Every day, in cities across Europe, young people face barriers they didn’t create — and that no one, officially, intended to build. These are not the walls of open hostility. They are the walls of procedures, habits, unquestioned rules. They are the walls of systemic, unintentional discrimination.
What is unintentional discrimination?
Discrimination is not always the product of conscious prejudice. Norms, rules, and institutional practices — even legally compliant ones — can produce deep inequalities without anyone ever making the deliberate choice to discriminate.
Young people from immigrant backgrounds and national minorities in Europe face these invisible mechanisms every day: a housing application turned down because the required guarantees are impossible to provide, a medical appointment made harder to access due to language barriers, an employer’s “standard” process that quietly filters out certain profiles.
These unexamined rules, procedures, and practices perpetuate racial, ethnic and religious inequalities — not by intention, but by inertia. That is precisely what makes them so hard to detect, and so urgent to address.
The hypothesis defended by the project is that some of the discrimination suffered by young people from immigrant backgrounds is due to the norms, practices and rules in force in institutions — even if they are legal — which are never challenged by the various players, or never fought.
Four sectors where barriers run deepest
UNDETERRED focuses on four key fields where systemic discrimination shapes the trajectories of young people’s lives.bse.u-bordeaux
- 🏠 Housing — Guarantees impossible to provide, implicit selection criteria, access to social housing denied in practice
- 💼 Employment — Hiring processes that silently filter by name, origin, or address
- 🏥 Health — Language and administrative barriers that make access to care unequal
- 🎓 Education — Institutional obstacles that limit academic opportunities for minority and migrant students
Who is most affected?
UNDETERRED focuses on young adults between 18 and 35 years old — a decisive life period during which access to housing, work, healthcare and education shapes long-term trajectories.
The project specifically looks at young people from immigrant backgrounds and national minority populations across four European cities: Bordeaux, Barcelona, Bucharest, and Lausanne. These are people who navigate institutions not designed with them in mind — and who bear the cost of that omission every day.
Why this matters now
Providing ourselves with the means to combat discrimination means choosing not to build walls — in a medium and long-term context in which the dynamics of migration will not change. If we are to preserve open societies, we need to take up the challenge of updating the systems that shape people’s daily lives.
UNDETERRED was built on the conviction that what is invisible can be made visible — and that what is visible can be changed.
01
The Four Cities
Bordeaux, Barcelona, Bucharest, Lausanne — four cities, four realities, one shared challenge.
02
Four Key Fields
Housing, employment, health, education — discover where invisible barriers hit hardest.
03
Young Adults 18–35
Meet the people at the centre of our research — and understand why this decade of life changes everything.