Fear of the Family by Lauren Stokes;

Author:Lauren Stokes;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Age Limit of Six

The Kohl cabinet was ultimately forced to abandon the age limit of six because of considerations of foreign policy rather than because it was considered unconstitutional or incompatible with German liberalism. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the FDP was specifically concerned about the 1970 Association Agreement with Turkey. He worried that on December 1, 1986, Turkish citizens might come to West Germany, be denied entry, and then appeal to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to uphold the promise of free movement. If the ECJ chose to uphold the free movement provisions of the Association Agreement, the FRG would lose any possibility of enforcing effective control over the movement of Turkish citizens.

The Foreign Ministry believed that Turkey could be negotiated out of freedom of movement but worried that introducing restrictions on child migration would make those negotiations more difficult. As Genscher explained, “Foreign policy considerations force us to keep the migration regulations for Turks as liberal as it can be justified domestically. . . . We should only give in to domestic pressure when the foreign policy risk of worsening our relationship with Turkey is really worth it.”141 İlter Türkmen, the Turkish foreign minister, had informed the FRG that the imposition of an age limit would be a “bombshell” interpreted as an attempt to separate families.142 Turkish diplomats would only give up on full freedom of movement in exchange for serious concessions. During one meeting in May 1984, they proposed a set of compensatory measures that included lowering the retirement age for Turkish citizens who worked in Europe to fifty-five to match that in Turkey, getting rid of the visa requirements that had been introduced to curb asylum seekers in June 1980, paying equal child allowances to children who lived in Turkey, repealing the waiting period granting immediate access to the labor market for family members, and expanding the group of people who were eligible for family reunification to include children up to the age of twenty-one and dependent parents of foreign workers.143

Within this context, the Foreign Ministry argued that the state should give up on the idea of restricting child migration and move toward restricting marriage migration instead, but the Interior Ministry continued to push for an age limit of six.144 Genscher raised the stakes in October 1984 by threatening to resign as foreign minister if this age limit was implemented.145 His threat convinced Kohl to drop the idea. Although Kohl continued to support the age limit in principle, it would not be floated as a possibility again until after EEC institutions defused the threat of free movement.

The dramatic but ultimately fruitless confrontation over the age limit damaged the ability of the FDP-CDU/CSU coalition to compromise or even to discuss migration policy. Liselotte Funcke, federal commissioner for the Promotion of Integration of Foreign Workers and Their Family Members, appears to have lost her ability to intervene in policymaking after her public opposition to the age limit. The Labor Ministry argued that she was overstepping the

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