Integration revisited

Much of the existing literature inmigration and integration research pays hardly any attention to the subjective view of the immigrants on their individual migration history and the links between prior life phases and the structural embedding of integration processes. This article aims at connecting objective data and subjective perspectives analysing the intersections between migrants?? perceptions of their individual ??migration project??, objective traces of their biographies and societal opportunity structures. The model, that we develop at the end of the paper summarises emerging hypotheses during the analysis and stresses the dynamic, contextual and interactional nature of integration processes. It is based on qualitative interviews with 30 immigrants from the two biggest guest-worker groups in Austria originally recruited during the 1960ies and 1970ies from Ex-Yugoslavia and Turkey.