Upon walking U.S. inner-city streets you sooner or later come upon groups of black kids wearing prison-style outfits; there is a boom box, and rap music. And inevitably you will hear the N-word. Upon entering a district housing migrants in any European city you will encounter almost identical scenes - youngsters dressed in prison style, the boom box, rap. Only most of the kids are of a "white" or olive complexion. They call themselves "Wiggers," "white Niggers" or "Black albinos." It was this "Wigger" metaphor, with its implications of a transnational response to uprootedness and racialized exclusion that inspired CAAR to invite African American researchers working among inner city black youth and European and Israeli migration scholars to a symposium of trans-cultural and - national orientation called "Crossing Boundaries." We placed the study of African American youth - and thus a native though marginalized American population - next to research on migrant youth in Western Europe. The essays gathered here hope to contribute to an understanding on how to address the myriad challenges that both the youth and the countries in which they live must confront.