Transnational youth mobility: new categories for migrant youth research

Abstract

Large-scale research on migrant youth categorises youth along two lines: ethnicity and generation. Yet insights from smaller-scale qualitative studies indicate that it is important to experiment with categories based on mobility. While these studies have shown that young people’s mobility affects their identities, educational resilience, sense of belonging and sense of self, findings have not led to new thinking about categories used in large-scale migrant youth research. Given this lacuna, we investigate young people’s mobility, understood here as long or short trips to countries other than where they reside, based on a large-scale survey in three European countries ( N = 2019). We find that travels are common amongst secondary school pupils of both migrant and non-migrant background and that youth with a migration background primarily travel to their or their parents’ ‘home’ country. While lower socio-economic status is associated with less frequent travel for the general population, it is not linked to the frequency of travel of youth with a migration background. In today’s globalised world, where there are important distinctions between those who can travel and those who cannot, our findings call for putting the mobility of young people at the heart of analytical categories.

Migrant youth and the idea of the ‘migrant experience’

“…The literature on ‘second generation returns’ (Mazzucato and Haagsman, 2022) examines the connection between young people’s engagement with their parents’ country of origin in which returning home has important implications for their identities and sense of belonging in both ‘origin’ country and country of settlement (Binaisa, 2011; Caneva, 2017; Reynolds and Zontini, 2016). The young people’s accounts tell us that a sense of belonging is a complicated process where they inhabit multiple complementary homes (Mallett, 2004; Tharmalingam, 2016).…”

Extraordinary everydayness: Young people's affective engagements with the country of origin through digital media and transnational mobility

“…As such, it has failed to consider young people's agency in creating their own transnational networks with peers in the origin country (but see Akom Ankobrey et al., 2021). Furthermore, this body of literature commonly conceptualizes migrant youth as sedentary and has ignored their physical mobility, even though almost half of all migrant youth in European secondary schools visit the country of origin at least annually (Mazzucato & Haagsman, 2022; Schimmer & Van Tubergen, 2014).…”

Young lives on the move

“…As such, it has failed to consider young people's agency in creating their own transnational networks with peers in the origin country (but see Akom Ankobrey, Mazzucato, and Wagner 2021). Furthermore, this body of literature commonly conceptualizes migrant youth as sedentary and has ignored their physical mobility, even though almost half of all migrant youth in European secondary schools visit the country of origin at least annually (Mazzucato and Haagsman, 2022;Schimmer and Van Tubergen 2014).…”

“…Such trips to the country of origin are a common phenomenon among young people with a migration background 1 in Europe. Recent research shows that 81-97% of migrant youth in several European countries have visited their country of origin at least once or twice, and many visit on a regular basis (Mazzucato and Haagsman, 2022; see also Schimmer and Van Tubergen 2014). Considering that migrant youth make up 21% of the overall youth population across the European Union (OECD/EU 2018), travels to the country of origin is part of the reality of millions of young people with a migration background in Europe.…”

“…However, recent research agendas emphasize the need to adequately address -theoretically and methodologically -the increasing complexity, diversity, and emotionality of transnational youth mobilities (van Geel and Mazzucato 2018;Robertson et al 2018;Cheung Judge et al 2020). Youth mobility is not only an empirically important phenomenon, with more than half of young people with a migration background in Europe travelling to the origin country at least annually (Mazzucato and Haagsman, 2022;Schimmer and Van Tubergen 2014). Several recent studies also show the significant impact mobility trajectories have on young people's lives, such as equipping them with educational resilience (van Geel and Mazzucato 2021) or a renewed sense of purpose (Hoechner 2020).…”