The Radical Democracy of Migratory Youth Organizing for a Right to Stay

Since anti-migrant movements, parties and governments are on the rise in Europe and the US, migratory struggles are playing a crucial role as never before. This paper analyzes self-organized struggles, in which migrants organize themselves according to their specific positions in migration regimes to fight for their right to stay and social inclusion. I argue that these self-organizations are crucial for contesting dominant migration regimes, but also for pointing to new forms of democracy.

The paper draws on my research on grass roots organizations of migrant youth with precarious legal status in the US and Germany. Accompanying their movements since 2012, I conducted document analyses, participant observations and qualitative interviews. By combining two case studies, I investigate the different and common aspects as well as specific challenges of their initiatives. Their self-organization creates relatively safe and autonomous spaces and facilitates processes of empowerment. In practices of political intervention, they furthermore create strategies of political subjectification as well as self-representation in public spaces and discourses for making their claims heard. Whereas the groups in Germany work closely together with non-migrant allies from anti-racist movements, the groups in the US are more independent. However, through their work on criminalization, the intersections with movements of queer folks and people of color have been focused recently.

Referring to approaches of critical citizenship studies and radical democracy, I argue that these self-organizations of migrant youth challenge the anti-migrant hegemony in both countries by becoming political subjects despite their lack of formal citizenship. I describe their political interventions as radical democratic practices that combine rather invisible politics of organizing with visible politics of public interventions. The challenge of the movements is to advance both, short-term improvements in the precarious situation of their communities as well as social justice in the long run.