Discourses of integration: Language, skills, and the politics of difference

Abstract

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.

The case of Mesut Özil: A symbol of (non-) integration? An analysis of German print media discourses on integration

“…Integration becomes an irresolvable dilemma. Media re-enforces ideologies that standardize integration as a one-way street and thus shifts the responsibility for integration to the subject rather than to society (Flubacher and Yeung, 2016).…”

“…At first sight this stance seems to give agency to the individual, but our conclusions suggest that there is a gap between what is expected and what is achievable according to these obligations. Discourses that posit integration as a dominant obligation of migrants constitute a divide between those who are, and those who are not yet integrated (Flubacher and Yeung, 2016;Fuller, 2018Fuller, , 2019. This gap reduces or suppresses agency.…”

“…Considering these discourses, our research interest is focussed on how integration is often constructed as a responsibility of those who are expected to integrate into a society. Various aspects of this responsibility are discursively assigned to individuals who are expected to integrate; thus, integration becomes “a socio-political instrument [that] is connected to larger structuration processes that create and produce normativity and subaltern ‘others’, all the while proclaiming an integrative and inclusive policy” (Flubacher and Yeung, 2016: 606). Such structuration processes are often based on norms of the host society.…”

An Alternative Narrative of Integration In Germany through an Ethnographic Exploration of Cuban Immigration

“…Language, as argued by Pochon-Berger and Lenz (2014, p. 14) is a fundamental measure of integration. Especially in the European context where language interacts with various other integration measures (Piller, 2001;Flubacher & Yeung, 2016). For example, both citizenship acquisition and entrance to the mainstream labor market is contingent upon German language attainment.…”

“…The acquisition of the receiving country's national language is a fundamental indicator of successful integration (Pochon-Berger & Lenz, 2014, p. 14; see also Shohamy, 2006). Flubacher and Yeung (2016) state that the European model argues for language attainment as a necessity when integrating into immigrants' host because it "enables all other forms of (employment, educational, and cultural) inclusion" (p. 600). This makes sense especially when considering that unlike the United States, European states have one or more official national languages that are both ingrained in every aspect of the nation and define the nation itself (Piller, 2001).…”