to conform to the market, regardless of the pre-existing assumptions of the welfare regime they were entering.
Any commonalities that such research might uncover will be all the more significant because, as this article has also argued, stereotypes about ‘Southern Europe’ performed crucial boundary work within the West German migration regime. The common description of guest workers from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey as ‘Southerners’ drew on a centuries-long tradition of thinking about the area around the Mediterranean as a single cultural space distinct from Northern Europe. In this case, the assumption that individuals from these countries were uniquely dependent on their families functioned to promote family migration but also to depoliticise demands they made on behalf of their families. Stereotypes about the ‘Southerner’ played a larger role in the history of West German migration policy than scholars have previously recognised, both preceding and overlapping with the stereotypes about the ‘Muslim’ that have received more scholarly attention.Footnote 67
Finally, I would suggest that more attention to how welfare states treated those categorised as ‘family migrants’ might also yield new insights into the purported decline of the European welfare state. Family migration has composed the plurality of legal migration into Western Europe since the mid-1970s, so that foreign families have arrived in greater numbers precisely as European states have shifted the responsibility for ameliorating inequality from the welfare state back to individual families. These changes have particularly impacted those families whose social reproduction is seen as a threat: cultural racism implies that these families transmit the wrong values and threaten to become burdens rather than resources. In the twenty-first century several European states have introduced new formal requirements for family reunification that make this logic explicit. Politicians who introduce specific income requirements for family migrants seek to assure voters that foreigners will not ‘burden’ a welfare state financially.Footnote 68 A related strategy seeks to educate would-be migrants in the tasks of social reproduction. For example, Germany requires new ‘family migrants’ to prove that they have German language skills – a measure first suggested in 1981 but only adopted in 2007. The state argues that family migrants who learn German will be able to ‘integrate’ better into life in Germany. The policy also turns the work of learning German into a cost that must be borne by the individual family before it can reconstitute itself, and thus penalises low-income migrants, rural migrants, and migrants without access to German language classes in their home country.Footnote 69 Other European states have introduced requirements that directly address the ‘family skills’ of would-be migrants: for example, spouses who come to France through family reunification must agree to attend a one-day course on parenting as a condition of their residence permit. Meanwhile in the Netherlands, family migrants must create ‘portfolios’ that demonstrate their knowledge of Dutch society, with female migrants often directed to create portfolios about Dutch parenting norms.Footnote 70
Both minimum income requirements and skill requirements perpetuate the idea that migrants primarily burden the welfare state rather than contributing to it. The continuous adoption of such requirements reflects an intensification of the ‘market-conforming’ attitude towards the family evident in the 1973 ‘Spanish grandmother’ case. In that case, a German court recognised the potential value of care work within the welfare state while strictly defining its limits. In contemporary discussions about the welfare state, the care work of foreign families is stigmatised when it produces individuals who might themselves struggle to find employment, but it is valued when it directly supports the reproduction of domestic families. New family reunification requirements across Western Europe encourage foreign women to enter the fields of domestic service, eldercare, and childcare – precisely the services that domestic families need to be able to purchase cheaply to survive the ongoing downsizing of the welfare state.Footnote 71 Policy makers seeking to develop a more humane policy might drop some of the requirements in favour of a policy of relational ethics that recognises that we all need care at some point in our lives. The care work that a grandparent can provide for a grandchild might be one among many reasons to let the grandparent in, but the care work that the grandparent might one day require should never be a reason to keep them out.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the fellow members of the ‘Who Cares in Europe?’ project, especially Jennifer Crane, and to the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. Research of this article was primarily funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Central European History Society. Parts of this article are drawn from Lauren Stokes, Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Thank you to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce the material.
