Migration background – Statistical classification and the problem of implicitly ethnicising categorisation in educational contexts

Recent studies on ethnic boundary making have shown how deeply systems of statistical classification are intertwined with wider social and political relations. Empirical studies of this interplay have overwhelmingly focused on contexts of explicit ethnicising. This article, in contrast, discusses how ethnicised categories emerge and function in fields of professional practice in which categorisation practices, by themselves, are not necessarily ethnicising. The focus is on the field of education. Analysing categorisation processes in such fields of professional practice is crucial for understanding the social and political embedding of statistical classifications of migration and ethnicity: they are both part of the social foundation of statistical measurements and crucial contexts in which statistical classifications develop their broader societal effects. The article uses the German category of ‘migration background’ as an example to corroborate this argument. Drawing on findings from various empirical studies, it argues that the emergence of ‘migration background’ in educational contexts mirrors a more general shift from class-centred educational problematisations of the post-Second World War era to individualising and culturalising discourses of the 1990s and 2000s. Mirroring its historical development, current educational usages confound three dimensions of meaning (migration, ethnicity and social class), with important consequences for the problematisation of educational phenomena. The usage of this confounded category is deeply anchored in the structures of educational practice. At the same time, ‘migration background’ is full of tensions and increasingly incapable of classifying the ‘intended’ parts of student populations. Hence, the question about the future of ‘migration background’ as educational category and the problem of possible successors arise