Competencies and life skills among youths in deprived neighbourhoods: empirical data contradicts the political construction of a non-western underclass

In Danish deprived neighbourhoods, residents with ethnic minority backgrounds are categorised by politicians as a particularly troublesome group requiring wide-ranging political intervention in the form of intensified municipal efforts, focused area-based interventions and even alterations and extensions of legal frameworks. In this paper, we investigate if children and youths of ethnic minority backgrounds are as socially disadvantaged and vulnerable as the political debate and the area-based interventions seem to suggest. We apply administrative records and survey data to describe social vulnerability, competencies and life skill among youths in deprived neighbourhoods. The results reveal that youths with ethnic minority background perform better than youths with non-ethnic minority background in terms of objective measures on enrolment and completionof youth educations and subjective measures on life satisfaction and life skills. Hence, the results suggest to rethink political measures towards ethnic minorities in deprived neighbourhoods and to incorporate that social inequality has a strong non-ethnic minority dimension that needs to be addressed.