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In this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration and the politics of difference. This introduction characterizes “integration” as a dominant policy orientation and discursive regime concerned primarily with understandings of language, communication, and skill which constitute a (trans)national politics of difference. In various sites and national contexts of the global north, migrant “integration” policies render difference and mobility the site of both discursive elaboration and management. This introduction highlights the salience of critical ethnographic analyses for understanding “integration” beyond policy realms, arguing for attention to situated practices, emergent social categories and types, political-economic stakes, logics of linguistic (dis)engagement, and the reproduction of mono- and multilingual social orders. In particular, we propose to untangle this complex by describing three central processes that run through all of the contributions and which, we suggest, are indispensable for the analysis of current and emergent regimes of integration: processes of categorization, of selection, and of activation.

Taking the hasty implementation of 'German support classes' in Austria in 2018 as a starting point, I will lay out recent political developments in Austria similarly marked by speed, i.e. I will focus on language integration policies in more detail, which form a central concern for studies on bilingualism and bilingual education with regard to compulsory language learning in the context of migration policies. In order to understand the role of speed in this contemporary development (i.e. introduction and revision) of language integration policies, I will introduce speed as a theoretical concept, before turning back to what I will call the Austrian case of politics of speed, which goes hand in hand with executive decreeing and a disregard of parliamentary democracy. As I argue in the concluding discussion, this has serious effects on institutions and the population, in the form of institutional lag and systemic confusion. It is my aim to tease out how this politics of speed results in a culture of confusion that, in the end, could serve a political purpose.

Drawing on an ethnography in regional employment offices in a French-German canton in Switzerland, it is the aim of this article to articulate the complexities involved in the practices revolving around and geared towards the role of language competences in the process of professional reintegration, particularly so with regards to migrants who speak a different language. When comparing two cases of unemployed migrant job seekers and the variable treatment by their respective consultants, we will discuss the logics, ideologies, and discourses underlying the institutional regulation of the diverse body of unemployed migrants. We argue that in particular two discourses emerged in our fieldwork that seem to frame the variable approaches: the discourse of

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