The 2019 GEM Report (Migration, displacement and education: building bridges, not walls) underscores the opportunities of ensuring that migrants have access to quality education in inclusive societies. By law, the Swedish educational system quite strongly supports immigrant education. On the other hand, problems with implementation and processes of social and discursive exclusion are major challenges that may lead to segregation and counteract educational inclusion and social cohesion. Various intercultural and linguistic approaches are developed in order to support and empower immigrant students (Cummins, 2000). The theories of Translanguaging (García, 2009) has come to dominate academic discussions, since it emphasizes social justice, inclusive teaching and the pedagogical value of engaging students' multilingual repertoires in all school subjects. In this paper, we emphasize that content area teachers have a crucial task in promoting students’ building of identity, knowledge and language. We perceive content area learning as a complex interplay between knowledge, language and identity formations. A key issue is, how to avoid processes of exclusion, and a simplified pedagogy that, despite good intentions, contribute to social injustice (Karlsson et al 2018; Nygård Larsson, 2018; Svensson Källberg, 2018). We explore the integrated building of identities, knowledges, languages and academic discourses, mainly through concepts derived from Translanguaging theories, and Karl Maton’s sociological framework Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014) that underscores the complexity of knowledge-building within various school subjects. In combining these theories in un-explored ways, we attempt to find new methodologies for understanding the diversity and complexity of contemporary pedagogy in a sustainable society.