Jan Skrobanek

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

Our article addresses two aspects of young migrants’ understandings of integration: their own ideas of what integration is, and their perception of the destination society’s concepts and expectations regarding their integration. We analyze qualitative interviews which were conducted in the Horizon 2020 project MIMY, in Germany, Luxembourg and Norway, using the grounded theory methodology. Our exploration shows that the young migrants’ awareness of the existing ideas of integration surrounding them creates a complex reflective interaction between their own ideas and the (perceived) expectations from society. We identified aspects of consonance, where young migrants’ ideas coincide with the expectations they perceive. More importantly, however, our research has discovered that the youth experience tensions and dissonance between their own ideas of what integration should be and the concepts and expectations regarding integration they feel confronted with by society. Our analysis revealed that while young migrants’ understandings of integration are very close to state-of-the-art scientific conceptualizations of integration, this view is not matched by the meaning of integration they perceive around them.

Based on biographical interviews from an intra-European youth mobility study in Luxembourg and Norway the article aims to contribute to the debate on how to understand and account for complexities of agency in youth intra-European employment mobility. Critically reflecting and operationalising Emirbayer and Misches’s conceptualisation of agentic orientations in the field of intra-European employment mobility of young people, we a) explore the usefulness of researching agency from a relational perspective, we b) elaborate on how young mobile reflect their manoeuvring under perceived contingent moments and we c) augment our ken of the complex interlacement of habit, imagination and judgement with (contingent) employment mobility contexts and young people’s concrete employment mobility practices. Our results emphasise the importance of considering how differently agentic orientations interlace with contingent employment mobility contexts ranging from radical self-realisation, adaptive interplay of self-realisation and situational constraints and agentic orientations strongly bounded by situational constraints. In addition, the empirical analysis shows that some of the theoretical propositions of Emirbayer and Mische’s approach have to be revisited.

Until just a year ago, hardly anyone believed that the increasingly unrestrained growth in mobility could be so abruptly interrupted by a radical immobilisation of large population groups. Neither mobility studies nor other research fields had foreseen this kind of scenario in their mobility and migration models. In the past decades, the belief in unconstrained mobility, as well as the practice of mobility and its scientific modelling, relied on the idea of unbounded growth at the sub-national, national and supra-national level. The article focuses on immigration to Norway, showing how institutional constraints were used to deal with the spread of COVID-19 and how they affected immigration to the country. Due to complexity reasons, we focus exclusively on the situation of asylum seekers, giving additional attention to unaccompanied minors. These groups’ migration status is assumed to make them especially susceptible to the newly established immigration measures. Drawing upon a combined focus of data on migration regulations and asylum application statistics, we examine what impact mobility-related COVID-19 measures implemented in Norway since January 2020 had on asylum procedures, asylum mobility and asylum applications in Norway.