Spurwechsel in German migration policy

The legal and political processing of asylum and labour migration used to follow different logics, humanitarian need v. individual performance, respectively. This binarity is losing traction, as neoliberal performance criteria and mundane labour needs hold entry in the asylum domain. In this chapter, I illustrate this trend along the so-called Spurwechsel (track change) in German migration policy. Importantly, what started, under a conservative government, as a pragmatic balancing between competing migration control and migrant integration imperatives, has in the meantime, under a left-dominated government, turned into a philosophical “paradigm change”. With this transition, the migration control imperative has all but disappeared, in favour of an expansive understanding of integration as “integration for all immediately” (Kolb 2023).