‘I am from here, and I belong here’: undocumented youth resisting social exclusion through reclaiming belonging

Belonging is a fundamental right, essential to adolescent development, identity formation, and well-being. For undocumented youth, children of migrant workers born and raised in Israel, who navigate exclusion amid legal precarity, social marginalization, and institutional invisibility, belonging must be actively reclaimed. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 15 youth aged 13.5–17, we examine how these youth navigate and cope with social and institutional exclusion. The findings reveal a persistent tension between their emotional identification with Israeli society and their systemic exclusion from it. Despite this dissonance, the youth do not passively accept their marginality. Through peer relations, symbolic practices, civic aspirations, and ethical critique, they actively reclaim belonging and assert their place in society. The paper introduces ‘reclaiming belonging’ as a key form of youth agency, emotionally grounded, morally charged, and politically subversive. This process involves identity work, hopeful futurity, moral-social critique, and narrative performance leading to the creation of counter-spaces of recognition. Framing belonging as a performative and reclaiming as an intersectional act of resistance, the study contributes to critical youth studies by showing how undocumented youth navigate the lived implications of legal exclusion through relational, social, and cultural practices, thus reshaping the boundaries of political and social membership.