Beyond Indicators: Emotional Labour and the Lived Dynamics of Refugee Integration in Germany Capturing Lived Experiences of Integration

Abstract

Integration in Germany is commonly assessed through visible indicators such as language acquisition, labour-market participation, and compliance with institutional expectations. Drawing on qualitative interviews, participant observation, and informal conversations with 18 Syrian refugees, this article argues that such indicators capture only part of refugees’ lived experience. Integration also involves emotional labour: managing frustration, performing motivation and gratitude, controlling visibility, and sustaining self-worth under continuous evaluation and conditional recognition. These dynamics appear in language courses, job-centre meetings, workplace encounters, and everyday social interactions. Participants often fulfilled formal expectations while still experiencing downward mobility, fragile recognition, and emotional exhaustion. By linking integration research with scholarship on emotional labour and recognition, the article shifts attention from refugees’ supposed deficits to the emotional work produced by integration regimes and unequal opportunity structures. Integration, it argues, is not only measurable participation, but a lived process shaped by evaluation, conditional recognition, and unequal social relations.