The de facto abolition of the basic right to asylum as stipulated in the German constitution by the Bundestag in 1992/93 has for a long time been assumed to be closely related to racist attacks on migrants in Germany in the early 1990s. However, until now neither historical nor other research has been carried out with the aim of corroborating the assumption in a scientific way. This article attempts to do so by evaluating the debates on the right to asylum which have taken place in the Bundestag between 1985 and 1993 by way of a ‘topos analysis’ (after Martin Wengeler). It investigates how the discussion of the basic right to asylum changed and which role the racist attacks played in this. The discursive changes are then analyzed against the backdrop of changing migration regimes and placed into historical context. Our analysis shows that both majority political parties in the German Bundestag, CDU/CSU and SPD, used the racist attacks as an argument to justify the de facto abolition of the basic right to asylum.