← Back to Blog
Young people of migrant heritage — those who grew up in a country that was not their parents' birthplace — occupy a particular position in European society. They hold multiple cultural affiliations simultaneously, often navigate conflicting expectations from their family and the wider society, and frequently find that neither their "home" culture nor the culture they grew up in fully claims them. Youth work has both an opportunity and a responsibility to engage this experience honestly.
The "Between Two Worlds" Framing — and Its Limits
The phrase "between two worlds" is the most common way that second-generation experience is described — and it is both partially accurate and fundamentally misleading. It is accurate in that diaspora young people often navigate different cultural logics in different contexts: family, school, peer groups, religious community may each operate by different norms, and switching between them requires real cognitive and emotional work.
It is misleading because it implies that the two cultures are discrete, bounded, and incompatible — and that the person navigating them is somehow incomplete or suspended between them. Research on diaspora youth identity consistently shows something more interesting: most second-generation young people do not experience themselves as torn between two worlds but as constructing a third — a hybrid identity that draws on both without being reducible to either.
The second-generation young person is not half-Turkish and half-German. They are something new — something that did not exist before them and that neither culture could produce on its own. This is a creative achievement, not a deficit.
What Youth Work Gets Wrong
The most common failure of youth work with second-generation young people is deficit framing: treating their complex cultural position as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be developed. Programmes designed to help diaspora youth "integrate" often implicitly assume that integration means assimilation — becoming more like the majority culture. This misses the actual experience and needs of the young people.
A second common failure is essentialism: treating young people of Turkish heritage, for example, as representatives of "Turkish culture" rather than as individuals with complex, hybrid identities. Being asked to speak for your culture — or being assumed to hold particular views because of your heritage — is alienating and inaccurate.
What Good Youth Work Looks Like
Youth work that genuinely serves second-generation young people creates space for the complexity of their experience rather than simplifying it. It asks open questions about how they experience their multiple affiliations rather than making assumptions. It treats their hybrid identity as a competence — a genuine and valuable form of cultural intelligence — rather than as a problem. And it connects them with others who share similar experiences, not to create an identity group, but to reduce the isolation that can come from navigating multiple worlds without companions for the journey.