Gaining employment in society is a critical stage in the lives of most young people, but statistics show that young migrants face greater barriers than do young people from the majority population. In the present article, I highlight how young adults of migrant background who live in Sweden handle and resist labour exclusion by focusing on how they try to improve their chances of getting a future occupation. The results show that the informants use various strategies to try to prevent future labour exclusion. Some of them are related to the construction of a ‘Swedish’ identity and dissociation from a migrant position, others to the importance of choosing the right education, struggling to find a job or adapting in different ways to societal and racialized discourses.
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