Street-Level Integration Work with Temporary Migrant Students <b>:</b> “The joker is always whether they would prefer to go home”

This article is concerned with how migrant students who arrive in the Danish school system during their compulsory school years are placed in different reception programs by street-level bureaucrats. The national political framework is indeterminate with regards to integration programs in education, meaning the local level can create multiple coexisting programs where the placement of migrant students depends upon how street-level bureaucrats apply their discretion. Street-level bureaucrats must decide migrant students’ placement considering students’ temporal conditions, namely their potential permanent integration, but in recent years also their potential non-permanence as posited by the 2019 immigrant policy “paradigm shift” espousing repatriation. The article is therefore guided by the question: How do street-level bureaucrats navigate temporal conditions in their integration work of referring migrant students to reception programs in a Danish municipality? The theoretical framework consists of street-level theory regarding discretion, but read with an emphasis on migrant students’ temporal conditions (Griffiths, 2024; Lipsky, 2010). The empirical material consists of 17 interviews in a Danish municipality supplemented by municipal policy documents. The article finds that three groups of migrant students are identified by street-level bureaucrats as referred to different reception programs based on temporariness as a temporal condition. These are respectively “international students,” “aging-out students,” and “Ukrainian students.” The referral leads to disparities in provision within the heterogeneous group of migrant students. This has potential ramifications for migrant students’ access to their educational rights and the Danish welfare state’s posits of educational egalitarianism.