Introduction

The German welfare state and its emphasis on status maintenance seem to cement migrants’ worse socio-economic position, and contribute to their exclusion. However, its contribution-based logic has also been the primary mode of initial welfare access for guestworkers (Bommes, 2000). This uneven impact of the welfare system interacts in complicated ways with education chances for the second and now third generation of immigrants, and with the formal integration mode of an ethnicity-centred migration model for ethnic German repatriates.

Scrutinising migrants’ status in the German case, this chapter aims to develop arguments in the literature about the relative exclusion of migrants (Sainsbury, 2006) and the structural impact of welfare states on their social inclusion patterns (Morissens and Sainsbury, 2005; Schierup et al, 2006). It sets out to explain the system-specific modes of inclusion and their differential impact on migrants with the help of a policy legacy perspective. The second section contextualises the position of Germany's migrants today in a framework of historical policy legacies. This shows how statuses and rights of migrants have, until today, historically been derived from their entry as guestworker or ethnic German. In the subsequent section, the dominant domains of migrant inclusion are identified in this context, as are sources of intergenerational pathways of inclusion. We review empirical studies that have scrutinised migrants’ social inclusion, labour market participation and links to educational attainment to illustrate and qualify the ways in which differential inclusion plays out in the German welfare state. This allows us to see how welfare inclusion logics have also affected traditional German ethnicitybased migrant inclusion. We finally pay a brief tribute to political participation as a cross-cutting rights regime. In sum, we identify and assess three main – yet not mutually exclusive – domains of inclusion: via the labour market in the case of the original ‘guestworkers’, via educational attainment and later employment prospects for second-generation German-born immigrants and via ethnicityoriented ‘management’ of welfare biographies and political participation for ethnic German repatriates. We are also able to highlight some of the shortcomings and blind spots of the differential social inclusion arguments revised and qualified here, and to re-assess the mechanisms of inclusion the conservative-corporatist welfare regime (Esping-Andersen, 1990) opens and constrains for migrants.