Yeung, S. & Flubacher, M. (2016). Discourses of integration: Language, skills, and the politics of difference. Multilingua 35(6). 599-616.

Multilingua 2016; 35(6): 599–616 Mi-Cha Flubacher and Shirley Yeung* Discourses of integration: Language, skills, and the politics of difference DOI 10.1515/multi-2015-0076 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 monoand 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. Keywords: integration, politics of difference, language learning, skills, transnational migration, mobility 1 Introduction In the wake of the widespread retreat from, and backlash against, “multiculturalism” across much of Western and Northern Europe, “integration” has emerged as the dominant immigration policy paradigm, dramatically transforming frameworks and practices surrounding the social, legal, and professional inclusion of immigrants in Europe and abroad. Constituting a veritable “integration trend” (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010: 19), the sheer ubiquity of integration discourses *Corresponding author: Shirley Yeung, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, E-mail: syeung@uchicago.edu Mi-Cha Flubacher, Institute of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Austria, E-mail: mi-cha.flubacher@univie.ac.at Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 600 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher in migration policy and programming reflects a discursive flexibility and complexity that makes the concept highly contested, exceedingly difficult to pin down, and as such, tremendously productive for arguments across the political spectrum. On the one hand, “integration” advances an inclusive paradigm, commonly positioned as a moderate alternative to assimilationist policy models. Here, “integration” invokes the promotion of tolerance, equity, migrant/human rights, and diversity. Its proponents often espouse a rhetoric of activation which strives to cultivate, among immigrants, intercultural “capacities”, aptitudes, and a sense of personal responsibility for social mobility. This view is reflected at the European level, where a focus on integration promotes various efforts at migrant empowerment: individual “needs-assessment”, tailor-made skills-building, democratized educational opportunities, and the use of incentives rather than sanctions for language training (Council of Europe 2014). On the other hand, immigrant “integration” has also been advanced as a necessary corrective to the perceived dislocations of increasing social diversification. In this framing, integration is commonly voiced in the imperative: in order to safeguard social cohesion, strengthen national values eroded by misguided (and too-permissive) “multicultural” models, prevent the development of intra-national parallel societies, and ensure the transmission of liberal democratic principles (the rule of law, religious freedom, adherence to constitutional values), immigrants “must integrate”. On this end of the spectrum, “integration” participates in discourses of defensive securitization; those who “fail” to integrate face sanctions, whether the withdrawal of social benefits, services, residency documents, or citizenship entitlements. The widespread commitment to integration in policy and public life – witness the European Commission’s website devoted to the topic1 – thus reflects a novel and emergent assemblage of often vacillating and contradictory logics that contravene strict distinctions between an immigration politics of the Left and Right, or between strictly multiculturalist and assimilationist arguments. Aligned with a wide array of discursive positions, the vagueness and instability of “integration” renders it an inherently slippery concept. While a single and unified agenda does not exist at the European level (Kostakopoulou 2010), a growing commitment to “integration” models has entailed the intensified regulation of migrant mobility through linguistic regimes and requirements. European states have placed pointed focus on both promoting and assessing the linguistic competences of migrants in national language(s), commonly arguing that linguistic integration cross-cuts and enables all other forms of (employment, educational, and cultural) inclusion. A model of linguistic 1 The English version can be accessed at https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/home? lang=en Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 601 integration figures prominently, for instance, in the European Union’s Hague Programme, adopted by the European Council in 2004, which advanced a set of Common Basic Principles (CBPs) for Immigrant Integration Policy in the EU. This move towards the harmonization of migration management in an area of “freedom, security, and justice” promotes the migrant’s “basic knowledge of the host society’s language, history, and institutions” (CBP 4). The Council of Europe’s recent 2014 project on the Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants (LIAM) further reinforces the pervasive integration-language nexus. While they differ, models of linguistic integration are increasingly employing national language competences as a key criteria for gaining entry, settlement documents, social services, material resources, and naturalization (Hogan-Brun et al. 2009). Such competences are verified by emergent practices of assessment, standardized testing, and face-toface interviewing which commonly, but not always, employ measures such as the Common European Framework for Languages (Pochon-Berger and Lenz 2014; Wodak 2012). The current pre-occupation with “integration” commonly asks: how can language policy best promote national language-learning among newcomers? How is the process of learning to be motivated, monitored, measured, facilitated, and incentivized? How are various proficiency levels to be defined? And what standards of quality assurance ensure the most accurate, reliable, and fair tests for residence and citizenship? Taking this framework as our starting point, the contributions in this issue critically engage with various “integration” frameworks and practices, examining how they characterize and shape the linguistic-communicative capacities and trajectories of diverse mobile persons. Across various sites and regional/ national contexts – English-speaking Canada, Catalan-speaking Spain, Finland, and French- and German-speaking Switzerland – the contributions explore and analyze discourses and practices of integration as constituted by, and constitutive of, a (trans)national politics of difference which incite strategies for managing social diversity. The contributions variously explore logics of integration in relation to agency, citizenship, employment, economic and linguistic investment, language acquisition, multicultural orders, nationhood, skill, and social networking. As such, the authors address questions of language ideology, that is, the “cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989: 255). As sites of struggle, linguistic ideologies rationalize, systematize, and naturalize the indexical value of signs and their attendant social relationships (Silverstein 1998: 129). The contributors thus examine how situated understandings and practices of language-use reinforce, or else subvert, broader processes of value formation which, under late capitalism, condition potentials for transnational and, especially, social mobility. In addition, the contributors treat the vagueness Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 602 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher of “integration” as constitutive of the analytical object. Whether framed as at odds with, or else serving the aims of, “multiculturalism,” ideologies and social practices of integration are amenable to historical, ethnographic and discursive analyses. “Integration” is thus a discourse in the Foucauldian sense, produced by and productive of structural relations of power, and enacted through communicative technologies of the self (1988). We thus aim to grasp “integration” in its complexity and specificity, examining its inhabited dispositions, its social categorizations and modes of intervention, its political-economic stakes, its logics of linguistic (dis)engagement, and its relationship to mono- and multilingual orders. 2 “Integration” and standardization In its various iterations, “integration” is a social framework anchored to the territorially-imagined nation-state. As research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology has richly explored, national ideologies of language have, since the inception of the nation during the nineteenth century, long posed linguistic and discursive standardization as crucial to the maintenance of a viable national polity. While processes of globalization appear to have destabilized national sovereignty, they have conversely reinforced the Romantic correspondence between linguistic homogeneity, a culturally unified nation, and the bounded political community. Processes of European integration have done little to supplant the “dogma of homogeneism” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998b) at the level of national policies which constructs the linguistic diversity occasioned by migrants or linguistic minorities as the site of potential conflicts and social fragmentation. Nation-state centric logics are no less evident in explicitly internationalist organizations such as the United Nations where, for instance, a universalist human rights framework for minority-language protection reifies language while reinforcing national images of linguistic homogeneity (Duchêne 2008). Indeed, the presupposition that the world is comprised of mutually exclusive, monoglot national communities – and that a shared linguistic universe is the ontological grounding of a cohesive national community – permeates not only well-known analyses of nationalism’s emergence and phenomenology (see Silverstein 2000 on Anderson’s Imagined Communities), but informs how national borders are themselves enacted. Monolingual national models condition how immigration regimes verify the origins of migrants and refugees in their exercise of discretionary power (Blommaert 2010; Ammer et al. 2013) and socialize admitted newcomers into new national identities (Piller Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 603 2001). In certain domains, processes of linguistic standardization are homogenizing global norms, genres, and styles of communication across nationallyimagined languages, as evidenced, for example, by global ideologies surrounding “good” or “effective” communication (Cameron 2002). Standard language ideologies, further, commonly map temporal positionings onto speakers, identifying those who speak “standard” as properly modern subjects (Gal 2006). As such, the current EU promotion of multilingualism as an icon of cosmopolitan flexibility reproduces linguistic hierarchies. While some configurations of multilingual competences are valorized – i. e. norms around European trilingualism (Gal 2012) – other multilingual repertoires are provincialized, demoted, or erased, as several contributors to this issue demonstrate. As recent critical scholarship has illuminated, the view that linguistic and national borders ought to be coterminous enables discriminatory and exclusionary integration-related policies, public discourses and, more recently, language testing regimes. While these practices vary in their concepts of citizenship and nation-hood, they converge in equating some concept of “integration” with the official verification of cultural and linguistic skills. Cultural-linguistic testing practices have been critically analyzed in Australia (McNamara 2009; Slade and Möllering 2010; Piller and Lising 2014), Austria (Perchinig 2010; Plutzar 2010,2013; Wodak 2012), Belgium (Van Avermaet and Gysen 2009), Germany (Möllering 2010; Piller 2001; Stevenson and Schanze 2009), Israel (Shohamy and Kanza 2009), Luxembourg (Horner 2009), Norway (Baba and Dahl-Jørgensen 2013), the Netherlands (Extra and Spotti 2009), and the UK (Blackledge 2009a, Blackledge 2009b).2 This scholarship variously demonstrates that not only are tests and testing practices vectors of cultural socialization, but that, in many cases, tests often exceed formal linguistic requirements for naturalization. As Piller (2001) has also shown, linguistic testing regimes often ideologically presuppose that any monolingual speaker is an able judge of linguistic proficiency, raising serious questions about both the validity and ethics of testing. Indeed, in contexts like Germany, knowledge of the national language as criterion of integration has explicitly supplanted the criterion of “ancestry” in the nation’s ideology of citizenship, making language-testing a new means of social exclusion (2001: 273). Emergent practices of migrant integration are thus quite familiar; they comfortably correspond with the enduring ideology that “social and political cohesion demand one language, one metadiscursive order, one voice” (Bauman and Briggs 2000: 201). Such linguistic-cultural regimes are emerging, however, 2 Pochon-Berger and Lenz (2014) provide a broader synthesis of existing literature and debates on language testing and integration. Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 604 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher in a global context in which the circulation of capital, goods, and people is both intensified and diversifying, and where national-linguistic borders are becoming sites of increased regulation in tandem with neoliberal processes of welfare state retrenchment and economic de-regulation (Baba and Dahl-Jørgensen 2013; Feldman 2012; Piller and Lising 2014). In this context, the contributors to this issue reflect on the following questions: What is “integration’s” relationship to more enduring processes of socio-linguistic standardization? In what ways has “integration” gained discursive traction across vastly different contexts, and why? How are difference and diversity discursively constructed? And how do various mobile/migrant subjects reproduce, contest, or else inhabit the ironies of social orders in which language skills are indexical of “integration,” with its attendant entitlements? Presenting a series of case studies, the contributions here explore this terrain and enrich current analyses by ethnographically linking state policies to socially situated persons and communicative practices (and the paradoxes these engender) in ways that cross-cut distinctions between “official” and “informal” domains. The contributions here thus analyze integration as much in its tacit as well as its explicit dimensions, going beyond policy analyses to examine how hegemonic models of inclusion bear long-term consequences for migrants’ social and linguistic trajectories. 3 Framework and orientation: Siting integration In their breadth and variety, the articles collected here broadly share two analytical and methodological orientations. First, the contributions analyze and situate models of linguistic integration in the context of the global political and economic transformations which have made language and communication central in regulating capital and transnational/social mobilities. Often falling under the rubric of neoliberalism, these broader transformations have seen cuts in taxation and welfare state expenditures with a move towards policies of privatization and economic de-regulation (Harvey 2005; Prasad 2006). These shifts include processes of de-industrialization; the growth of the tertiary service and knowledge sectors, a hallmark of late capitalism, makes economic value production particularly reliant on speakers’ ability to enact forms of linguistic distinction and flexibility (Duchêne and Heller 2012), with “skills” increasingly commodified (Urciuoli 2008). In this respect, neoliberal frameworks place particular primacy on language and communication as the means for cultivating the valorized dispositions of personal responsibility, agentive self-reliance, and entrepreneurial spirit in ways that make “will” and affect key sites of Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 605 intervention (McElhinny [2010] provides a useful review which interrogates “rational choice” readings of neoliberalism, revealing its grounding in forms of affective, linguistic labor). These logics of valuation condition how migrant speakers understand and evaluate their own language practices. To the extent, then, that political-economic processes and the social inequalities produced by them are linguistically mediated (Irvine 1989), the contributions here share a broad interest in how the logics of capital surface and are negotiated across various communicative domains. Whether expressed in practices of skills-training, linguistic investment, self-instruction, or else self-correction, emergent communicative norms are, in this issue, situated within political-economic structures and processes. A second analytical and methodological commonality lies in how the articles combine critical analyses of discourse with ethnographic studies of employment- and subsistence-related activities (see also Duchêne et al. 2013). It is a commonly held truism that language is a skill that “integrates” by improving one’s chances on a competitive job market. Likewise, the (im)migrant is often conceived in terms of the capacity for labor and value production. A critical ethnography of work, skill, and subsistence is necessary for understanding how these ideological linkages are rationalized and instrumentalized across various contexts. This ethnographic focus is necessarily multi-scalar and multi-sited (Marcus 1995; Zimmermann 2016); the papers variously question the analytic distinction between “micro” and “macro,” and thus policy and practice, exploring linkages between institutional discourses over time, between variously positioned social actors in employment and subsistence-related domains, and between situated practices and enduring processes of social reproduction, categorization, and resource-distribution (Heller 2001). This scalar breadth is expressed in the ways the contributors have variously “sited” integration as discourse, process, and ethnographic object. In this issue, Allan examines practices of labor-market integration in multicultural Canada, analyzing a program which strives to enhance the marketability of professionally qualified immigrants through “soft skills” education. Sabaté Dalmau reveals how the hegemonic monolingual order of peninsular Spanish and its ideologies of integration are simultaneously reproduced and contested in the translinguistic practices of undocumented labor migrants in a call shop, or “locutorio,” in Catalonia, Spain. Flubacher et al. examine how logics of “investment” construct differing entitlements to language instruction, and thus different potentials for integration, among migrants in an unemployment office in the Swiss canton of Fribourg/Freiburg. Strömmer demonstrates how the invisibility of cleaning work prevents migrants from developing the language skills that are deemed necessary to social mobility in Finland, revealing “integration” as a difficultly Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 606 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher achieved ideal. And Yeung looks at how recent migration policies in Switzerland yield two social types in Geneva, “migrants” and “expatriates,” which reflect, on the terrain of language and culture, contrasting assessments of risk and profitability. This shared interest in work and subsistence – and the discursive structures by which livelihoods are secured or foreclosed – sheds light on what has, until quite recently, been considered the “black box” (Lindquist et al. 2012) of migration studies: migration brokers and brokerage. As Lindquist et al. (2012) emphasize, processes of migrant brokerage constitute the interstitial infrastructure which conditions transnational and social mobility, throwing into question distinctions between state and market, formal and informal sectors, and altruistic and profit-based domains of activity. Several of the contributions give specific attention to how situated agents – whether representatives of the state, members of migrant networks, or researchers, themselves – mediate integration via skills-training, networking, and other forms of communicative negotiation. We thus examine how integration brokerage structures and defines novel criteria for judgment and evaluation which entails new inequalities as well as new forms of agency. The contributions ethnographically illuminate the ways mediating actors and discourses ultimately shape how migrants both assume and are ascribed forms of linguistic responsibility, “how criteria are established and how they come to apply to specific circumstances, contingencies, subjects, objects, and means of action” (Lambek 2010: 62). 4 Processes of integration and the politics of difference It is the aim of this special issue to present critical analyses of the mechanisms, workings and logics of discourses of integration on the one hand and its consequences as conceptualized in varied “politics of difference”, on the other. That is to say, we argue that “integration” as a socio-political instrument is connected to larger structuration processes that create and produce normativity and subaltern “others”, all the while proclaiming an integrative and inclusive policy. Applying a critical and differentiated stance towards these policies and their consequences, the contributions point to the pivotal role of language regulations in the reproduction of difference and inequality in spite of the geographical and institutional distinctiveness of the five research sites and the participants. These regulations, however, vary in terms of effect and impact; Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 607 furthermore they are indexical of a number of different political investments and ideological underpinnings. We will try to untangle this complex by examining the following three processes that run through all of the contributions: the process of categorization, of selection, and of activation. 4.1 The process of categorization What becomes evident in all of the contributions is that the policies surrounding the regimentation of language competences in the context of migrant integration are fundamentally complicit in and instrumental for the creation of social categories. As has been argued by Blommaert and Verschueren (1998a), integration policies are in fact contingent on the production of subjects that need to be integrated, which is why we can actually speak about a “politics of difference” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998a), hence of a politics that creates intra-societal differences. First and foremost, the politics of difference creates an elementary – even binary – difference between citizens and non-citizens. Yet, such processes also create categories which differentiate between various groups of non-citizens – or migrants – and, as such, different stages of migrants’ trajectories. Reminiscent of the process of fractal recursivity, as described by Irvine and Gal (2000: 38), there seems to be an endless possibility of creating further sub-groups and of a constant fragmentation of social groups. This becomes evident simply when taking into account the complex and refined array of entry regulations for different categories of (potential) immigrants. Categories of migrants and citizens, however, are fluid and dynamic constructs that are susceptible to change congruent with political economic conditions. In Europe, the most important effect has been felt with the introduction of the European Union and, with it, the free movement of goods and people that has imposed a new regime of mobility and entry regulations, which, in turn, have created new viable categories, i. e. that of EU-citizens and non-EU-citizens. In Switzerland, on the other hand, attempts to loosen the notoriously rigid naturalization requirements (so far unsuccessful) have provoked the conservative right to introduce the expression “Papierlischwizer” (“Paper Swiss”, i. e. Swiss on paper), which denotes the further categorization of citizenship into legitimate and authentic Swiss citizens versus Swiss citizens “only on paper”, i. e. naturalized and of foreign origin. Sabaté Dalmau analyses a similar process of intra-group differentiation in her ethnography of language practices of migrants in an “ethnic” call shop in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Just as Irvine and Gal (2000: 38) describe how “the dichotomizing and partitioning process that was involved in some understood Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 608 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher opposition (between groups or linguistic varieties, for example) recurs at other levels”, Sabaté Dalmau gives a detailed account of the locally prevailing social hierarchies that govern migrants’ linguistic practices which, in turn, give rise to a continuing fragmentation of the “migrant” category (who speaks how, with which accent, which language?) and are connected to questions of legitimacy (in terms of speaking, writing, and performing). Such questions are at the core of the variety of categories that result from the politics of difference. A large part of these categories further hinge on the question of who is considered legitimate in terms of producing profit for the state. This in turn translates into the rights and duties of migrants in their respective societies, as explicitly discussed in the papers by Allan, Flubacher et al., Strömmer, and Yeung. While unemployed foreigners in Canada, as described by Allan, are struggling to embody and enact the perfect skilled worker, their success or failure in attaining a job will categorize them as just that: a success or failure. The same goes for Kifibin, the Ugandan immigrant working as a full-time cleaner in Finland, whose Catch 22-situation is exemplarily depicted by Strömmer: Arriving in Finland as a graduate student, he did not succeed in finding a doctoral position after his Master’s degree. Entering the labor market through an entry-level job as a cleaner seemed the best possibility to finance his stay in Finland. In the long run he aimed to improve his language skills and to regain footing in the academic world, therefore, to increase his chances of social mobility. However, as Strömmer consequently shows, the occupation as a cleaner hardly offers any opportunity for interaction and language learning, thus also making it difficult for someone as pro-active and engaged in his language learning as Kifibin to apply for a job with higher language requirements. His attempt to break into a different category (or to regain the original category of “student”) remains unsuccessful, along with his attempts at social mobility. He remains helpless against the societal categorization that limits him to a lowly-paid job and, thus, to a marginalized social position. Processes of categorization thus pervade migration trajectories and will decide whether migrants are considered legitimate candidates for the labor market and legitimate residents willing to integrate, or not. While, in multicultural Canada, it is discursive competence that is arguably related to impending categorization, in Finland, it is the fateful combination of immigration regulations that ask for (any) employment and language requirements that presents the legitimacy of the process of categorization itself. However, not every migrant willing to learn the local language is deemed a legitimate recipient of language courses or similar measures, as Flubacher et al. demonstrate in their contribution describing institutional categorization processes in a Swiss Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 609 employment service that determine whose language competences are considered central to their employability and, hence, the object of investment. Similarly, Yeung draws out the categorizing migration and integration policies of Switzerland in general, and of the francophone and metropolitan canton of Geneva in particular. Categorization in this respect is based upon an evaluation of the profitability of foreigners who are classified as “migrants” or “expatriates”. In her analysis, Yeung unpacks the question of how and why this categorization is co-constitutive of the other in becoming veritable key figures around which the integration policies are constructed. This observation in particular is indicative of the functionality of the categorization processes inherent in the politics of difference for carving out profiles of legitimate residents and citizens and, thus, for determining who is welcome to stay and whose sojourn remains tolerated. Finally, this leads us to conclude that social categories are constitutive of social realities in having implications for the arrangement and composition of social hierarchies. They thus cannot be separated from power relations and power struggles, which are ultimately struggles over the power to define how to see and structure the world, as Bourdieu (1991: 22) proposed. 4.2 The process of selection Closely related to categorization are processes of selection that fundamentally determine one’s access to a state (i. e. immigration) or to resources (e. g. employment or investment). As is shown in all of the contributions to this special issue, selection mechanisms lie at the heart of every immigration trajectory, policy, and process. These mechanisms are not only based on economic considerations on the part of the state, but are also determined by seemingly irrevocable ideologies concerning the compatibility of specific races, cultures, and religions. The Swiss Three Circle Model, drawing on ideas of close and distant cultures, as presented in Yeung’s paper, is an explicit example of such considerations that have framed the selective entry regulations of prosperous nations in Western Europe. With the model falling from grace shortly after its implementation, a new regime of selection had to be put into place that focused on professional qualifications more specifically. As is argued in Allan’s paper, language and skill as selection criteria for entry into Canada have supplanted, on the surface, race, ethnicity or nationality. She carefully traces the discursive and political development not only of entry regulations but also of integration programs, which, in the end, have put an emphasis on soft skills rather than “culture”. This shift, she argues, neutralizes the potentially politically incorrect evaluation of Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 610 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher candidates as (in-)appropriate for the Canadian labor market: If migrants are deemed to have “cultural deficiencies”, they are ever so often reframed as having “skills deficits”. In the end, such reframing profiles these candidates as not trying hard enough or not willing to adapt to Canadian manners and values, which, again, justifies their non-selection as employees. As these papers thus attest in their empirical and in-depth approaches, issues relating to language testing and language competences are not only functional for the regulation of entry, but they become instrumental in determining the selection of migrants “on site”. The papers all pay close attention to the question of what costs the personal investment in and of individuals entails, who invests in them and for what reason. In this context, language courses come to stand for the pivotal tipping point at which a person is selected as a desired immigrant, i. e. considered as potentially contributing to the economy and the prosperity of the nation, as elaborated on in the paper by Flubacher et al. As they describe, in the wake of the bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the European Union on the free movement of goods and people, it seems that new selection processes have been put into place in Switzerland, since the entry of EU-citizens can no longer be regulated as stringently as before. These selection processes apply in cases of unemployment, according to a political economic ideology of investment, and are hence concomitant with cost-benefit analyses of the allocation of state resources, for example in the form of language courses for unemployed job seekers. The authors argue that these selection processes represent a delayed regulation mechanism for channeling unemployed foreigners into socially structured positions, e. g. keeping them in unqualified and precarious working conditions. Strömmer develops a similar argument in her discussion of the focal participant in her study, Kifibin, who presents a paradigmatic example of non-selection, even abandonment. After a motivated start into Finnish society as a natural science student and as an eager learner of Finnish, Kifibin was not selected as a doctoral candidate nor as an employee in his field of expertise. Instead, he found himself in the position of a full-time cleaner, working mostly on his own for companies and restaurants. Strömmer describes that in his work Kifibin becomes invisible; clients generally do not appear to consider him a person of contact. Selection of investment thus also touches on personal levels and on interpersonal interactions that have clear implications on who is considered worthy of time and interest. The selection processes analyzed by Sabaté Dalmau point to a different direction. The (oftentimes “illegal”) migrants frequenting the “locutorio” (call shop) practice a form of self-selection that materializes in their linguistic repertoires. On the one hand, they enact specific forms of in-group practices, which Sabaté Dalmau describes as “counter-hegemonic multi-lingua francas”. She thus Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 611 understands non-standard language practices as a way of breaking the rules imposed by society and its institutions, which are conceived of as threatening by the illegal immigrants most specifically. However, while such in-group practices not only determine who has in-group membership, Sabaté Dalmau also observes a process of self-selection with regard to standard Spanish. Aware of the imposition of competences in Spanish (and not Catalan, the dominant language in Barcelona) on the nation-wide labor market and for citizenship, migrants selfregiment their practices in attempting to attain a correct Spanish, further understanding these efforts as indexical of their willingness to integrate, as conveyed in the ideology of “integration through language”. It is this last point that leads us to the third process that cross-cuts the different research contexts and analyses, the process of activation. 4.3 The process of activation Activation policies are appearing increasingly on the agenda of Western and Northern states as part and parcel of the shift from welfare to “workfare” regimes that embody the emergence of neoliberal tendencies in these states since the late 1970s (Harvey 2005; Jessop 2002). Policies of activation are based on the premise that all residents of a state are inscribed in a logic of rights and duties towards the state and the collective. While it is the right of an individual to be able to turn to the state for certain benefits and (financial) assistance, it is simultaneously the individual’s duty not to solely rely on the state. In other words, individuals in need of social benefits are to be (willingly) “activated” in order to work for benefits, e. g. unemployed residents have to provide proof of job searching activities and/or they might be obliged to participate in specific programs. As Flubacher et al. describe in their study of activation practices in the employment services in a Swiss canton, job-seekers have to perform and embody motivation in order to be legitimate recipients of benefits. The undercurrent of this neoliberal ideology stipulates that these subjects are to take on responsibility for their economic situation and, in the process, become their own entrepreneurs or brand. Similarly, Allan topicalizes the policy of activation and its effects most prominently in discussing how the soft skilltraining that migrants are required to attend is aimed at producing responsible entrepreneurs of the self that are able to sell themselves on the labor market. Resulting from the ideology of activation, their economic success or failure becomes their own responsibility, thus deflecting potential criticism away from the social system and system-inherent discrimination mechanisms against foreigners. In this respect, the activation of unemployed foreigners via soft skills Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 612 Shirley Yeung and Mi-Cha Flubacher has complemented the role of language testing as the site of legitimate categorization and selection. Allan’s example does not constitute an exception. In the context of integration, activation often takes the form of responsibilization, i. e. making the migrant subject responsible, which clearly denotes the expected efforts of migrants to successfully partake in the project of their social and economic integration and, hence, their social mobility. Yet, while today’s neoliberal societies are permeated with ideologies of activation and self-reliance, there are still marked differences as to what is expected of whom. This becomes evident in Yeung’s succinct problematization of the bifurcation of rights and duties in relation to linguistic requirements of foreigners, who are basically categorized according to their potential benefit to the nation. While migrants with low professional qualifications are responsibilized, highly qualified “expatriates” are accommodated, both in terms of linguistic requirements and linguistic practices. Strömmer’s case study, finally, clearly exposes the fictional component of the idea of activation. The focal participant, Kifibin, appears as an exemplarily motivated and active migrant who strives to be in charge of his future, but who fails to attain social mobility in spite of his language learning efforts and higher education background. Similarly, it is questionable whether the index of willingness, as displayed through linguistic self-regimenting and self-discipline by the migrants in Sabaté Dalmau’s study, will suffice and pave their way to citizenship status, rights, and resources. 5 Contestations, complexities, and contingencies As has become evident in this introduction, “integration” is a highly contested concept that is concurrent with a variety of processes which reproduce a veritable politics of difference rather than creating inclusive societies open to social mobility. While it is not the point of this introduction to contest the view that linguistic competences might indeed lead to social integration and professional success – especially in monolingual nation states – it is the aim of this special issue to highlight the variability and contingency of such purported truths. The contributions to this special issue thus invite the reader to critically reflect on the role of language policies in the integration regimes of late capitalist societies that have embraced the neoliberal ideology of activation. In combining ethnographic research methods with their various theoretical underpinnings, the contributions provide exemplary insights into the complexities Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30 Discourses of integration 613 and intricacies related to the role of language in the context of migration, integration, and national politics. Since the research in the contributions focuses on specific sites in only a limited number of national contexts that come with their own specific and idiosyncratic political and historical conditions, we do not make any claims to representativeness. 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