Life Strategies of Young Migrants in Ageing Societies (LYMAS)

Integration Department

Project head: Dr. Edward Omeni

Project team members: Johanna Bastian ,  Leandra Oberg

Associates: Anna Shostak

We consider ageing societies as a macro context for understanding the experiences of younger migrants with the overall aim of understanding how this group experiences the local, national and transnational implications associated with ageing family, community and societal contexts. The question of the kind of effect an ageing society will have on younger generations has rarely been directly engaged with in research and there is a paucity of studies addressing the question of how multiple dynamics of minoritisation and exclusion are associated with being young, a migrant and/or an ethnic and cultural minority and how they intersect with the broader realities of living in an ageing societal context. We anticipate that this focus provides a unique perspective on understanding processes of societal ageing, enabling a comprehensive analysis of what it means to live in an ageing society. We hope to examine the challenges associated with aging populations and the policy responses to demographic aging across multiple European contexts, examining for example how developments such as cuts in social benefits, migration and youth and family policies, affect younger migrants in terms of their decision-making and life trajectories.

The selected countries Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and Austria offer diverse yet comparable socio-economic and cultural contexts, with different histories of migration and systems/approaches to migration control. We see this as a basis enabling us to comprehensively reflect on similarities and contrasts between the experiences of young migrants across these regions. We also anticipate that our transnational and comparative focus can yield valuable insights on regional developments and dynamics of population ageing and their connections to transnational regimes of mobile labour in these contexts. In our analysis, we aim to examine the following research questions:

1. How are young migrants and their families affecting ageing demographics and the wider structural societal changes that are associated with population ageing (including a focus on regional national and transnational developments)?
2. How do ageing kin networks and multi-generational relations in families and society in general impact the young migrants and their life trajectories (as related, for example, to relationships, family planning, life-long-learning, work, employment, migration/mobility, social inequality)?
3. What roles do young migrants play in the support networks of their elderly kin in consideration of disparities in elder care provision affecting migrant families?
4. What is the impact of demographically determined societal changes in the roles, obligations and relationships of younger migrants, including emerging intergenerational interdependencies and relationships?
5. How do the nature/purpose of intergenerational kin keeping among younger migrants and the associated costs and benefits look like?

Further information about the project is available here: (https://lymas.dezim.de/)

Funding: Volkswagen Foundation (Third-party funding)