Cities need a stronger role in migration governance

Following an intervention at the latest ARLEM Plenary in Barcelona, I would like to spend a few words on a fantastic project I am now working on at the International Centre for Migration and Policy Development (ICMPD)

While the issue of migration management in the Euro-Mediterranean region seemed to have seen a time of reduced salience over the past months, recent events have brought the topic back up on the policy making agenda.

As one of the greatest political challenges of our times, migration is too complex and nuanced to be addressed solely by one nation, one ministry or one city alone. All levels of governance must work together by understanding and accepting the functional part each of them plays. National governments cannot act alone on such a multi-faceted and evolving issue and cities must acknowledge and embrace their own role as necessary active agents in migration governance.

Why is this important? It is at the local level that the reality of migration affect peoples’ lives, whether they are newly arrived immigrants or long-term residents of a city. Migration has a direct impact on cities, its administrators and its people. However, cities currently hardly influence the conceptualization and application of migration policies, which are mostly drafted on a national or supranational level. This creates a governance discrepancy between policy-making and policy-implementation.

If this continues, there are serious risks that migration policies will impair the level of social cohesion of the territories and disrupt the quality of life of its inhabitants. Better synergies between cities and governments are necessary across all policy areas such as employment, education and urban planning that have a direct impact on mobility and migration.

This is where the benefit of the MC2CM project is shown at best.

This ICMPD-led project (in partnership with UCLG and UN-Habitat and supported by the EU and Swiss government) helps policy makers bridge this gap and raise awareness, to the most relevant stakeholders, about the challenges, opportunities and needs to address. Migration is a territorial challenge with numerous different traits. It cannot be tackled with a one-size-fit-all type of approach.

MC2CM is building experience and knowledge about migration at the local level and informing stakeholders through our dialogues and practices in the regions. Over the the past five years, the project:

• Involved 20 cities as active members of its networks in the Euro-Mediterranean.
• Welcomed over 400 representatives from 100 different local administrations.
• Published 9 City Migration Profiles in its first phase (Vienna, Amman, Beirut, Lisbon, Lyon, Madrid, Tangier, Tunis, Turin). The second phase of the project already counts 7 profiles under work (Casablanca, Rabat, Oujda, Sousse, Sfax, Seville and Cadiz costal area), and 4 more will follow mid 2020 (Grenoble, Naples, Irbid and Ramallah).
• Supported cities dialogues and mutual learning across 12 thematic events (on social cohesion; access to education; communication; culture; civil society involvement) and high-level panels.
• The project allocates 800.000€ grants for local actions in SPCs countries to support migrants’ inclusion and local authorities’ role in migration governance. 

Concretely the project advocates for:

• Supporting the set-up of inter-administrative cooperation and multilevel governance.
• Developing the knowledge and data sets amassed on local migration contexts to provide a solid evidence-base to future local actions.
• Promote a diverse economy and support new labour opportunities involving local entrepreneurship, innovative economic sectors and vocational training as efficient tools to foster access to employment.  
• Facilitate dialogue with trade unions and social entities, thus contributing to a proper monitoring of the labour market and avoiding exploitative measures towards migrants. 
• Facilitate qualifications and skills recognition to enable the incorporation of newcomers in the labour market, along with the introduction of new skills and opportunities in local economies.

Further acceptance for immigration and migrants’ rights can only be achieved through policies that ensure that no member of a community feels left behind. We need to address the pressing issue of host communities expressing dissatisfaction with the way migration is playing out in their territories.

Through our project we saw some example of how cities such as Amman, who has seen their population double in less than a decade due to migration and forced displacement, or Vienna, with a third of its population of foreign origin – do not see migration as a problem but as a task of governance they can deal with very successfully.

Partnerships for development 

There is a huge potential for such initiatives that bring together the national level, the city level, the private sector and the people, be they migrants or non-migrants. If any of these are left out, we are likely to fail. We need to stop paying lip service to cooperation and start enacting it in practice.

We should keep building strong coalitions among donors, international organizations and government representatives. This includes establishing standing communication lines between the various existing initiatives to avoid duplication and fragmentation, as it is often the case.

ICMPD is fully committed to broadening our support for local and regional authorities in building their capacity to address migration challenges and benefit from migration as a tool for local development. We aspire to accompany national governments, as we do in several Mediterranean countries, in their efforts to embrace comprehensive migration policies.

ARLEM has the mandate to voice the needs of local and regional authorities in the Euro-Mediterranean and influence decentralization frameworks both at EU level and in Southern Partnership Countries (SPCs). This meets the aim of the work we are carrying out in the MC2CM project and the spirit of our promotion of city-to-city cooperation.