10. Labour market inserton of young migrants.

Convenor
Iraklis Dimitriadis, Scuola Normale Superiore
iraklis.dimitriadis@sns.it

Research on the labour market insertion of young migrants has largely centered on the reltionships between education, unemployment, and occupational attainment across different ethnic groups. Meanwhile, youth studies have explored the transition to adulthood, intergenerational disadvantage, and the strategies adopted by young migrants to shape their life trajectories, without paying much attention to work experiences and labour processes. Interdisciplinary research addressing the labour market insertion of young migrants also remains limited, with much of the focus placed on the so-called «second generation».

Given the growing importance of youth migration and the evolving characteristics of young migrants in recent years, this session invites contributions that explore their experiences when accessing new labour markets. These markets are often marked by poor employment conditions, informality, deskilling processes, and gender inequalities. Such structural constraints are differently experienced by highly stratified migrant populations in terms of legal status, including those born in the host society (either third country nationals or naturalized migrants), those arriving through family reunion, refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors, people without regular legal status. Additionally, this population varies in terms of social capital (e.g., the presence of reference communities), human capital (e.g., education, skills), and factors such as gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and possible trauma related to migration.

This session warmly encourages interdisciplinary approaches, engaging sociology, anthropology, human geography, and other social and human sciences, as well as combining different research strands such as the sociology of migration, labour studies, and youth studies.

Open questions

  • How do young migrant workers represent their integration into the labor market and their transition to adulthood?
  • How are the structural constraints that young migrants face in accessing new labour markets perceived, and what resources do they draw on to improve their working lives?
  • To what extent do individual resources and multiple layers of stratification resulting from intersecting factors impact the narratives and work experiences of young migrants?
  • How do young migrant workers envision their future, and what are the implications of these narratives in terms of agency?
  • What are the methodological and ethical challenges in studying young migrant workers?

Keywords
young migrants; labour market insertion; discrimination; exploitation; agency; aspirations; transition to adulthood; transnationalism; qualitative methods.

Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
sociology of migration; labour studies; youth studies; antrhopology; human geography.

Convenor’s bio
Iraklis Dimitriadis is an Assistant Professor (RTDA) of Sociology of Work and Economy at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research (Universities of Milan and Turin) with the distinction of Doctor Europaeus. He serves on the editorial boards of Frontiers in Sociology and Mondi Migranti. In 2023, he was awarded the Young Talents Award first prize by the University of Milano-Bicocca. His current research focuses on migration processes, the informal economy, and digital labour platforms.