Exploring institutional and regulatory change: the case of undocumented youth in the Netherlands

Undocumented immigrants in the global North are amongst those most affected by restrictive citizenship regimes and by (the gendered, racialized and classed) processes of precarization and polarization that affect us all, albeit in very different ways. While undocumented immigrant youth are part of our communities, their lives are characterized by explicit and implicit forms of institutional exclusion across many different domains, and by the simultaneous experience of control and neglect. Departing from ongoing research on multi-stakeholder and multi-level efforts geared towards enhancing the societal inclusion and participation of undocumented youth that were raised in the Netherlands, this paper aims to better understand the challenges and opportunities of such innovative and inclusive forms of collaboration and transformation. Specifically, the paper uses an ethnographic study of decision-making processes regarding access to higher education for undocumented youth to help identify the barriers and enablers of institutional and regulatory change towards inclusion. It delineates the sociolegal and political-economic dynamics within such processes and points towards 1) the pivotal role of institutional brokers – or boundary spanners – capable of translating divergent logics to differentiated fields and publics; and 2) the discursive conditioning, sense of professional purpose, and responsiveness of professionals within different institutional domains in the Netherlands. The paper then looks at what this case teaches us about the inclusive, collaborative, and adaptive (i.e., resilient) capacities of Dutch institutions and society.