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 mono- and multilingual social orders. In particular, we propose to untangle this com- plex by describing three central processes that run through all of the contribu- tions 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, transna- tional migration, mobility 1 Introduction In the wake of the widespread retreat from, and backlash against, “multicultur- alism” across much of Western and Northern Europe, “integration” has emerged as the dominant immigration policy paradigm, dramatically transforming frame- works 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 Multilingua 2016; 35(6): 599–616 Bereitgestellt von | Vienna University Library Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 02.01.17 17:30