A Missing Piece: The Absence of Discussion About Integration Policy in the Slovak Migration Discourse

In the current paper, we will explain how and why Slovak politicians have been largely unwilling to articulate the topic of migrant integration in recent years, even though up until 2015, international migration was at least a marginal topic of public debate in Slovakia. To this day, this topic remains mostly unexplored by both Slovak politicians and voters. Since migration policy is a synthesis of immigration, asylum, and integration policies, we assume that the migration discourse will be equivalently structured. Although the integration of foreigners has traditionally been an important part of migration policy in the larger world, we have found that this topic has been marginalised in Slovak public discourse, i.e. it is usually not part of the political discussion here. Integration is a marginal topic of this political discourse because Slovak politicians prefer to articulate migration as a threat to public order, identity, culture, and religion. Slovak politicians reject migration because they assume that migrants are unable or unwilling to integrate. The debate on migrant integration began to emerge only in the context of the war in Ukraine and immigration from Ukraine. Still, state institutions have not yet presented a systematic approach to integrating foreigners into the autochthonous society.