Sunday, March 16, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
By 1970, fifty percent of the nearly three million foreigners residing in West Germany were concentrated in only four percent of neighborhoods. State officials began to refer to neighborhoods with a large foreign population as neighborhoods that were approaching the “limit of tolerance” for the presence of foreigners. This locution signaled a kind of moral panic about the fact that immigrant communities were claiming their own spaces inside of Germany. In 1975, the federal government instituted a new policy whereby neighborhoods with 12% foreign population would be closed to further foreign settlement. Neighborhoods with between 8 and 12% foreign population had the choice of whether or not to prohibit new foreign settlement into their neighborhood, a practice known as instituting a Zuzugssperre. New migrants who entered the country received stamps in their passport listing the neighborhoods into which they could not settle. The policy was justified in terms of a benevolent paternalism of integration. If immigrants were going to integrate into German society, they had to be dispersed through that society. However, widespread criticism as well as serious problems with implementation forced the repeal of the policy in 1977. Despite its short implementation period, I argue that the practice of Zuzugssperre reflects longer patterns of thinking about community, race, and space within German social thought.
