Since Germany’s self-recognition as a country of immigration, there have been manifold political efforts to involve ‘migrant organisations’ in school processes. The expectations towards these organisations as well as their (self-)perception of their role in schools have not yet been systematically investigated and related to each other. This article fills this gap by examining how the organisations are positioned towards schools in the political and administrative discourse and how their members take up the notions of their role and embed them in their self-perception. Using a triangulated research design, this article reconstructs how the intelligible subject position of the ‘migrant organisation’ is produced in the interweaving of discourse and subjectification processes. In this process, the conditions of recognition prove to be as ambivalent as they are presuppositional for participation in the school, whereby, in addition to orders of belonging in migration societies, welfare state transformation processes also prove to be central contexts of subjectivation that contribute to the constitution of the (self-)responsible subject in and through ‘migrant organisations’.