The construction of the labour migrant's body: federal Germany's medical selection of Turkish labour migrants (1961-1973)

Abstract

Health boundaries may demarcate the nation state without necessarily running along its territorial borders. Their intention is to regulate the mobility of people and objects across state borders from a health politics point of view. However, delineating spaces of liminality, health boundaries not only restrict, but also constitute spaces of creative power as immigration studies show. In this chapter, I focus on a distinct moment in Federal Germany's recruitment of Turkish labour from 1961 to 1973: the medical examinations of prospective Turkish labour migrants conducted in the German recruitment office in Istanbul to assess the applicants' work suitability and general health status. Specifically, I concentrate on the question of how, in relation to the requirements of industrial labour and national citizenship regulations, the body of the Turkish labour migrant was constructed in these medical examinations. Combining concepts taken from the work of Michel Foucault and disability studies, I trace how certain conceptualisations of the labour migrant's body emerged along the lines of health, disease, bodily ability and disability. Furthermore, I analyse how this construction process of the body overlapped in various ways with notions of race and gender. I argue that the medical immigrant examination was no neutral scientific endeavour. Rather, in accordance with industrial requirements and national health politics, it served as a selection procedure combining inclusionary and exclusionary power mechanisms with the logic of risk calculation to rationalise, normalise and commodify the labour migrant's body. My chapter contributes to the existing research in a twofold way: by introducing public health and body politics as a new level of analysis in the literature on Turkish migration to Germany and by focusing on the neglected field of medical immigrant examinations designed for state-recruited labour migrants, not future citizens.