Institute for Social Science Research

This paper addresses the status of "immigrant women" in a non-immigration country.International migration reflects the need of the receiving country for a certain kind of worker, i.e., workers with a temporary time perspective,and an instrumental orientation toward work, thus, flexible, hard-working and cheap, keeping reference groups and delaying gratification for return home. These are at least the initial characteristics which migrants exemplify par excellence.The recruitment and participation of women in the recruitment process should say even more about the work to be done and nature of the receiving society. Although women migrants are present in all contemporary European migratory processes, the Federal Republic of Germany is the country which most officially and systematically recruited and hired foreign women for its workforce before 1973. As potentially the most vulnerable member of the labour force,the status of foreign women in the German labour market may serve as an indicator of transformations in the economy as well as broader societal changes.