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How can we understand the emergence of middle-class individuals who articulate their ethnic identities? What makes ‘minority climbers’—social climbers with low-class ethnic-minority backgrounds—identify with ethnic-minority labels such as ‘Moroccan’ or ‘Turkish’? This is a particularly relevant question because ethnic-minority identifications are not well-understood and often regarded with distrust in broader society. This is the case in many countries, including the Netherlands. This phenomenological mixed-methods study explores the ethnic identification of second-generation Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch with high education levels. The focus is on practices of self-identification. Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative in-depth interviews, the study explores their identifications, when and why they articulate ethnic-minority labels, what their ethnic identity means for them, and how this develops over time. Based on four personal stories, inspired by the in-depth interviews, this introductory chapter introduces the book’s central themes. These stories exemplify common threads and at the same time give a feel for the variations between individuals.

As integration theories shape the lens of many scholars and politicians, this theoretical chapter begins with a brief description of the straight-line assimilation model and segmented assimilation theory. However, as the frame of ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’ is too narrow to capture the experiences of minority climbers, the focus shifts to literature on ‘ethnic options’, which is better-suited to understanding the individual level. In addition, Bourdieu concepts (such as habitus, field, and symbolic capital) enable us to describe the relation between agency and structure, negotiation of belonging, and the contextual and temporal aspects of individuals’ experiences. Although this study departs from a constructivist perspective, upholding such a perspective in an empirical study is complicated due to the trap of essentialism, on the one hand, and the trap of ambiguity on the other. To avoid these traps, an analytical toolkit is assembled, consisting of five tools: (1) focus on practices; (2) separation of self-identification and external identification; (3) distinction between category and group, the latter implying some level of ‘groupism’; (4) distinction between label and content, which refers to sociocultural practices; (5) and intersectionality. The last section of this chapter critically reflects on the use of common terms such as integration.

The study has a mixed-methods research design. It combines data from a structured survey with data obtained from 14 in-depth interviews with university-educated second-generation Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch. The survey was conducted in the context of the TIES research project, prior to this study. The two different methods complement each other in valuable ways and are used in various constellations throughout the study. The chapter explains how results of qualitative interpretivist studies, which are based on small samples, can be generalized in various ways. In addition, it argues how quantitative methods, which are generally used within more objectivist and positivist research traditions, can be used within a more interpretivist perspective and can be even used for the deconstruction of concepts such as ethnic identity, as illustrated in Chap. . The chapter furthermore describes the details of the quantitative data collection and the qualitative data collection and analysis.

The changed landscape of Dutch integration politics forms the backdrop of this study. Literature shows that, as in many other European countries, the Netherlands has experienced a ‘culturalization of citizenship’ in which belonging has become defined in cultural terms. The dominant integration discourse dictates that immigrants and their children internalize the progressive ‘Dutch’ norms and identify as Dutch. Based on the zero-sum presumption that one can be only loyal to one country and culture, identification as Moroccan or Turkish is deemed suspect. Particularly Muslims, whose religion is portrayed as inherently incompatible with ‘Dutch culture’, are seen as the Other. Moroccan and Turkish immigrants are most stigmatized in the current integration discourses, and together with their offspring comprise the largest ethnic-minority groups in the Netherlands. They arrived in the Netherlands around the 1970s as labor migrants to work in low-skilled jobs. Most came from rural areas and had very low levels of formal education. Given their backgrounds, it is quite an achievement that nowadays a large and ever-increasing share of their offspring enters higher education levels. Despite some sociocultural differences between the Moroccan Dutch and Turkish Dutch, the commonalities warrant a joint study.

Both the survey data and the interviews indicate that the Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch climbers strongly identify as ‘Moroccan’ or ‘Turkish’. Refuting the idea that ethnic and national identifications are zero-sum in character, the climbers not only identify with their ethnic identity but also with the national identity. They explain how they experience these dimensions as complementary, and deconstruct the identity concept but not the concept of culture. Analysis of the statistical data reveals that, especially among the Moroccan Dutch, identification with a label does not necessarily reflect a specific sociocultural content. The in-depth interviews, which expose large variations in how individuals see their ethnic and national identities, explain these findings. These results warn against assuming responses to identity questions to be all-encompassing reflections of some consistent, coherent sociocultural orientation, as is done in authoritative reports in the Netherlands. Although the interviewees spoke about their identifications in static terms, their stories also contained references to the contextual, relational, and temporal nature of identification, as Chaps.  and show.

Individuals do not have fixed identifications. How they identify—how they position themselves—depends on the social context. The interviewees described that they yearned to belong in the various fields. They negotiated this belonging both in coethnic contexts, such as the family, and in interethnic contexts, such as at school and in the workplace. In coethnic fields, participants were often confronted with behavioral expectations that ran counter to their own autonomous preferences. In interethnic fields, despite their social mobility, the interviewees sometimes faced an exclusionary labeling that conflicted with how they want to be seen, namely, as one of ‘us’ in that particular situation. Labeling minority individuals in ethnic terms is an act of exclusion, leading to categorization resistance, for various reasons. Although such labeling can be very coercive, individuals do not lack agency. They have various responses at their disposal. Here, the achieved social mobility functions as symbolic capital. Based on the interviews, a typology of ethnic options is developed.

Identifications vary between contexts and also vary over time. The interviewees’ stories reveal a trajectory of ethnic reinvention. As young adults, they experienced a resurgence of ethnic identification, which is not merely a retention of cultural traditions but is aligned with their achieved education level. This reinvented identity was developed in interaction with coethnic co-educated ‘Soulmates’, with whom the interviewees experienced unprecedented levels of understanding. This connection was grounded in a shared ethnic and migration background, but even more in a shared education level. These characteristics affected their position in the various fields and shaped their habitus in specific ways, resulting in feelings of affiliation with others who shared these characteristics. These findings underscore the relevance of ethnicity, while at the same time nuance the idea that ethnic background is inevitably the most important social boundary. Parallels with other studies indicate that this particular intersection of class and ethnicity teases out in similar ways in other contexts. In response to the challenges stemming from being middle-class and having a low-class ethnic minority background, specific cultural elements develop in ‘soulmate spaces’. In other words, a ‘minority culture of mobility’ emerges.

The trajectory of reinvention highlights the possibility of being middle class without completely assimilating into the ethnic majority mainstream, and presents an alternative incorporation trajectory of becoming middle class with a middle-class minority identity. From the empirical results, a range of factors emerges that explain the relevance of ethnic identity for Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch climbers. Clearly, ethnic self-identifications are partly responses to the social situation at hand and contain strategic elements. The identifications are not solely voluntary and ‘symbolic’, but also not purely ‘reactive’. This has an intersectional character: ethnic identification is influenced by social mobility in particular ways. The findings lead us to adapt the analytical toolkit used and warn us not to use terminology such as ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’ in reference to entire ethnic categories, as well as to not overestimate the meaning of survey questions about identification. Clearly, ethnicity is a constructivist phenomenon—which does not necessarily imply that ethnicity is less relevant and less real—that is best studied from an interpretivist perspective.