Der Diskurs über Migration ist hierzulande geprägt von Debatten über religiösen Fundamentalismus, Abschottungen migrantischer Gruppen und Ghettobildungen. Erol Yildiz zeigt, dass die Realität der Migrationsgesellschaft weit darüber hinausgeht und unseren Alltag um die gelebte Erfahrung der Globalität bereichert. Urbane Orte »öffnen sich zur Welt«, wandeln sich zu vielfältigen Zentren für unterschiedliche Traditionen, Kulturen und Erfahrungen. Und dies wesentlich unter dem Einfluss von Migration. Dennoch wird der Beitrag von Migranten zur Entwicklung unserer Städte bisher kaum wahrgenommen. Statt den Zerfall der Metropolen herbeizureden, plädiert der kluge Essay daher für eine unverkrampfte Sicht auf urbane Diversität, die ja gerade die Anziehungskraft der globalen Städte ausmacht.

The “postmigrant perspective”, which arose in the German-speaking countries and has been adopted internationally, offers a counter-hegemonic alternative to the everyday racist and ethnicizing discourses on migration. To understand migration as historical normality, to engage in migration research as social analysis and to focus centrally on the perspectives of the postmigrant generation leads to a rupture. This entails a radical interrogation of the binary thinking around migrants and non-migrants, which has significantly shaped not only established migration research but other areas as well. The present article, proceeding from a postmigrant perspective, analyses semi-narrative interviews with adolescents on their experiences of discrimination and racism. We seek to show there that the young people of the postmigrant generation have been impacted by everyday racist and ethnicizing discourses, but have not been subjugated by them. Despite encountering restrictive conditions, they develop empowering convivial everyday practices, from which society ought to learn something.

Our article is based on a qualitative study conducted in 2015 in large cities in Turkey, encompassing 35 semi-structured interviews. Inquiry focused on the descendants of the so-called “Gastarbeiter [‘guest worker’] generation” – youth who were born and grew up mainly in Germany and Austria, were educated there and who to a great extent are Austrian or German citizens. They left their country of birth and emigrated to the country of origin of their parents or grandparents, Turkey, where they hoped for better professional perspectives. In the public sphere they are perceived, if at all, as returning migrants. In this paper, we term this next generation post-migrant, a generation that moves in different “spaces in-between”, developing strategies for living from their distinctive positioning: between transnationalization and discrimination, here and there, between leaving and remaining. This promotes a confrontation with the respective local conditions. For this generation, a certain double distance to the uninterrogated normalities here and there is part of everyday life, and at the same time should be seen as a resistant praxis. Proceeding from the investigation mentioned, we attempt here to reconstruct that a praxis that can open up new perspectives, not only for social work.