Transnational youth mobility: new categories for migrant youth research

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.