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作者

Raffaele Bazurli

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue4,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Introduction: Asylum Policies—Between State Authority and Urban InsurgencyProgressives worldwide increasingly look to cities as the essential bulwarks in the battle for the rights of migrants. Over the last years, labels such as “sanctuary cities” (e.g., Darling and Bauder 2019), “solidarity cities” (e.g., Agustín and Jørgensen 2019), “refuge cities” (e.g., Mayer 2018), and “welcoming cities” (e.g., Bazurli 2019) have proliferated in academic and political debates. These initiatives are generally crafted at the grassroots level. This means that civil society organizations experiment with discourses and practices of migrant solidarity that sympathetic local officials possibly translate into full-fledged policy programs (de Graauw and Vermeulen 2016; Kaufmann and Strebel 2020). Another salient feature of these initiatives is their confrontational, or at least polemical, stance towards nation-states, blamed for the suffering inflicted on migrants through exclusionary policies and punitive practices (Darling and Bauder 2019). Aside from these common traits, and behind their highly evocative names, there are fundamental differences among these urban initiatives, notably their view of how to resist the state monopoly over immigration and citizenship (Kaufmann et al. 2021). Supplementing state services for refugees through municipal welfare, for example, is very different than supporting migrants who are even denied legal status by nation-states. How can we explain this variety of pro-migrant urban policies?This article aims to conceptualize the different roles that cities can play in challenging national migration regimes, with a specific focus on urban asylum governance in the European context. The realm of asylum is, de jure, the sole jurisdiction of nation-states. They set out the conditions for accessing their territory, they process applications, and they determine the legal status and welfare entitlements of asylum-seekers. Within this centralized framework, nation-states at most task local governments with integrating asylum-seekers who obtained (or those in the process of obtaining) a positive humanitarian protection status, i.e., a Geneva Convention refugee status or a subsidiary protection status (cf. Łukasiewicz, Oren, and Tripathi 2021). However, in reality, European cities were in the trenches of coping with the “refugee crisis” of the 2010s. As the EU and its member states failed in sharing the responsibilities of humanitarian protection (Guiraudon 2018; Lutz, Kaufmann, and Stünzi 2020), numerous municipalities exceeded their formal prerogatives to assist forced migrants in need—regardless of their formal protection status (Bazurli 2019; Mayer 2018).We define these instances of municipal defiance as insurgent urban asylum policy-making. The term “insurgent” underlines the fundamental opposition of these policies to the power of the nation-state to separate— through policing, detention, exclusion, and expulsion—those who deserve membership in a national polity from those who, instead, ought to be punished for their own “outsider-ness” (Stumpf 2012, 15; Dauvergne 2008; Crawley and Skleparis 2018). Against this background, insurgent asylum policies project an alternative, inclusive vision of belonging based on the principle of jus domicili (membership upon residence, cf. Varsanyi 2006; Kaufmann 2019). Scholars of urban politics have emphasized that grassroots activism at the city-level is the guiding force behind these modes of dealing with migration challenges (e.g., de Graauw and Vermeulen 2016; Steil and Vasi 2014), whereas political scientists have focused more on federalism, and intergovernmental relations across territorial levels (e.g., Scholten 2013; Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015).We integrate these different perspectives into a multi-level governance (MLG) framework to explain the (non-) emergence of insurgent urban asylum policies. MLG refers to the assorted state and non-state actors that shape policy-making at various spatial scales without a structuring authority and in the context of proliferating, interdependent jurisdictions (e.g., Hooghe and Marks 2003; Kaufmann and Sidney 2020). In this article, we take up the call of migration scholars to unleash the explanatory potential of MLG perspectives, that is, their capacity to address “why” and “how” questions and to move beyond the merely descriptive usages of this concept (cf. Caponio and Jones-Correa 2018, 2006). We theorize that insurgency in urban asylum policies depends on two dimensions of MLG. The horizontal dimension captures urban governance dynamics, i.e., the interactions between the city administration and grassroots organizations, local parties, and other actors that have a stake in city politics, especially those that mobilize from the bottom up. The vertical dimension incorporates intergovernmental interactions as well as the impact of supralocal policy-making on the preferences and strategies of urban actors. City governments face opportunities and constraints originating from these two dimensions. They are able to mediate, interpret, and strategically use different, possibly contrasting signals that come from both below and above.We illustrate our conceptual framework through a comparative case study of urban asylum policy-making in three large European cities: Barcelona, Milan, and Munich. The findings reveal that forging alliances among progressive actors was a condition for crafting inclusionary provisions in all of the cities analyzed (i.e., the horizontal dimension). Grassroots solidarity initiatives were vocal enough to attract the backing of political leaders in city governments, thus giving rise to broad pro-migrant coalitions at the city-level. However, while Munich limited its endeavors to rather uncontroversial integration policies, Milan and Barcelona overstepped their jurisdictional boundaries, ignored supralocal policies, and supported migrants deemed to be “illegal” (or at least not entitled) from the perspective of the nation-state. These insurgent responses emerged as a “remedy from below.” This sense of urgency was not as pressing for Munich’s policy-makers because of the greater capacity of Germany’s asylum system (i.e., the vertical dimension).Our findings expand our understanding of the terms “sanctuary,” “solidarity,” “refuge,” and “welcoming” cities by distinguishing between insurgent and non-insurgent initiatives. They contribute to the literature on migration policy-making by demonstrating the explanatory potential of MLG perspectives (Caponio and Jones-Correa 2018), which prove productive for accommodating different scholarly contributions within an overarching conceptual framework. However, we believe that our study also speaks to urban studies scholars outside the perimeter of migration studies. The burgeoning debates on “new municipalism” (Russell 2019; Thompson 2020), “progressive cities” (Joy and Vogel 2021), and “contentious governance” (Verhoeven 2021) share some common threads, notably, the significance of alliance-building dynamics at the city-level, the subversion of state-centrism over a variety of policy domains, and the possibility of harnessing the urban scale to achieve far-reaching democratic and societal transformations. We contend that urban initiatives that defend and expand migrant rights should be part of the policy agenda for “a just, democratic, and sustainable future” (Kaufmann and Sidney 2020, 1).