German employers' lobbying and the worsening of global economic outlook in the 1970s led to these temporary measures being made increasingly permanent, with a path to permanent residency, but not citizenship.
In the 1990s (and in a process that continues today), Germany relaxed its jus sanguinis citizenship laws, and German society, influenced by the political approaches of its western neighbors, debated profoundly about how to reconcile its historical notion of Germanness with its desire to participate and show leadership in an increasingly multicultural European Union, all the while showing proper human compassion to its decidedly different residents of foreign descent. In Germany's case, this was particularly interesting, because the German people have long been a nation split between several sovereign states, yet a shared sense of German belonging has transcended centuries of political upheaval; nonetheless the State of Germany -- in its various guises and predecessors going back before the Unification of 1871 -- has been the one polity that was always intrinsically German.
Today, this questioning of what it means to be [nation] in a classic nation-state is ongoing Sweden and beginning in Denmark; it's also causing angst in Austria and Hungary, where the recent rise in immigration (or transiting migrants) is causing conflicts with a national identity that was built -- both by domestic and foreign forces -- in the aftermath of the First World War to emphasize maximum contrast with conflicting nations who would go on to gain their own nation-states.
Japan's outlook on immigration is not entire unlike those practiced by small European states defined solely around the self-determination of a single nation bound together largely, but not exclusively, by ethnicity, shared language, and implied lineage to predecessor states somehow connected to the nation in question. It's under demographic pressure, but its past experiments with immigration have shown that widespread assimilation foreigners is out of question, and it can only import people if it's willing to re-examine what it means to be Japanese. Given their high-tech economic base, they may opt to pursue that solution instead, while less economically fortunate Eastern Europe can't pursue as much automation, and will have to opt for immigration.
