Navigating the In-Between: Immigrant Children’s School Integration in Vienna
Zsuzsanna Árendás, Stella Wolter and Judit Keller
Integration is widely presented as a shared, two-way process: newcomers adjust, and receiving societies make room for them. Schools, in particular, are treated as the natural place where this happens — where language is learned, friendships form, and children find their footing in a new country.
But an important question remains: does the integration model that Austrian schools actually implement match the way immigrant children themselves experience belonging?
Our chapter, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Vienna, looks at this question through the experiences of intra-EU migrant children and third-country nationals alike — two groups usually studied separately, but who, our evidence shows, face strikingly similar realities inside the classroom.
Looking beyond language acquisition
Vienna is a city where the case for taking this question seriously is hard to ignore. The share of pupils with a migrant background more than doubled between 2000 and 2022, from 11% to 27%, and a quarter of children do not speak German at home. Yet Austria has rarely featured in international research on migrant school integration.
Austrian policy, in line with EU recommendations, treats education as the key resource for integration. In practice, however, this has narrowed into something much more specific: German-language proficiency and ‘Austrian values’ are framed as the precondition for successful integration in every area of life. Newcomers are expected to demonstrate what is tellingly called a Bringschuld — a ‘debt to be discharged’ — through learning German and adapting to the host society. It is a one-sided script: the newcomer adjusts, the state simply waits.
This raises a broader question: can integration be reduced to language acquisition without losing sight of everything else that shapes a child’s sense of belonging?
This question is not asked in a political vacuum. Across Europe, the resurgence of (neo)conservative and populist politics has treated the coexistence of multiple identities as something to be managed, even resisted. In both Hungary and Austria, far-right ideology and parties have shaped education policy toward an ethnically and linguistically homogeneous idea of the nation. Understood this way, schools are not neutral service providers: they are one of the places where a society decides who counts as ‘one of us,’ and on what terms.
Two ways of thinking about ‘in-between’
To make sense of what we saw in schools and families, we use two complementary concepts from migration and cultural theory. The first, liminality, describes a threshold state — being ‘betwixt and between’ established structures, as anthropologist Victor Turner put it — that is meant to be temporary, ending once a person is fully ‘incorporated’ into a new status. Applied to migration, this suggests integration is a linear journey: newcomer, in-between, then integrated.
The second concept, hybridity or ‘third space’ (developed by Homi Bhabha), pushes back against that linear story. It suggests that people don’t simply pass through an in-between phase on their way to a fixed new identity — they continuously blend languages, cultures and attachments, and that blending is not a problem to resolve but a normal, ongoing way of living. Our evidence suggests both dynamics are at play in Vienna: schools are largely built around the first model, while children and families are actually living the second.
What does the ethnographic evidence tell us?
To answer this, we draw on two ethnographic research strands carried out over four years (2020–2024).
The first, conducted as part of the EU-H2020 MiCREATE project, is based on fieldwork in six Viennese schools — two academic secondary schools and four compulsory secondary schools — chosen because roughly half of their pupils spoke a first language other than German. Of 87 biographical interviews and 13 focus groups collected for that project, we focus here on 10 interviews with newly arrived migrant children aged 10 to 17.
The second strand followed Hungarian immigrant families in Vienna, beginning with an autoethnographic element — one of the authors had herself settled in Vienna with two school-age children — and growing into 15 exploratory interviews, followed by a second phase (2023–2024) with in-person parent interviews and a focus group with children aged 13 to 16.
To make sense of this material, we use two conceptual lenses: liminality (the in-between, transitional status newcomers are assigned) and hybridity, or ‘third space’ (the idea that children actively blend cultures, languages and attachments rather than simply moving from one to the other).
Schools manage integration as a temporary, monitored phase
The evidence shows liminality is not just a theoretical idea — it is built into how Austrian schools are organised. Since 2018, every entering pupil is tested for German proficiency using a standardised instrument (MIKA-D). Children who fall short are labelled ‘Außerordentlich’ (extraordinary, AO) and placed in separate German classes or remedial courses, sometimes for up to two years, with responsibility for exiting that status resting entirely on the child.
This matters because the AO label does more than support language learning — it also isolates. Parents described children spending a school year ‘half asleep, as an outsider,’ with almost no friends and no real progress, receiving 15 hours a week of German instruction but only about two hours a day with their actual class. In one case, a child’s growing withdrawal — spending days at home ‘curled up in a blanket… watching Netflix’ — became serious enough that the family arranged online psychological support.
Even where German instruction is intensive, in other words, it can come at the cost of the very social integration it is supposed to produce.
Home languages are tolerated at best, and often actively discouraged
Across both fieldwork strands, families described a clear, unspoken hierarchy of languages. German dominance is enforced in all school situations, while children’s home languages are excluded from the curriculum and from most school activities — the only exceptions being standard foreign languages such as English, French, Italian or Spanish. One child was reprimanded by a teacher simply for speaking English, his and a friend’s shared language, on the suspicion that they were ‘gossiping.’
Attempts by parents to work around this system — seeking places in German-English bilingual schools, or in Vienna’s only Hungarian-focus elementary school — generally failed, because good German turned out to be a precondition for admission. The one resource that could have helped these children bridge into German, their strongest existing language, was the one schools refused to build on.
Belonging is shaped as much by transnational ties as by school
Interviews with newly arrived children point to a second, often overlooked dimension of belonging: distance from family. Many pupils live apart from siblings or parents who remain abroad, and consistently described this separation — maintained through weekly video calls and occasional visits — as central to how connected they felt, or didn’t, to their new home. As one girl put it, Austria doesn’t feel like home ‘because my mom and my dad are not here.’
Notably, almost none of the interviewed children wanted to return to their country of origin, citing limited opportunities there — but many also did not want to stay permanently in Austria, hoping instead to join relatives scattered across other countries. This mirrors findings elsewhere that young people who migrate more than once can build identities that transcend both sending and receiving countries, provided they feel accepted and can access opportunities over time.
Outside school, hybridity is simply everyday life
Among the Hungarian families we followed, dual attachments were not the exception but the norm. Teenagers regularly visit grandparents and old friends in Hungary; some nuclear families are split across the two countries, with a parent commuting for work; language-switching at the dinner table is unremarkable, made easy by the short distance between Austria and Hungary.
One family’s routine illustrates just how far this can go: a mother and child live in Budapest for most of the week while the father commutes from Vienna, with the family reuniting on weekends. We encountered several such arrangements — built around the practical needs of coordinating children’s schooling, sustaining employment, and maintaining a meaningful life across a border.
Parents actively invest in keeping this dual attachment alive — through weekly Hungarian theatre workshops in Vienna, online lessons in Hungarian literature and history, or, for some children, weekend trips home to train with their old sports club. None of the parents we spoke to described this as building a single, stable ‘Hungarian-Austrian’ identity. It is better described as ongoing work: a constant, practical balancing act rather than a destination.
The contrast is stark: this hybridity flourishes at home and across borders, but our evidence suggests Viennese schools make almost no room for it. We call this an ‘integration paradox’ — schools pursue integration without genuinely incorporating the backgrounds children actually bring with them.
Is ‘integration’ itself the wrong frame?
Migration scholar Adrian Favell has argued that integration is ‘a fundamentally colonial term,’ resting on the idea of a pre-existing, bounded national society that migrants must be absorbed into. Our findings sit comfortably with this critique. Time and again, the families we followed were not failing to integrate — they were successfully building rich, workable lives across two or more places and languages. What was missing was not effort on their part, but institutional recognition on the school’s part.
Seen this way, the everyday hybridity we documented — theatre workshops in Hungarian, weekend football back home, dinner-table code-switching, a family’s carefully choreographed commute between Vienna and Budapest — is not a symptom of incomplete integration. It is a form of quiet contestation: evidence that migration does not simply flow into a fixed national container, but reshapes what belonging can look like.
What does this mean for policy and practice?
Several lessons emerge from the evidence.
First, integration cannot be reduced to German proficiency without losing sight of the relational and emotional dimensions — friendship, understanding, family presence — that children themselves describe as central to feeling integrated.
Second, separating children for language support carries a real social cost. Intensive German classes that remove children from their peer group for most of the school day can leave them more isolated, not less.
Third, home languages are a resource, not an obstacle. Blocking access to bilingual or heritage-language schooling until a child already speaks good German shuts out exactly the tool — a shared strong language — that could ease the transition.
Finally, policy should recognise multiple, fluid attachments as normal rather than a problem to be resolved. The children and families in our study were not failing to integrate by staying connected to family and culture abroad; that connection was, for many, what made everyday life manageable.
In-betweenness as a starting point, not a problem to fix
There is an intuitive case for schools focusing hard on German: language does open doors to further education, social networks and employment. But our evidence shows that treating language acquisition as the entire integration project — a debt for the child alone to repay — leaves out most of what actually shapes belonging.
The key message is therefore not that Austrian schools’ emphasis on German is without value, but that it currently comes at the expense of everything else: friendship, home language, transnational family ties, and the everyday hybridity that already defines these children’s lives outside the classroom.
Ultimately, the question is not whether these children integrate. It is whether the institutions meant to support them are willing to recognise integration as something children are already doing, in their own hybrid and fluid way — rather than a fixed status still waiting to be earned.
Árendás, Z., Wolter, S., Keller, J. (2026). Navigating the In-Between: Immigrant Children’s School Integration in Vienna.
In: Kodero, C.U., Gapa, A.Z., Shehadeh, L. (eds) Navigating Diaspora: Migrant Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-25202-9_11