Contribution short abstract:

Germany’s language-based integration policies aim to accelerate newcomer inclusion but often delay socioeconomic incorporation, compounding marginalization. Drawing on ethnographic research in Berlin, the paper shows how migrants counter these effects via informal commons and acts of solidarity.

Contribution long abstract:

In response to over 1.3 million displaced persons seeking asylum in Europe since 2014, Germany introduced increasingly stringent language learning requirements as part of its integration model for adult newcomers. Such policies make German language proficiency a prerequisite for access to formal work and long-term legal security, while ostensibly aiming to accelerate the socioeconomic participation refugees and migrants. However, based on over 7 years of ethnographic fieldwork within languages classrooms and employment offices in Berlin, this paper argues that these policies instead significantly slow and delay newcomers' socioeconomic incorporation. These temporal consequences thus compound the bordering effects of language-based immigration and asylum policy, often keeping newcomers’ in protracted periods of waiting and uncertainty as they navigate access to the labor market, citizenship and sociocultural belonging.

Counteracting these slowing and indeed marginalising effects, newcomers from Syria and Ukraine create informal commons through acts of solidarity including peer-led language networks, informal employment strategies, and advocacy efforts, thus enabling joint strategies of acceleration and navigation within rigid institutional structures.

Combining anthropological approaches to migration and temporality as well as research in within dark anthropology and the anthropology of commoning, this paper considers, on the one hand how integration policies like Germany’s produce and reproduce conditions of inequality, dominance and hopelessness for often highly racialized newcomer communities. On the other, it demonstrates the ways in which ethnographic accounts newcomers’ lived experiences reveal everyday practices of solidarity and communal belonging which disrupt and defy institutional procedures and the power dynamics of EU migration policies.