In this paper I critically review language policies aiming at the integration of immigrants into French minorities in Canada, and use recent survey data to trace the impact of these policies on adult Francophone immigrants’ integration experiences outside of Quebec. An analysis of the intersections between these language policies and the integration trajectories shows interesting, but also worrying trends which are discussed in this paper. While these policies arguably aim at the maintenance of linguistic status quo, both nationally and locally, through reinforcing the existing balance of power between English and French communities, and through leveling asymmetries in French minority settings, they simultaneously work at facilitating but also impeding immigrant integration; as such, they are at times embraced, and at others resisted on immigrants’ pathways.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.