Fragility is a concept that overlaps with vulnerability or precarity, standing on the antipode of resilience. In this chapter, the fragility of a specific migration system, namely the Gastarbeiter migration from Southern Europe to West Germany is used as a remarkable example of a mobility scheme fragile from its very inception. Scholars in the 1970s described labor migrants with various negative terms, mostly borrowed by the Marxist tradition, namely as a reserve army, an under-class, a buffer, a burden, human material, and a mere commodity to be exchanged. Apart from a kind of ethnological interest about the “lowest of the low”, they perceived the migrant workers as the building blocks of a greater construct, namely Western capitalism. This chapter is a critical appraisal of the Marxist critique on the fragile position of the Gastarbeiter in West Germany in the light of the broad global shift in migration in the 1970s.