Whose children? The EU and Member States’ integration policies in education

Abstract

A gap exists between the EU’s professed guarantees of the rights of migrant children and Member States’ individual practices concerning integration. The EU promotes policies claiming to be based on the rights of the child, children’s best interests, and a child-friendly integration system. Both theory and the EU framework also insist that integration should be understood as a two-way process. Yet national practices and policies shift responsibility for integration from the reception community to newcomers. Pressures on immigrants, hate speech, and the closure of borders have become the main features of migration policy. The article points out inconsistencies between the EU and its Member States’ own policy frameworks regarding the integration of migrant children in education. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders, we look at the primary triggers for these inconsistencies to learn what they reveal about the EU and its Member States’ integration policies for migrant children. We argue that nationalism and the denial of rights prevent policy processes from becoming a two-way process and we demonstrate the consequences this has for child-centred approaches to integration.