The Lives of Third-Country National Migrant Youth in Europe: Between Perceived Vulnerabilities and Available Resources

1. Introduction to the Special Issue

The idea for this Special Issue emerged from the Editors’ collaboration on the framework of the European project MIMY: EMpowerment through liquid Integration of Migrant Youth in vulnerable conditions. The main objective of MIMY was to better understand and support the “liquid integration” processes of young (between 18 and 29 years of age) third-country nationals (TCNs) living in nine European countries in vulnerable conditions1. Between 2020 and 2023, the project brought together 14 partner institutions across Europe and researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds to conduct several empirical activities with different actors in 18 local case studies.

This Special Issue includes eight contributions, in which MIMY researchers present findings from their local or national case studies (in Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania, and Sweden) or compare results cross-nationally (Hungary and Poland, Germany, Norway and Luxembourg). Specifically, each article draws on qualitative empirical activities carried out in the context of MIMY with young TCNs in order to explore their subjective accounts and experiences of integration, vulnerability, and resilience.

Starting from these rich data, each group of authors theoretically and analytically developed their own unique contribution to the study of multifaceted, temporal, and relational integration processes from the point of view of young TCNs. However, each contribution to this SI shares a common “point of departure” characterized by theoretical, ethical, and methodological choices developed in the context of MIMY (Nienaber et al. 2020). In the following section, we present three key considerations that have been at the core of the MIMY project and that constitute the basic rationale behind each of the articles collected in this SI.

Firstly, the focus of MIMY, as reflected in the articles, is on young people between 18 and 29 years of age who have migrated from a non-EU country to Europe. Within the emergent, complex, multi-layered processes characterizing contemporary migration in Europe, the adaptation processes of young people in this specific age group between adolescence and adulthood are still understudied and are, thus, not really understood yet, despite their impact on the receiving and sending countries (COMEM 2007; De Lange 2015; Roman et al. 2020). Indeed, young TCNs greatly contribute to the demographic rejuvenation of European societies and to the functioning of European economies, and they initiate changes and transformations in the social and cultural arenas of European society. However, diverse migratory motives and trajectories, and encounters with migration regimes and governance, will not only affect the lives that migrants are building in Europe but also the societies that they have become part of. Additionally, young migrants are arguably at a higher risk of socio-economic marginalization, as they are experiencing a “double transition”: the developmental and socio-economic transition from infancy/adolescence to adulthood and the migratory transition from their country of origin to their new country of residence. Both transitions entail complex multilevel/multidimensional temporal processes, which can bring about opportunities and prospects for participation and development in new contexts but also numerous challenges, barriers, and obstacles, which can create conditions of vulnerability or exacerbate existing ones (Côté and Bynner 2008; King and Koller 2015; Lindell and Campione-Barr 2017; Titzmann and Lee 2022).

Following this reasoning, the MIMY project paid close attention to young TCNs who were living in vulnerable conditions, as they could be at a higher risk of marginalization. Aware of the ethical and political complexities behind the notion of vulnerability, and of the high risk of bias in defining who is “vulnerable”, the project adopted a broad, multi-layered, and process-orientated understanding of vulnerability (Gilodi et al. 2022). To avoid stereotyping, stigmatizing, and rigid conceptualizations, the project moved beyond the conventional “categories of vulnerability” (such as the forced/voluntary binary), and considered vulnerable conditions related to different dimensions, such as negative life events, adverse childhood experiences, illness, injuries and disabilities, social, cultural, and economic exclusion, experiences of discrimination, etc. (MIMY Consortium 2019). The selection of the participants in all the studies included in this Special Issue was informed by this critical and processual understanding of vulnerability. Thus, reflecting the broad target of the MIMY project, this collection of papers focuses on young TCNs in different conditions of vulnerability, such as newly arrived asylum seekers/refugees living in reception centres or in transition from the reception system to independent living, young NEET migrant women, international students from non-EU countries with hostile regimes, refugees who have been issued temporary permits, or migrants from specific origin countries living in precarious conditions.

Secondly, all the articles in this Special Issue are grounded in a critical and processual understanding of integration, which is not seen as a fixed, static, and linear concept but rather as a complex process of multifaceted temporal interactions across multiple dimensions and levels (Skrobanek and Jobst 2019; Spencer and Charsley 2021; Skrobanek et al. 2021). The MIMY project adopted this “liquid integration” (LI) perspective (Skrobanek and Jobst 2019) to counter and challenge all manner of popular sectarian integration convictions (Freire 1970), misunderstandings, or misreading of the classical concept of integration (Spencer and Charsley 2021). On the contrary, MIMY was grounded in an understanding of integration as a integration as a reciprocal lifelong exchange and adjustment of individuals and institutions, both embedded in temporal ecologies (Skrobanek and Jobst 2019, 2022). Consequentially, the project set out to study the complex and processual mutual adaptation of young migrants, embedded in a specific context and operating on multiple levels, in order to better research and understand the idiosyncratic understandings, perceptions, processes, and practices of integration (Skrobanek and Jobst 2019, 2022; Skrobanek et al. 2021). Although not all the articles that are part of this SI adopt LI as their main analytical framework, they incorporate its main theoretical premise as a starting point for their analysis.

Thirdly, from an ethical–methodological point of view, the empirical contributions share a migrant-centred approach, which was an intrinsic component of MIMY’s research design. Migrant voices, experiences, and perspectives are often left out of political discourses and policies around migration (Aldridge 2012, 2015; Hugman et al. 2011), which tend to focus on what migrants are missing and cannot do in their new lived contexts. Critical of these deficit-orientated and exclusionary models, the MIMY project regarded young migrants as agents shaping their own life trajectories and strove to place their perception and experiences at the core of its investigation. Thus, in the field research activities conducted in the various European contexts of the project, in-depth interviews were used to explore personal histories and pre- and post-migratory experiences in many facets of life (access to local services, education and the labour market, housing, psychological wellbeing, family processes, formal and informal social networks). This ethical and methodological approach is reflected in all the contributions to this Special Issue, as young TCNs’ narrations, subjective perceptions, and understandings of the vulnerable conditions, challenges, and opportunities in their new country of residence take centre stage.

To conclude, despite this common “point of departure”, each study in the SI developed specific theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches and investigated specific conditions, experiences, or phenomena that shape the lives of young TCNs in a particular research context. In the face of this heterogeneity, the findings may not be directly comparable but still allow us to draw some reflections on the cross-cutting themes that emerged from all contributions, namely, integration processes and temporal dimensions.

2. Integration: An Open Process

Regarding the notion of integration, as indicated above, the authors of this Special Issue share a dynamic, ecological, and contextualized approach. However, such an approach is declinated differently in the various contributions from a linguistic and, in some cases, theoretical point of view. For example, some authors have chosen to retain the word “integration” while highlighting the problematic history of the term, and have sought to explore it in processual, multilevel, and multidirectional ways (Aydar and Plöger 2023; Arendas et al. 2023; Cimpoeru et al. 2023; Zanfrini and Giuliani 2023). Other authors, in an effort to distance themselves (more or less explicitly) from the language of policies and politics, have opted to adopt the less politically and semiotically heavy analogy of “building a life” (Gilodi et al. 2023; Lind et al. 2023) or “making projects for the future” (Crapolicchio et al. 2023), pointing to the process in young adulthood of finding one’s place in the world. Finally, rather than discussing integration only in theoretical terms, in the study by Biaback Anong et al. (2023) the meanings and understandings of “integration”—in the paper understood as Vergesellschaftung—became the focus of the empirical analysis. Indeed, the authors investigated migrants’ subjective ideas on integration and their perceptions as being consonant or dissonant with those of the receiving society.

Regardless of the semantic choices made, each paper examines the lived experiences, opinions, and views of young people going through processes of integration (or building their lives/futures) in different European countries. Within this broader focus and approach, each contribution focused their attention on different levels of analysis (e.g., the effect of certain socio-political conditions vs. individual psychological processes), on different groups of young migrants (e.g., refugees living in reception centres vs. NEET migrant women) and on different geographical units (e.g., one city vs. multiple countries). The articles also vary in terms of their main discipline of reference (e.g., psychology, sociology, geography, political science, etc.) and the different theoretical and analytical concepts employed (e.g., vulnerability, agency, locality, integration, etc.). Nevertheless, together, these papers strongly contribute to the literature on integration and, specifically, the integration of migrant youth. For example, considering the “traditional” dimensions related to integration processes (employment, housing, education, and healthcare), the articles in this Special Issue document an array of critical issues faced by young migrants in their countries of arrival. Reaching educational goals, accessing (certain sectors of) the labour market, and finding suitable and long-term housing solutions are some of the main structural challenges that migrant youth can encounter during the integration process (Arendas et al. 2023; Aydar and Plöger 2023; Cimpoeru et al. 2023; Gilodi et al. 2023; Lind et al. 2023; Zanfrini and Giuliani 2023).

The young migrants’ voices that are collected in this Special Issue shed light on how structural constraints have affected their integration experiences, since their arrival in their country of residence, or since an even earlier point. In particular, legal barriers, and their capacity to arbitrarily shape the experiences of migrants across different aspects of life, are broadly documented in the contributions to this SI (Arendas et al. 2023; Aydar and Plöger 2023; Cimpoeru et al. 2023; Crapolicchio et al. 2023; Gilodi et al. 2023; Lind et al. 2023). Insecure legal statuses, temporary residence permits, the bureaucratic complexity of legal procedures, and difficulties in communicating with local authorities are crucial aspects that shape young people’s lives, as they limit opportunities across different life domains, as well as access to resources (e.g., welfare provisions). Legal barriers are also discussed in connection with the increasingly restrictive national and supranational migration regimes and political changes that have been characterizing Europe in recent years, from Sweden, with a history favourable policy frameworks for the integration of migrants (Lind et al. 2023), to Central–Eastern-European societies, described as hostile environments (Arendas et al. 2023).

Again, on a structural level, welfare state models in European countries may exacerbate some migration challenges. As an example, Zanfrini and Giuliani (2023) show how the condition of marginalization that young female NEETs experience in the Italian labour market is the product not only of the structural disadvantages affecting the broader migrant population but also of the “familistic” character of the Italian welfare state (Esping Andersen 1990) that places on (women within) families the greater burden in care practices, reinforcing strong gender asymmetries.

Structural barriers and opportunities are, therefore, embedded into other barriers and resources at the meso and micro level, and this allows us to better understand the conditions and challenges faced by migrants. The articles in this Special Issue explore, among other topics, different forms of social isolation from the rest of society (e.g., the isolation of young women within the home, the isolation of asylum seekers/refugees inside reception centres), family dynamics related to the pile-up of critical events during pre- and post-migratory transitions (e.g., the marriage-induced departure of young reunited women), interactions with local service providers and NGOs (e.g., as sources of support for integration trajectories). If, on the whole, the contributions present in the SI make it possible to grasp the plurality of dimensions involved in the integration process (education, labour, housing, psycho-social wellbeing), then the challenge for future research will be to elucidate their reciprocal interdependence, linking together different dimensions of integration, without oversimplifying the instrumental and relative-affective value that certain objects (housing, qualifications, jobs, etc.) have for people.

Thus, most of the articles present contextual challenges, and they not only examine these challenges’ instrumental role in shaping young migrants’ long-term opportunities and trajectories in their country of residence, but also highlight their emotional and psychological impact. Despite the variety of disciplinary approaches adopted and goals pursued in each study, some articles in this Special Issue (Crapolicchio et al. 2023; Gilodi et al. 2023; Lind et al. 2023) make a particular contribution to our understandings of the psychological processes and emotional dynamics at play in the complex process of integration, and how these are strongly related to the wellbeing of young new residents in European societies. For example, Crapolicchio et al. (2023) show how the precariousness experienced in multiple structural dimensions of post-migration life (housing, education, labour, status) can result in psychological suffering and distress, threatening some psychological needs (e.g., self-esteem, self-efficacy, meaning, continuity, belonging) that are crucially related to migrants’ identity and agency. The contribution by Lind et al. (2023) focuses on the consequences of states’ restrictive migration policies, highlighting how they foster migrants’ sense of uncertainty and powerlessness and their fears and worries about the future. Similarly, Gilodi et al. (2023) reflect on the meaning of having or not having a “home”, reminding us that, beyond the migratory journey, feelings of being “homeless” can persist or even intensify in the initial integration phase, when precarious and temporary housing makes migrants feel constantly unsettled, “homeless” and, at times, even “hopeless”.

Finally, despite the multiple barriers and challenges described, following MIMY’s approach, all the contributions to this Special Issue present migrants as agents actively contributing to their positioning in their local context and integration trajectory. Different studies highlight the relationship between migrants’ agency and the mobilization of resources on the individual level (cultural capital, dispositional traits such as self-determination, personal values), on the social and family level (support from ethnic networks, quality of family relationships, loyalty to family migratory mandates), and on the institutional level (access to opportunity structures, instrumental support from local actors and population, migrant-friendly local policies and service provision).

3. Temporality

Another main cross-cutting theme emerging from the SI relates to temporality in its various aspects. Indeed, the challenges and resources that migrants encounter in their integration processes are not static but change over time and, significantly, take time (Cwerner 2001; Fontanari 2017; Robertson 2014; Ryan and Mulholland 2015; Skrobanek et al. 2021; Skrobanek and Jobst 2022; Sluzki 1979). Additionally, ideas and perceptions about time are embedded into individual migration projects as well as national migration policies (Baas and Yeoh 2019; Cottrell 2015; Ryan and Mulholland 2015). All the contributions to this Special Issue recognize the importance of temporality but explore it in different ways.

On the collective level, migratory and integration processes are always linked to historical times, and the different socio-demographic, economic, political, and cultural characteristics defining the contexts that await migrants upon their arrival (MIMY Consortium 2019; Skrobanek et al. 2021). In the area of migration studies, particularly in the research into migrants’ integration and vulnerability processes, the social influence of time is often neglected (Aydar and Plöger 2023; Skrobanek et al. 2021). With the passage of time, policies around migration and integration change and evolve, on the local, national, and supranational levels, and affect the integration experiences of different cohorts of migrants. As highlighted in some of the contributions to this SI, the paradigm shift in migration legislation towards increasingly restrictive policies that has been occurring in Sweden as well as in Central–Eastern-European countries starting from 2015 has marked a turning-point in policy-making, with different outcomes (Arendas et al. 2023; Lind et al. 2023). In addition, not only the policy conditions, but also the economic and demographic situations that characterize a context are of importance at the time of arrival, as clearly shown by the growing labour shortages due to the ageing population in many European societies.

On an individual level, temporality is also a crucial dimension in migrants’ narratives and perceptions, as comparisons are drawn between pre- and post-migration life. For example, Gilodi et al. (2023) show that migrants’ subjective temporal imaginaries reveal deep interconnections between their present, past, and future conditions of vulnerability. Migration is not a timely event but a long transition, characterized by phases with specific needs and often marked by pile-ups of critical events, where individuals and families confront major transformations filled with uncertainty and ambiguity (Spini et al. 2017). Such transformations can profoundly disrupt young migrants’ perceptions of the flow of time in their lives, which can significantly enhance conditions of vulnerability, especially during young adulthood, as it is a period when, usually, many choices are made. What emerges is a time marked by fractures, in which the perception of one’s own identity as coherent over time, and the sense of control of one’s life—including one’s time—is put in crisis (Jetten and Wohl 2012). Alternatively, migration can bring time flows characterized by sudden and unmanageable accelerations, in which a sense of urgency and impatience becomes dominant, as well as anguish over the lack of time and fear of the failure of the migration project, or by temporal impasses/suspensions, such as the “dead times” in which nothing happens, the waiting times imposed by bureaucratic processes, and a prolonged indeterminacy, which can generate frustration and feelings of powerlessness (Crapolicchio et al. 2023; Gilodi et al. 2023; Lind et al. 2023; Zanfrini and Giuliani 2023).

4. Contributions to This Special Issue

As highlighted above, the eight articles in this Special Issue offer several important insights into processual and contextualized integration processes, placing the experiences and opinions of young TCNs at the heart of their analyses. The plurality of disciplinary perspectives (political, geographic, anthropological, psychological, sociological) to which the authors refer has contributed to the articulation of this popular research topic in unique and specific ways.

Three of the articles shed light on how state-level mechanisms are interconnected with local subnational realities and individual experiences, generating or enhancing conditions of vulnerability among young migrants but also creating spaces in which migrants’ agency manifests.

In Young Refugees’ Integration Trajectories. The Critical Role of Local Resources in Germany, Zeynep Aydar and Jörg Plöger explore how legal frameworks, and especially legal statuses, constitute a structural barrier to the integration of young refugees, “channelling” them into different categories of the migration system and, thus, assigning each of them a different “starting point” upon arrival. However, drawing on narrative interviews with young refugees, the authors show how, over time, access to localized resources can enable migrants to overcome the initial structural challenges, and can open up new integration trajectories. Presenting three emblematic but different narratives, Aydar and Plöger reveal how access to local resources can help individual migrants to confront and overcome the barriers and exclusion fostered by national and supernational systems, carve out a space for themselves and, ultimately, become full members of their local society.

Similarly, Jacob Lind, Christina Hansen, and Nadeen Khoury, in The Impact of Temporary Residence Permits on Young Refugees’ Abilities to Build a Life in Sweden, discuss the detrimental effects that temporary legal statuses (especially residents’ permits issued to students following The Swedish Upper Secondary School Act) have on the life prospects, material conditions, and emotional wellbeing of young migrants living in Sweden. Through rich empirical data collected from migrants who arrived as minors in Sweden and are currently living with temporary status or have held temporary permits in the past, the authors use the concept of “vulnerabilization” to describe how the process induced by migration policy regimes unfolds in the lives and stories of young migrant residents of Sweden. Specifically, the article highlights how insecure and temporary legal statuses are detrimental to the sense of agency and wellbeing and the future orientations of young people, who have to compromise their professional and educational ambitions in order to secure permanent residency.

Finally, Zsuzsanna Arendas, Agnieszka Trąbka, Vera Messing, Marta Jadviga Pietrusińska, and Dominika Winogrodzka, in the article titled Agency of Migrant Youth in Hostile Sociopolitical Environments: Case Studies from Central–Eastern-Europe, identify different forms and patterns of agency among migrant youth, and discuss how these may aid in social embedding, despite the barriers imposed by hostile legal and socio-political contexts. The article starts with an insightful description of the socio-political environment in two Central–Eastern-European countries, Poland and Hungary, showing the ways in which they are hostile to migrants. Drawing from interviews with a large group of young migrants with different legal statuses (such as migrants with work visas, those with student visas, asylum seekers, refugees, or reunited migrants) living in the two countries, the authors select, and present in detail, five case studies representing the evolution of various migrant agencies in these contexts. The analysis highlights different enactments of agency related to three main areas (education, work, and wellbeing) and identifies the common agency patterns used to navigate hostile national environments, often enabled by supportive local practices.

The interplay of resources and barriers encountered by young migrants in different domains and at different levels (the macro, meso, and micro level) of integration is the focus of two other papers in this Special Issue.

In Two-Speed Integration? A Comparative Analysis of Barriers and Resilience Strategies of Young Migrants in Vulnerable Conditions in Romania, Smaranda Cimpoeru, Monica Roman, Vlad I. Roșca, Elena-Maria Prada, Ioana Manafi, and Laura Mureșan adopt a multidimensional approach (considering employment, housing, education, and health) to explore the similarities and differences in the barriers to integration and the resilience strategies among two contrasting groups of migrant youths (one national, one supranational) constituting the largest (but different) migration flows to Romania. The comparative analysis revealed that migrants from Arab countries face harsher integration barriers compared to migrants coming from neighbouring Moldova, such as psychological distress linked to pre-migration traumatic events, language barriers, legal and bureaucratic barriers, educational barriers, and barriers related to labour-market access. Thus, in the comparison between the two groups, the migrant youth from Arab countries face longer and more complex processes of integration and heightened self-perceptions of vulnerability. The article concludes by highlighting the impact of migrants’ characteristics at the time of arrival on their integration trajectories and emphasizes the need for policies that acknowledge these differences.

In a similar vein, Laura Zanfrini and Cristina Giuliani, in “Look at Me, but Better”: The Experience of Young NEET Migrant Women between Vulnerability and Stifled Ambitions, document the complex interplay of institutional, situational, and individual factors affecting the young women living in NEET conditions (neither in employment nor in education or training) who arrived in Italy through the process of family reunification. A deep sense of vulnerability emerges among the women interviewed, which mainly refers to an impoverished and deprived relational life post migration, exacerbated by limited language skills. The authors highlight how intrinsic ambivalences emerge in relation to family life, with several positive and negative aspects that characterize the post-migration experiences of young women: the renegotiation of personal aspirations and desires, the role played by new normative expectations connected to relations between genders and generations, the gratification derived from the experience of motherhood, the loyalty to family responsibilities, and migratory mandates.

The next two articles chose to analyze vulnerability and integration through the exploration of specific dimensions of migrants’ subjectivity, focusing in particular on migrants’ temporal imaginaries, identity motives, and needs.

Amalia Gilodi, Catherine Richard, Isabelle Albert, and Birte Nienaber, in The Vulnerability of Young Refugees Living in Reception Centres in Luxembourg: an Overview of Conditions and Experiences Across Subjective Temporal Imaginaries, explore the lived experiences of young adults who have obtained refugee status in Luxembourg but still live in “temporary” reception centres through the lens of vulnerability as an analytical category. Specifically, the authors examine how conditions of vulnerability at the structural, situational, and individual level are interlinked with participants’ subjective imaginaries of the past, present, and future, and how these affect their experiences in their new lived context.

In Identity Threats and Individual, Relational, and Social Resources among Refugees in Italy, Eleonora Crapolicchio, Marta Matuella, Giulia Carones, Daniela Marzana, and Camillo Regalia investigated how identity development processes among forced migrants (asylum seekers and refugees) unfold during settlement in the Italian context. Specifically, the authors explore the threats that the migration and settlement processes pose to migrants’ identity and, particularly, to the satisfaction of identity motives, such as self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, meaning, self-efficacy, and belonging. The analysis reveals how migration can become a crucial threat to the construction and maintenance of identity among young forced migrants, especially in contexts characterized by negative attitudes towards migration and discriminatory practices against migrant residents. However, in the local context, young migrants can also find important resources, such as social networks and services that can, to a certain extent, support them in coping with identity threats.

Finally, the paper by Dorothea Anong Biaback, Jan Skrobanek, Leonie Wagner, and Birte Nienaber, Consonant and Dissonant Experiences—Young Migrants’ Understandings of Integration: A Cross-Country Comparison between Germany, Luxembourg, and Norway, offers interesting insights on the contested notion of integration by exploring young migrants’ understandings of integration. Drawing on data gathered across three national contexts (Germany, Luxembourg, and Norway), the paper analyses ideas of what integration ought to be, according to young migrants, the expectations that they perceive in their lived context regarding their integration, and the relationship between the two. The findings show both consonances and dissonances between the expectations of “how to integrate” that migrants perceive from society towards them and their own ideas of “integration”. While the results show consonant perceptions of the role of language in the context of integration, dissonant and conflicting aspects emerge in relation to the societal pressure to quickly achieve financial independence as opposed to the educational/professional aspirations of migrant youth, the sense of becoming “like” or “equal to” the rest of society, and the understanding of integration as a reciprocal and bidirectional (rather than unidirectional) process. It is also important to note that, considering the critiques on the concept of integration, the young people in focus here show a rather positive understanding of it, hinting at a reflexive processual understanding of achieving their interests under the constraints that they face.