The language politics of uncertainty: On the temporal consequences of Germany’s newcomer integration policy

This paper examines the temporal consequences of Germany’s language-and-integration measures for adult migrants and refugees. In response to over 1.3 million displaced persons seeking asylum in Europe since 2015, many countries have tightened their existing language learning requirements for newcomers as part of stricter immigration control. Germany has been at the forefront of these policy reforms, expanding its integration programmes to accelerate newcomer incorporation. Based on over 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, this paper shows that instead of accelerating access to employment and higher education, in practice, integration policies delay socioeconomic mobility among refugees and migrants. This is largely because language becomes embedded in a broader ideological and bureaucratic complex newcomers must negotiate in their recurrent interactions with state institutions. As I demonstrate, in part because of the slowing effect such policies have on their mobility, newcomers’ first few years in Germany are experienced as a period of protracted uncertainty.