This chapter explores the asylum crisis of the 1990s. We examine how officials in Germany and the UK dealt with growing evidence of a sizeable population of irregular migrants by deploying the three main strategies for responding to ignorance: denial, elucidation and resignation. Although both governments pursued forms of denial and resignation, these took different forms. In the UK, pragmatism about the limitations of state capacity implied that officials were sanguine about their ‘ignorance’, with pressure emanating from external political scrutiny. In Germany, officials faced an acute conflict between bureaucratic and legal norms of the rule of law. Both cases reveal profound state ambivalence about elucidating a social problem over which they had limited control.