In Sweden, as elsewhere, migrants’ language knowledge has become a debated topic and a cornerstone in restrictive migration policies. In this paper, we investigate how the metaphor ‘language as a key’ to society is used by migrant language learners and how it relates to the participants’ experiences of learning Swedish. The study draws on interviews with 174 migrants enrolled in three different state-subsidized language educational contexts providing tuition in basic Swedish. The results highlight how the metaphor was recurrently used and how it constructed certain time-space relations. It positioned migrant language learners as outsiders to a national imaginary, and the temporal aspects of the metaphor both pointed to what was needed to be done in the present, that is, learning Swedish, and how language learning was associated with future-oriented possibilities. While the migrant students reproduced a simplified discourse on the relationship between language learning and integration, their language learning experiences simultaneously subversively challenged the simplified metaphor.