Local Governments and Social Movements in the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Milan and Barcelona as ‘Cities of Welcome’

City Government Activists and the Rights of Undocumented Immigrants: Fostering Urban Citizenship within the Confines of US Federalism

“…As a more generalised framework, multi‐level governance refers to an increasingly complex policymaking process that results from interactions between assorted governmental and nongovernmental actors operating at different levels (Bache and Flinders 2004; Hooghe and Marks 2001). Recently, multi‐level governance has also made its way into analyses of urban policies more generally (Kaufmann and Sidney 2020; Kübler and Pagano 2012) and local immigration and immigrant integration policies, particularly in the context of Europe (Bazurli 2019; Caponio and Borkert 2010; Scholten and Penninx 2016; Spencer and Delvino 2019).…”

“…Indeed, because they face urgent immigration challenges that nation states have ignored or failed to address, entrepreneurial city officials have pursued their own local solutions, including developing urban citizenship policies that benefit undocumented immigrants in their jurisdictions (Scholten 2013; Spencer and Delvino 2019). They have done so, for example, by collaborating with local immigrant rights activists (Bazurli 2019) or European transnational city networks (Caponio 2018), thereby strengthening their position to deal with local immigration and citizenship issues that have traditionally been beyond their power to address. European city officials act strategically: their pro‐immigrant agendas and policies sometimes challenge nation‐state and European policies in visible and less visible ways, yet at other times they are coordinated or compliant with them (Bazurli 2019; Scholten et al 2018; Spencer 2018).…”

“…They have done so, for example, by collaborating with local immigrant rights activists (Bazurli 2019) or European transnational city networks (Caponio 2018), thereby strengthening their position to deal with local immigration and citizenship issues that have traditionally been beyond their power to address. European city officials act strategically: their pro‐immigrant agendas and policies sometimes challenge nation‐state and European policies in visible and less visible ways, yet at other times they are coordinated or compliant with them (Bazurli 2019; Scholten et al 2018; Spencer 2018). By both challenging and embracing nation‐state and EU policies while collaborating with assorted nongovernmental actors, officials in different European cities have managed to develop a range of new local pro‐immigrant policies.…”

Urbanising migration policy-making: Urban policies in support of irregular migrants in Geneva and Zürich

“…This approach enables us to integrate the interplay of structure and agency into our analysis (Ward et al 2011). We expect that urban policies that support irregular migrants have been negotiated in and must be won through multilevel governance politics because these policies challenge hierarchical and state-centered modes of government (Bazurli 2019;Ataç et al 2020). In line with the multilevel governance conceptualization proposed by Caponio and Jones-Correa 2018, we expect to detect three minimum elements of multilevel governance in the struggle over urban policies in support of irregular migrants:…”

“…By seeking to anchor membership for irregular migrants to the city level, cities challenge the national state as the only regulatory body over immigration and citizenship. Examples include the more than 100 socioeconomically diverse cities across the United States (USA) that have declared themselves as sanctuary cities (Mancina 2016;Collingwood and Gonzalez O'Brien 2019), cities including New York and Vienna that issue urban ID cards (de Graauw 2014), European cities that expand welfare provisions to rejected asylum seekers (Ataç et al 2020), or Southern European cities that stretch, circumvent, or resists exclusive national migration policies (Bazurli 2019). A central concern for European cities is finding policy solutions for the many forced migrants whose asylum application were denied but who nevertheless stay in European cities (Ataç et al 2020).…”