The Implementation of Access Policies – Immigration Offices and the Work Permit for Asylum-Seekers and ‘Tolerated’ Persons in Germany

Officials at municipal immigration offices play a crucial role in the implementation of labour market access policies, being responsible for the issuance of work permits. The aim of this paper is to detect the mechanisms underlying observed variation in implementation of labour market access policies for asylum-seekers and persons with a toleration status in Germany. Previous studies have indicated that this administrative practice varies regionally. It is argued that the discretionary decision about work permits taken by street-level bureaucrats is a type of internal immigration control. Germany’s institutional structure and its current status of a receiver of high numbers of asylum applications make it an apt case to investigate the yet under-researched implementation of these internal migration control policies by subnational state actors and their role in (re-)producing or mediating legal uncertainty. Based on semi-structured interviews with caseworkers and directors of immigration offices in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in autumn 2017, the paper delineates how officials implementing access policies operate in the area of conflict between immigration control and integration. It shows that the type of implementation depends on how bureaucrats and their supervisors weight the differing policy objectives of migration control and integration. Studying the explanatory power of these variables, it seeks to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the reasons of variation policy implementation, i.e. in how street-level bureaucrats cope with immigration law’s inbuilt ambiguity.