Do policy legacies matter? Past and present guest worker recruitment in Germany
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies create national immigration ideologies that delineate the range of viable policy responses well into the future. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to an immigration ideology even long after its emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a legacy's substantive bounds? This article examines the relationship between Germany's legacy of postwar guest worker recruitment and subsequent policy choices in the 1990s. The failure of the postwar system to prevent settlement left behind a no-immigration ideology that precluded the future pursuit of economic immigration. I argue that the ability of government officials to resume recruitment in the 1990s critically hinged on their ability to devise a recruitment system that could credibly commit to settlement prevention. Policy-makers pursued policies that—in contrast to the past—were premised on worker rotation, annual quotas, the denial of family unification and the absence of labour market integration. This article shows that policy legacies not only have constraining but also enabling effects. By providing opportunities for policy learning, legacies can create opportunities for policy innovation even within the constraints of paradigmatic path dependence.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it