Reasons for migration are as diverse as the migrating people: Some lack a perspective of how an already acquired valuable education can translate into complying living conditions, others first of all seek the guarantee of basic human rights and a valuable education for their children (or themselves). In Germany, it is the official aim to integrate all immigrants into the public school system, independent of a legal permit of residence. While the support of integration and education is a global humanistic imperative, authorities operate under a pressure to find strategies of not integrating and educating "too well" in order not to produce "additional incentives" for additional poverty-driven immigration on the local level. In this paper, we will discuss first insights from an ethnographical investigation focused on the encounter of poor immigrants with the public school system. These insights will address the institutional challenges that individuals face concerning the dilemma of a "not too little, but not too much"-integration. In doing so, we build on the theorization of schools as a pedagogic device that aims at producing subjects according to a given division of labour and on a critique of the ideology that underlies the workings of that device.