Migrant youth’s reflective agency and divergent life trajectories in a transborder context: upward-mobile return and other pathways among Brazilian Nikkei youth in Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why and how do migrant youths’ pathways in early adulthood diverge widely, including varying assimilation paths into the host society and return paths to parental homelands despite sharing group characteristics? Research has documented key factors that affect the social mobility of youths such as family socioeconomic status, institutional contexts, and cultures of mobility. However, they tend to conflate migrant youth’s agency with these institutional and cultural contexts. Consequently, the interaction between the contexts and the agency of migrant youth is undertheorised. Drawing on the notions of life-course agency and possible selves, this study develops a process-oriented approach focusing on agentic mechanisms by which the youth choose divergent pathways over time. Based on life-history interviews, this study compares four distinctive life trajectories among 28 Brazilian Nikkei youths in Japan. Findings show that Nikkei youths develop varying social identities, interacting with intra-family and school contexts. During the transition period, their life-course agency links their social identities to possible selves and motivates them toward different pathways in a transborder context. This study contends that the dynamic interaction between migrant youth’s reflective agency and contexts over the life course produces variations in their pathways even when group characteristics are shared.