Integrating Refugee and Asylum-seeking Children - Center for the ...

1. comparatIve report:
educatIonal IntegratIon of refugee
and asylum-seekIng chIldren In the eu
“Transform the luck of the few into the right
of all.”
Katarina Tomasevski,
Special Rapporteur on the right to education of the
UN Commission on Human Rights (1998 – 2004)
and founder of the Right to Education Project
1. IntroductIon
“I like my school. I really like my school”, remarks
an eight-year-old girl from Congo in Ireland. 1 This
spontaneous and joyous statement is the wonderful
expression of a successful educational integration.
Children, as well as theoreticians and policymakers,
know what successful integration feels
like. What children are not supposed to know is
how to achieve it. The paradox is that adults in
their institutional roles as theoreticians, politicians
and stakeholders cannot offer a definitive and
convincing answer to this fundamental question,
but hesitate between varieties of perspectives. The
term ‘perspective’ is understood as a looking at
the field from a different angle and thus asking
different questions, taking other units of analysis
as a starting point and collecting new kinds of
empirical material. 2
The answers vary synchronically and diachronically,
between the poles of multiculturalism and nondifferentialism,
as well as from one period to
another. A second paradox is that, as a general
rule, theories are better equipped than policies, the
latter being not prepared, not willing, or not ready,
35
anna krasteva
New Bulgarian University
to put knowledge into practice. However, this is not
the case for integration: both policies and theories
vacillate, experiment, fail and/or develop.
Four methodological preliminaries should be clarified:
the first concerns the triangle ‘concepts – realities –
normativity’; the second focuses on the key target
group of the INTEGRACE study – refugee and asylumseeking
children (RASC); the third summarises the
theoretical expectations for the comparative analysis;
the final one specifies the relations between the
institutional incentive structures and the strategic
decisions of migrants.
Firstly, integration as a concept faces two challenges –
one empirical and one normative. It covers a wide
range of practices and is heavily burdened with
normative pathos:
“The fact that the same concepts are used in
different national and local contexts – integration
policy or multicultural policies – may create the
illusion of similar, if not the same, phenomena.
Empirical research, however, has shown not only
the ideas and assumptions behind such policies are
different, but the practice and measures of such
policies vary considerably between both places and
situations.” 3
Secondly, the project clearly identifies two target
groups – refugee and asylum-seeking children –
but the distinctions underlying the policies and
practices reviewed in the INTEGRACE project vary
from country to country and according the level
of policy concerned. Whether refugee and asylum-
1 Country Report: Ireland.
2 Penninx, Rinus, Dimitrina Spencer and Nicholas Van Hear. (2008) Migration and integration in Europe: the state of research. Oxford:
COMPAS, p. 11.
3 Penninx, Rinus, Dimitrina Spencer and Nicholas Van Hear. (2008) Migration and integration in Europe: the state of research. Oxford:
COMPAS, p. 10.