Rebels with a Cause? Asylum Policy-making in European Cities

• In Event: Immigration and Refugee Politics in Cities

Abstract

Cities and towns bore the lion’s share of the responsibility for accommodating asylum seekers during the so-called European ‘refugee crisis.’ City have to react fast and pragmatically to societal challenges such as high numbers of asylum seekers. While some local governments opt for restrictive policies, most city governments in Europe embraced proactive and accommodative policy stances, at times blatantly non-complying or subverting national and European laws. This paper examines the dynamics behind urban asylum policy-making in European cities during the so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ that was most urgent in 2015-2016. It examines the role of the mayor(al administration) who’s asylum policy-making leeway is mainly constraint and enabled by political situations in two dimensions: The urban politics dimension incorporates the interactions of the mayor with local parties, civil society actors and social movements that can help to promote accommodative urban asylum policies. The multilevel governance dimension includes the governance and capabilities of national asylum systems, potential different political ideologies between national and local governments and different interpretations of asylum situations.

We compare urban asylum policy-making in Barcelona, Milan, and Munich based on document analysis and more than 60 semi-structured expert interviews. We find that mayors craft alliances with progressive civil society organizations for enacting accommodative urban asylum policies. Yet, national models of asylum governance and capabilities of national asylum systems pressure these urban actors to different kinds of policy-making. In Spain and Italy, where national asylum systems are of limited capabilities, cities tend to enact accommodative urban policies as a ‘remedy from below.’ Progressive local incumbents, in combination with civil society actors, can ‘rebel’ against supra-local policy-makers, i.e., to overstep the hierarchical local policy-making authority and jurisdictional boundaries in face of poor and restrictive national policies. In Germany, precisely because of a more stable and capable asylum system, cities limit their policy-making endeavors to integration policies towards asylum-seekers. Hence urban asylum policy-making is less contested in Munich than in Barcelona and Milan. Because the ideology of national and urban incumbents was aligned in the case of Milan but not in the case of Barcelona, multi-level asylum policy-making was more consensual in Milan than in Barcelona. This paper reveals important dynamics in the urban and multilevel governance dimensions that may help us to understand progressive urban policy-making more broadly.

Authors

• David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich

• Raffaele Bazurli, Queen Mary, University of London