Insurgent Asylum Policies in European Cities: A Multi-Level Governance Perspective

Cities worldwide operate on the frontlines to support forced migrants. Some of these cities even overstep their formal prerogatives by refusing to comply with, and at times overtly subverting, the prescriptions of national authorities. This article builds a conceptual framework to understand such forms of insurgent urban asylum policy-making. We argue that insurgency depends on how city governments mediate the constraints and opportunities that emanate from the horizontal and vertical dimensions of multi-level governance, which capture city-level political dynamics as well as intergovernmental interactions. To illustrate our framework, we compare asylum policy-making in Barcelona, Milan, and Munich during the 2010s "refugee crisis." While Munich invested in rather uncontroversial integration programs, Milan and Barcelona overstepped their jurisdictional boundaries and supported migrants considered "illegal" by national governments. These insurgent responses were enacted as a "remedy from below," stemming from a sense of urgency that was not as pressing for Munich's policy-makers because of the greater capacity of Germany's asylum system.ISSN:1078-0874ISSN:1552-833

Further to the bottom of the hierarchy: the stratification of forced migrants' welfare rights amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

This article analyzes how forced migrants have been pushed further down in the hierarchy of social citizenship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on evidence from research in six cities of north-eastern Italy, we show that their welfare rights have stratified due to national immigration policies that imply unequal access to social protection. Local-level forces – including regional welfare institutions, municipal governments, and civil society organizations – have either magnified or mitigated such state-driven stratification. This process resulted in uneven landscapes of social citizenship, with a minority of migrants relatively well-protected and the others entangled into downward, pandemic-induced spirals of marginalization. In this way various forms of exclusion were activated, and accumulated on, one another – what we define as COVID-19’s ‘ripple effect’. These findings travel beyond Italy as an exemplary case of rampant nativism and urge post-pandemic host societies to emancipate welfare rights from the immigration policies to which they are so often subordinated