“Do You Know When I See the Experiences as Beautiful? When I Have Something to Work for”: Young Asylum Seekers’ Efforts to Make Sense of Employment and Precarity

Since the late 1990’s unaccompanied minors have crossed the Mediterranean in search of refuge and the possibility of building a viable future, including access to work to support themselves and their families. This paper draws on qualitative research with young asylum seekers who arrived in Malta as unaccompanied minors. It centres their voices to explore how they perceive and navigate their transition to adulthood, with a particular focus on the transition to employment and how this is shaped by legislation, policy, and service provision. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six young people. Participants’ narratives reveal resilience in the face of severe adversity, alongside experiences of being “rescued” into a system experienced as another form of confinement. Their efforts to access work are shaped by a punishing border apparatus that produces ongoing precarity, including unemployment, homelessness, and informal or exploitative labour. In the absence of consistent care and meaningful access to rights, participants are compelled to be self-sufficient while navigating uncertain and constrained pathways into employment. Reconnecting with the critical and creative use of metaphor that has animated scholarship on youth transitions, this paper further develops the metaphorical framework of ‘fugitive transitions’ to understand the experiences of unaccompanied young asylum seekers. In doing so, it challenges established notions of transitions to adulthood that are grounded in assumptions of citizenship and legal belonging. Specifically, we apply this framework to examine transitions into employment, exploring how unaccompanied young asylum seekers navigate precarious pathways to work while negotiating the legal, social, and structural constraints that shape their opportunities and aspirations.