Integration Becoming Business: Marketisation of Integration Training for Immigrants

Today, education is massively affected by marketisation and the drastic demands of the global economy. Integration training for immigrants has fallen prey to that; immigrants are employed to serve market needs, which has been attributed to the creation of “integration as business”. In the article, the authors examine how integration training for immigrants becomes organised within the current market-oriented policies and practices; which kinds of discourses are represented and utilised through which one becomes an “integrated immigrant” and; what kinds of consequences this orientation has on the subjects involved in integration training. By bringing examples from their ethnographic data on integration training for immigrants, the authors investigate the ways in which marketisation of integration training implies and elicits certain kinds of immigrant and teacher subjectivities, and analyse the ways in which these subjectivities become produced through the plural and contingent discursive practices across different sites of integration.