The occupational trajectories of immigrants’ descendants have not yet been studied much from an international comparative perspective. The article purports to remedy this by analyzing the entry into adulthood of immigrants’ descendants in France and Germany. The authors have combined representative statistics with qualitative data from a field survey conducted in underprivileged Paris and Berlin neighborhoods with young adults of four origins : Turkey and the Middle East in Germany; North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa in France. This methodology not only allows for focusing on differences between France and Germany in terms of inequalities between children of immigrants and children of natives, but also for showing the effect of national context (schooling, occupational and social systems, regimes of integration) on the trajectories of immigrants’ descendants. In addition to taking into account the specific constraints on the young adults living in underprivileged neighborhoods, the field study allows for examining the types of individual action logic underlying these ideal-typical trajectories.