The term „Migrationshintergrund“ (migration background) features very prominently in public German discourses on education and social integration. It serves to explain differences in educational success, income, standard of living, etc. Whereas its official attribution is based on a person’s (and his or her parents’) birthplace, this article examines its actual use in German newspapers and reconstructs its meaning according to the use of the term in the German language community. As a starting point, the emergence and historical development of the term is briefly recapitulated and the meaning of its constituents („Migration“, „Hintergrund“) is investigated both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. On this basis, a corpus of 4601 instances of the use of the term „Migrationshintergrund“ is analyzed. Overall, it appears that „Migrationshintergrund“ is used to distinguish between ,real Germans‘ and people who are officially German, but are not felt to be part of the German community. These persons are seen as a group of ,Others‘ that presents challenges for the majority because they are not sufficiently integrated and need social support. Against this backdrop, it is investigated whether the concept of Migrationshintergrund“ does indeed capture salient dimensions of social stratification, arguing that socio-economic and linguistic factors allow for a much more thorough understanding of social processes than the notion of origin as it is captured by „Migrationshintergrund“. It is concluded that „Migrationshintergrund“ therefore serves as a means to prevent discourse on social change and that the term and mental concept of „Migrationshintergrund“ should be avoided in future linguistic research.