The Political Stream in Action Between Migrant Integration and Education

Abstract

The chapter illustrates the political premises (political stream) behind the adoption of migrant language education policies, showing the political salience of language-in-education policies in political discourse. The chapter provides and analyzes evidence to test the hypothesis that policy proposals that are supported by political entrepreneurs who embody the prevalent ideology of a government or retain the political majority have better chances of being made the subject of policy decisions. To this aim, it combines quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis with the existing literature to investigate the political support for migrant language education. The former tool was especially used to investigate this topic in the Italian case, thus filling a gap in the literature. The latter tool was central to the analysis of the Austrian case, which offers a wider range of literature tracing the political discourse about immigration and migrant integration. Moreover, the different timing of the introduction of migrant language education in the two countries—more recent in Italy than in Austria—required the use of different sources: the Italian case leverages online political communication as hosted on the social networking website Twitter, while the Austrian literature employs mostly press sources.