One of the biggest immigration waves to Germany started in the 1960s. Due to a shortage of laborers during the Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") in the 1950s and 1960s, the Western-German government signed bilateral recruitment agreements with Italy in 1955, Greece in 1960, Turkey in 1961, Morocco in 1963, Portugal in 1964, Tunisia in 1965 and Yugoslavia in 1968. These agreements allowed the recruitment of so called Gastarbeiter to work in the industrial sector for jobs that required few qualifications. Children born to Gastarbeiter received the right to reside in Germany but were not granted citizenship; this was known as the "Aufenthaltsberechtigung" ("right to reside"). Many of the descendants of those Gastarbeiter still live in Germany and many picked up German citizenship.
The GDR also recruited Gastarbeiter, who mostly came from Vietnam, North Korea, Angola, Mozambique and Cuba. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1990, the population of guest-workers still remaining in the former East Germany faced deportation, premature discontinuation of residence and work permits as well as open discrimination in the workplace.
