In the LYMAS project, we agreed to use the term “young mobile person/individuals” or “migranticized person”. While this might sound and read complicated, we have good reasons for this decision. A growing number of scholars demonstrate that the ‘label’ migrant is anything but neural or unchanging: Far from being objective or stable, migration-related categories – such as (im)migrants, second-generation migrant, migrant background, refugee, and so on – are normative-moral and political categories born of the logic of the modern nation-state and intertwined with the legacies of history such as colonialism.

Of course, we need categories to understand and to make sense of our world, to position both ourselves and others, however categorization is never neutral, “[c]ategories have consequences” (Crawley & Skleparis 2017: 59). They come with different rights and statuses attached and tidily put people into a place, or so it seems. Hence, it is important to consider by whom they are constructed and to what (political) purpose they are used. In Europe, and beyond, ‘migrants’ tend to be perceived as racialized, poor and subordinated people whose movements or presence are problematic and thus warrant state control (De Genova 2017). The question is therefore: Who becomes migranticized – ascribed the label ‘migration’ –, which are the underlying social, political and economic processes and what consequences can we observe (Dahinden 2025).

Categories such as “labour migrant” or “refugee” evoke often mobility from what is called the global South to the global North and are used accordingly to problematize and manage specific forms of mobility. These categories are powerful in political discourses but also in coining the public imaginations. Try it yourself and type “migrant” into the search bar of Google Images … the result are pictures of people on boats and long treks of people – men – on dusty roads. Our gaze and our understanding are limited by such imaginations. Current debates in (migration) research are addressing the colonial origins of categories around migration. Often, they are used to mark people as “other” from a Western European, global North perspective (Raghuram 2020). 

Following the call for a “de-migrantization of migration studies” (Dahinden 2016), by choosing to talk about “young mobile persons” or ‘migranticized young people’ we attempt to de-center what makes a migrant in our research. In line with our research interest, we focus on young mobile individuals who crossed one or more national borders. Our perspective is one that highlights the specific and varying experiences of mobility that we encounter: Cross-border workers, people who have fled from war, or those who are seeking an international career. We thus continue searching for ways to talk about individual experiences of mobility beyond normative-political categories, instead concentrating on how migration acts as a form of regulating and controlling. 

• Crawley, Heaven & Dimitris Skleparis (2017). Refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1), 48–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1348224
• Dahinden, Janine (2016). A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2207–2225. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1124129
• Dahinden, Janine (2025). ‘Migranticization’. In Oso, Laura, Natalia Ribas-Mateos & Melissa Moralli (Eds.) Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Migration, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 358-360.
• De Genova, Nicholas (2017). ‘The Borders of “Europe” and the European Question.’ In Genova, Nicholas De (Ed.) The Borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1-35.
• Raghuram, Parvati (2020). Democratizing, Stretching, Entangling, Transversing: Four Moves for Reshaping Migration Categories. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 19(1), 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2020.1837325

Further Readings

• Scheel, Stephan & Martina Tazzioli (2022). Who Is a Migrant? Abandoning the Nation-State Point of View in the Study of Migration. Migration Politics 1(1), 002. https://doi.org/10.21468/MigPol.1.1.002.
• Amelina, Anna (2021). After the reflexive turn in migration studies: Towards the doing migration approach. Population, Space and Place, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2368.