The Elusiveness of Governing Migrant Integration: Why putting complexity in boxes does not work

This dissertation revolves around the question of how local governments are making sense and are responding to the challenges of increasingly diverse societies. I thereby focus on the empirical reality of government workers and migrants. My research question is as follows: __How do local governing actors make sense of and respond to migration-related diversity and how can these responses be explained?_

Re-imagining the city: branding migration-related diversity

This paper aims to unravel how superdiverse cities re-imagine themselves in response to migration-related diversity. Based on a double case study on the branding strategies of two superdiverse Dutch cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, this paper shows that although diversity is part of the brand identity in both cities, it is not used prominently in brand communications or in urban planning. Place brands are constructed in wider discursive and political settings that affect whether and how migration-related diversity is used in the symbolic representation of places as well as in urban planning. Migration-related diversity is re-defined strategically (as ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘international’) for two reasons: (1) to turn it into an asset that enhances the brand, and (2) to align the brand with existing policies and political discourses on migration and accommodate political pressures. City marketers have depoliticized place branding. Marketing logic pushed migration related-diversity to the background, because according to the city marketers diversity does not help a city to stand out

Going the Extra Mile? How Street-level Bureaucrats Deal with the Integration of Immigrants

Dutch immigration and integration policies are being interpreted and implemented by local street-level bureaucrats. We carried out 28 semi-structured interviews with integration coaches, integration teachers and client managers in order to understand the dilemmas they face, and to explain their subsequent behaviour. The results show that although organizational characteristics such as the bureaucratic burden made street-level bureaucrats reluctant to enlarge their discretionary space at the expense of policy rules, their willingness to help clients often transcends these boundaries under a combination of three conditions: high client motivation, extreme personal distress of the client, and negative assessment of existing policies and policy instruments (both in terms of fairness and practicality). Furthermore, street-level bureaucrats were found to be constantly reinterpreting and revising their roles