In recent years, Sweden has seen a vast increase in the number of migrant-background pupils entering the school system. According to official policies, these students should be included in everyday school activities wherever possible. The focus of this study is to investigate when and why this does not happen; with a focus on English lessons in upper primary school, we consider how exclusionary practices are implemented and justified by teachers. Exclusion from classroom activity is a complex, multifaceted topic, and thus needs to be explored from multiple angles. In this study, we adopt a mixed-method approach to data collection, drawing on observation of English classes, interviews with teachers, and analyses of local and national policy documents. We then use the analytical framework of nexus analysis in order to consider how exclusion is a social action, which can be seen as the combination of the historical body, the interaction order, and discourses in place. The main findings of the study show that the reasons pupils get excluded vary between teachers but mostly comes down to teachers' belief in some form of hierarchy between school subjects and that learning Swedish is prioritized for pupils with a migration-background. The implications of these findings are that that teachers do not perceive certain actions as exclusionary but rather view them as standard routines or even as something positive towards the students, which can be hurtful for the excluded pupils and leads to the loss of the socio-cultural learning environments that take place inside the classrooms.