Young People in Transition: The National Identity of Minority Youth

Abstract

This chapter uses CIL4EU data to investigate strength of identification with the nation and with the ethnic group. It explores how these vary across ethnic and religious groups, generations, and destination countries and how far these differences can be explained by processes of social integration on the one hand or perceptions of being excluded on the other hand. The key findings are that young people with a migration background are less likely than those without a migration background to identify strongly with their country of residence. This holds true more or less irrespective of their ethnic group or religion. Differences between European and non-European minority groups, and between Muslims and members of other non-Christian religions were generally modest in size, rarely reached statistical significance and were dwarfed by the overall gap between minorities and the majority.