Drawing on former ethnographic inquiry in a primary bilingual German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion classroom, this paper discusses how in the passage from primary to secondary education, multilingualism as educational resource experiences a meaning change from capital for social inclusion (allowing the rise of a spatio-temporally restricted bilingual community of practice (Budach 2009)), to capital for social mobility and individual difference, which subverts the terms for a shared multilingual aspiration. It is shown how multilingual learners deal with with this educational and societal constraint.