The “integration of refugees” is today characterised by temporary protection and repatriation schemes, and the “Danish approach” to integration has gained traction across many European countries because of its restrictive measures. Within the national welfare states, asylum seekers and ‘refugees’ are increasingly promoted and positioned only as assets for the host states, who invests in ‘refugees’’ human capital to stimulate growth and employment in industries and occupations in demand of labour power. Welfare workers in Denmark, such as social workers, social educators and schoolteachers, have since the 1970’s engaged in educating ‘the refugee’ with reference to the welfare state’s social-liberal norms concerning self-sufficiency and the achievement of life quality, aiming to integrate and form the refugee within the existing capitalistic welfare society (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022b, 100–127; 2022a).

Recently, Heba Gowayed, has constructed a theory of state-structured human capital (2022, 4) to study how Syrian refugees’ human capital “is augmented, transformed, or destroyed by national incorporation polices” in the US, Canada and Germany. But while Gowayed focuses on how different national policies either recognises and/or invests in one group of newcomers across three states, we will focus on how municipal integration workers have sought to transform and potentialize ‘refugees’ in local communities and its different economies.

Thus, the purpose of this paper is to study integration as a category of practice (Korteweg 2017; Jacobsen 2023; Masoud et al. 2023), and investigate how integration is described and work at the municipal level; how the state’s production of refugee positionalites is further governed locally. Thus, we focus on integration, not as a concept professing coherent meaning nor as a category of analysis, but exclusively as a category of practice which means that we focus on the “social, cultural and economic processes that produce groups in ways that move beyond integration discourse” (Korteweg 2017, 440). We engage in integration as a category of practice across multiple settings and investigates how municipal integration practices unfold, as narrated by the integration workers themselves. The analysis pays particular attention to how integration practices interact with and effectuate national policies of temporariness and repatriation in ambiguous ways, and how differences between rural and urban municipalities, their political leadership, and differences in housing, occupational and populational infrastructure transpire.

Research has translated integration as a category of practice into a bordering practice of internal frontiers that reproduces symbolic boundaries, racial difference and social inequalities within democratic policies (Borrelli 2021; Shapiro et al. 2024; Stoler 2022; Øland 2019; 2025). Such research shows how race is produced in the targeting of racialised groups by racialised images and interventions, and thus how racialisation implies practices and actions by dominant groups. Research has also pointed to how the refugee category itself has become racialised and racialising in as much as it has become associated with non-white bodies (Picozza 2024; Blinkenberg and Øland 2026). We use these insights in our analysis to point to what we conceptualise as racialisations and racialising narratives where refugees are targeted as a racialised group by disparaging and dehumanising images that seem to legitimate coercion and exploitation in the narratives of the integration workers.

The research question underpinning this paper is: how are local interests conveyed and canalised into integration practices and how do these practices simultaneously enact dynamic constructions of ‘refugees’?

The paper is founded on original empirical material gathered from narrative interviews with 30 integration workers from six Danish municipalities during 2021–2022. Local policy documents, 4–10 per municipality, encompassing integration policies, housing and employment plans and so on, serve as supplementary material. The research was a sub-project of the research project RESTORE, funded by The Independent Research Fund Denmark. The six municipalities selected differ in size (area), number of inhabitants, population density, and in political leadership and socio-geographical location (across Denmark), including housing, occupational and populational structures and opportunities. In Denmark there are 98 municipalities and the six municipalities selected for this study were chosen so that they meet different but typical parameters of municipalities in Denmark. The integration workers interviewed worked within the areas of reception, employment, social work, social education, schooling, youth activities and adult education. They were originally trained as teachers, social caseworkers, social educators, academics from the humanities and in sales and retail, and had previously worked in these areas. Of the 30 integration workers interviewed, 19 were employed in an integration unit (sometimes located within a jobcentre, sometimes not) and the rest in public community schools, language schools, youth and family sections of the municipality. In sum, the integration workers were a heterogenous group. The analytical approach for this paper aims at describing how each interviewee constructed meaning by weaving narratives of agents, events and plots into a meaningful whole (Czarniawska 2010; Mattingly 1994). The interview responses are therefore summarised in tables with the following categories: 1) notions used to describe refugees; 2) interventions and practices set in motion “to integrate”; 3) driving agents or actants of the practices; and 4) the municipality’s development in relation to refugees. This enables an understanding of how each integration worker wove their narratives into their local environments, and it gives insights into how each municipality functioned based on many different viewpoints. Grounded in these understandings, we will outline condensed descriptive analyses of the interviewees’ perceptions of refugees in relation to the interests, needs and goals of their municipalities.

The paper is expected to expose how integration practices unfold within the engine room of Danish municipalities and depend on municipal differences. Our preliminary analyses suggest that Danish integration emerges through racialising narratives and racialising dividing practices that absorbs and serves local interests, and in these racialising processes, educational thinking seem to play a crucial role. At the municipal level, the task to “integrate refugees” is narrated in different ways: through housing practices “refugees” are placed in isolated but ‘decent’ housing where a social order of ‘kinds of citizens’ carefully correspond to ‘kinds of districts’; through employment practices and the use of consecutive internships, “refugees” are racialised and cast as a commodity that fits the economic context and helps to develop local businesses; and through civilising practices “refugees” are cast as people who should develop and civilise themselves to serve long-term interests in establishing a viable population and tax base in the community. Almost every narrative has, as a silent referent, the Danish state’s production of refugee positionalities, in which the very categorisation of the refugee suggests and legitimises subordination, discrimination and segregation. The national integration policy’s focus on temporariness and repatriation positions the refugee in a waiting room, and in this position, municipal integration practices make the subordinated refugee useful to society. We will pay particular attention to the role of educational thinking in the racialising narratives. Learning agendas seem to play a crucial role in the cultivated integrationist treadmill driving integration practices (see also Ahmed 2016). Educational thinking appears to be dressed in good intentions but conceals the power relations upon which it is based, and which keep people positioned as refugees subordinated and stuck at the threshold of modern and free living within the Danish welfare state and liberal democracy.

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