This paper engages with the state-migrant nexus by investigating how the crafting of the Danish welfare state can be studied through administrative classifications of the immigrant and the pedagogical practices managing the immigrant of school age. We propose an elaborated statist perspective on the immigrant category and explore how the immigrant category functions as a privileged prism for the study of state crafting grammar.
Our interest in the state-migrant nexus is directed by a relational and dynamic understanding of the state crafted through symbolic acts of classification. These acts of classification render the immigrant of school age pedagogically governable. Hence, we merge the Wacquantian understanding of the state as symbolic and material forces of a bureaucratic field with the Foucauldian concept of the state as dispersed governing through sets of practices embedded in regimes of truth.
As such, we expand on Soysal's privileging of the institutional repertoire of the host state as a determinant for the migrant's life in the host society. In this paper, we operationalize the state institutional repertoire in the ministerial administration as well as in the pedagogical practices of education professionals.
The empirical material consists of a selection of policy documents produced by the ministries responsible for the immigrant of school age since 1970, when the category of the immigrant of school age appears in the Danish school system. This material is supplemented with selected educational reports prescribing and evaluating pedagogical practices addressing the immigrant of school age. The authors of these reports cover a range of schoolteachers, municipal administrators and researchers.
In this material we investigate how the classifications of and pedagogical practices addressing the immigrant of school age as an educational problem emerges with and are legitimized by ambivalent references to regimes of national membership, universal welfare, workfare and securitization.