Revisiting the Right to Humanitarian Protection: Vietnamese Citizens, Asylum, and Postunity Germany

After November 1989, Vietnamese labor migrants from the GDR and other Eastern European countries applied for humanitarian protection in the Federal Republic in growing numbers. In both 1990 and 1992, Vietnamese comprised the fifth largest national group of asylum seekers in the Federal Republic, contributing to the unprecedented rise in the number of refugees in the country. Scholars such as Étienne Balibar, Damani Partridge, Pipo Bui, and Phi Hong Su have underscored the strengthening of political and geographic borders against non-citizens that accompanied the end of the Cold War, German unity, and globalization. Thinking alongside this scholarship, I investigate how Vietnamese asylum seekers legally challenged the boundaries of political protection in post-unity Germany.

Specifically, I examine Vietnamese lawsuits against the Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees in administrative courts. Vietnamese laborers used asylum as one means to renegotiate their status in the unified country, just as Federal Republic leaders amended the constitution, restricting humanitarian protection. Exploring how Vietnamese narrated their cases for asylum, and then used the courts to challenge rejections of their cases, I argue that some Vietnamese citizens played within the discursive framework for humanitarian protection previously constructed by West German leaders, policymakers, journalists, and immigration officials. Others directly confronted established ideas about political asylum, contending that the violence of systemic poverty qualified them for humanitarian protection. This paper ultimately seeks to understand how migrants shape historical processes and social transformations, use the judicial system to circumvent the economic and social structures built to exclude them from a national body, and redefine who belongs in the nation-state.