Consonant and Dissonant Experiences—Young Migrants’ Un-derstandings of Integration: A Cross-Country Comparison between Germany, Luxembourg, and Norway.

Our article addresses two aspects of young migrants’ understandings of integration: their
own ideas of what integration is, and their perception of the destination society’s concepts and
expectations regarding their integration. We analyze qualitative interviews which were conducted
in the Horizon 2020 project MIMY, in Germany, Luxembourg and Norway, using the grounded
theory methodology. Our exploration shows that the young migrants’ awareness of the existing
ideas of integration surrounding them creates a complex reflective interaction between their own
ideas and the (perceived) expectations from society. We identified aspects of consonance, where
young migrants’ ideas coincide with the expectations they perceive. More importantly, however,
our research has discovered that the youth experience tensions and dissonance between their own
ideas of what integration should be and the concepts and expectations regarding integration they
feel confronted with by society. Our analysis revealed that while young migrants’ understandings
of integration are very close to state-of-the-art scientific conceptualizations of integration, this view
is not matched by the meaning of integration they perceive around them.