Access of Immigrant Roma Families to Strasbourg’s Integration Policies, in Paticular French-Language-Teaching Policy. an Example of Biographical Policy Evaluation.

We have been working on the comparative “biographical policy evaluation” of social policies concerning migrants in Strasbourg and Frankfurt, e.g. local programs for teaching to new migrants the language of the host country, hence French in Strasbourg. The method of “biographically evaluating” social policies takes note of the fact that social policies relevant to different domains (such as housing, healthcare, vocational (re)training and access to local labour markets, childhood, language programs for migrants...) are most of the times developed and implemented by different public agencies (or private subcontractors), mostly separately ; while the combination of their decisions on the conditions of life of given individuals or families necessarily interact and may engender unforeseen and unwanted effects. Hence the idea of evaluating policies “from below”, through in-depth case studies and case histories of small samples of recipients. This is an approach to evaluation that also has the advantage of allowing to observe how recipients receive, perceive, and react (or even proact) tactically and strategically to make the best possible use of policies oriented towards them. In doing so - and without necessarily being aware of it - they “join the game”, which if they are for instance migrants, does contribute powerfully to their integration. We will present here the case of Roma families coming from Eastern European countries to settle in Strasbourg, and of their reactions to municipal policies aiming at teaching them French to foster their access labour markets.