International migration governance has been at the top of the international agenda for the last two decades. And yet the recent European crisis triggered by the arrival of Middle Eastern and African refugees has shown the incapacity of States to reach any beginning of agreement on the matter (Lacroix 2016b). The idea of a global regulation system transforming human flows into economic benefits for sending and receiving countries and for migrants themselves is still a piece of wishful thinking in the face of State authorities that still consider migration as too sensitive a matter. In this context, cities have drawn growing attention from international organisations in search of partners for a way out of current impasses. On 25th and 26th of October 2015, at the peak of the ârefugee crisisâ, the International Organisation for Migrations (IOM) organised a conference that brought together international organisation representatives, local and national authorities, with the aim to transform localities networked by human flows into agents of global migration governance (Ahouga 2017). The renewed strategic role of cities and of their political leaders should not come as a surprise for observers of international negotiations; a similar trend is visible in the arena of global ecology as States appear as reluctant supporters of a zero-carbon economy. Nonetheless, when it comes to migration, there is close to zero scholarship dealing with both ends of the migration governance chain. This book is meant to fill this void and to provide a stepping stone for the development of evidence-based policymaking as well as a critical assessment of this process.
This volume draws on an international seminar hosted by Migrinter at the University of Poitiers in December 2015. The aim of this event was to launch a discussion between scholars of integration focusing on urban immigration and diversity policies in the North and migration experts working on the relationships between emigrants and their regions of origin in the South. The idea of hosting such an event on international migrations and new local governance came from an ongoing collaboration between the two editors of this book. Working on two very different fields: one in peripheral cities in a âhost countryâ (Desille 2017), and one in towns and villages in a âsending countryâ (Lacroix 2005, 2016a), they were confronted with a similar question: how can we account for the fact that immigrantsâsettling in the area, or born in the area and who now live abroadâcan be seen as drivers of development in a context of State withdrawal, increased competition to access resources and increased pressure on cities to take responsibility for their economic development? In the North as well as in the South, migrants and their organisations, under the glossier labels of âdiversityâ or âdiasporaâ, are enrolled in local policies as agents of economic development. Oddly enough, the scholarship focusing on immigrants and the city in departure and settlement settings remains completely disconnected even though it does address related dynamics. By bridging between these separate strands of literature, this collection of chapters reveals an unheeded facet of globalisation, conveyed neither by interconnected global cities nor by multinational corporations, but by smaller cities and villages that are to cope with the emergence of transnational migratory linkages.
In this introduction, we want to make a case for a rapprochement between urban governance studies and migration studies and what can be learnt from it. The second part of the introduction draws on an outlook of the different chapters in order to highlight the stakes and limits to the setting up of a local governance of international migrations.
On the Mutual Constitution of International Immigration and Governance Studies
The North-South divide that has characterised the governance of international immigration is slowly fading. In fact, the bilateral patterning of international mobility inherited from colonial empires has given way to much more erratic and diversified forms of migration. The range of potential destinations has, for migrants, strongly widened, be it the result of the individualisation of migration projects, the strategies undertaken by businesses, universities or public authorities to attract new talents, or the outcome of increasingly restrictive policies forcing migrants to consider âtemporaryâ alternatives. There is no country in the world which is not an emigration and an immigration country. This collection of papers brings together case studies from the USA, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, Mali, Morocco, South Africa and Japan in a comparative perspective. The diversity of those experiences support the fact that the growing complexity of international mobility is true not only in Europe and North America, but also in Africa and Asia. The âmanagementââfrom control to settlement policiesâof the presence of immigrants is no longer a Northern issue. And conversely, dealing with absentees and returnees is less and less of a Southern issue.
As migration experiences, patterns and policies are changing, the need for North/South comparisons, especially at city level, is growing. The city is and has always been a hotspot for immigrant settlement, once from peripheral rural areas, and now from other countries and continents. And yet, its role has been overshadowed by the constitution of Nation-States: as immigration defined the boundaries of the nation (Sayad 1999), immigration policy is regarded as the prerogative of the State. Over the last three decades, one observes a re-emergence of the subnational level as a relevant level of decision-making (see for instance Glick Schiller and ĂaÄlar 2010; Penninx et al. 2004; Varsanyi 2008). But this shift is âpartial, incomplete and contingentâ (Varsanyi 2008, p. 882). Even though subnational governments inherited increased responsibilities when it comes to formulate and execute certain policies affecting immigrantsâ settlement and access to servicesâamong other thingsâthey do not control immigration policies aiming at regulating the access of foreigners to a national territory.
Addressing these changes through the concept of urban (or local) governance leads us to account for the multiple actors involved in framing immigration policies and its corollary, immigrant integration policies, in the city. In fact, decentralisation policies and the subsequent municipal reforms that were passed from the late 1970s on in the North and in the South have sanctioned a shift from local âgovernmentâ to local âgovernanceâ. In that definition, a territory, whether it be a city or a group of rural villages, is administered by a wider range of horizontal and vertical actors, including public actors located at various levels of government but also private actors, who become highly dependent (Jessop 2013) despite their conflicting interests and contradictory logics. Moreover, these new local coalitions are expected to deal not only with the mere administrative tasks devolved to them, but also with economic development issues, in a context of âinterlocality competitionâ (Brenner 2004). In that sense, cities now compete for resources in general, and migratory resources in particular (Glick Schiller and ĂaÄlar 2010). Together with several migration scholars (Ellis 2006; Glick Schiller and ĂaÄlar 2009, 2010, 2015; Good 2009; Smith and Ley 2008; Varsanyi 2008; Walker and Leitner 2011), we believe that it is crucial to address immigration issues through the ârescaling of statehoodâ (Brenner 2004), and the new patterns of governance which spur from those transformed and transforming hierarchies of power.
However, the rescaling of immigrant policies is mostly addressed by a scholarship focusing on cities located in the global North. The relations between immigration, development and governance in the global South have mostly been explored through the lens of emigration and development, that is, the potential gains of cities/localities through their emigrant populations. But, while the perspective is different, the wider context of the dissemination of neoliberal models of governance forms the same background. If Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund guided the devolution of responsibilities to subnational governments in the South, market-friendly approach to governance also led to decentralisation reforms in the North. In this volume, the contributions of Lorena Gazzotti, and Hawa Coulibaly and StĂ©phanie Lima on the one hand, and of Hilary Sanders on the American case, and Myrte Hoekstra, Josef Kohlbacher and Daniel Rauhut in Europe on the other hand, show this parallelism. From the 1980s onwards, the World Bank and other international organisations promoted decentralisation reforms in order to promote bottom-up development dynamics that would make the most of the comparative advantages of local territories. This Local Economic Development approach (see for instance Feser 2014) is a reaction to the top-down, one-size-fits-all Structural Adjustment Policies of the previous decade which had shown their limits. Likewise, in the North, the transfers of powers at local level are supposed to give to local authorities the capacity to spur development dynamics by connecting and enhancing local potentialities, through âinterlocality competitionâ. Public-private partnerships, sub-contracting of public prerogatives, connecting universities and businesses, innovators and entrepreneurs, and voluntary and moneymaking sectors are now part of the âgood governanceâ toolkit. More and more, and in this logic, cities are ca...