German Maquiladora? Foreign workers in the process of regional economic restructuring

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the German Federal government signed a number of bilateral agreements providing the framework for the recruitment of workers from Central and East European countries. This article analyzes the goals, instruments and (planned as well as unintended) implications of these policies. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that this is—far from a radical reappraisal—just a conservative modernization of the German migration regime. The new regulations combine piecemeal reactions to the global political changes with provisions intended to support the growth of the German economy. Methodologically the paper combines official employment statistics with information from exploratory interviews conducted with commuters in the German‐Czech border region.