Nationalism, if it ever left us, is definitively back in vogue. With nationalist parties resurgent throughout Europe, more and more European nationals are vesting their political hopes in national governments. But for those new migrants without increasingly-coveted EU citizenship, the institutions most likely to come to their aid are not nation states, but local and city governments.
For what now seems like a brief moment, the German state led the way in ‘progressive’ policies towards refugee reception, with its chancellor Angela Merkel the unlikely poster-child for resettlement rights. But she was one of the key architects of the highly criticised EU-Turkey deal which saw many migrants condemned to the purgatory of refugee camps. She recently called for migrants who make it to northern Europe to be “returned” to their landing-spots in Greece; a country whose limited resources are already struggling to meet people’s needs.
Nonetheless, where many national governments shy away from earnest efforts towards long-term refugee integration, for municipalities the urgency of the problem has proved unavoidable. While refugees usually arrive in countries in rural areas; coastlines and borderlands — they are mostly headed for cities. Thomas Jezequel is a policy advisor on migration for the pan-European organisation EUROCITIES, a network and policy forum for 170 cities across 35 countries. He notes that “the refugee dream is an urban dream, as reception networks (family, friends, or fellow nationals) economic and education opportunities are located primarily in cities…This is often why refugees embarked on potentially deadly trips across the Mediterranean, why they walked from Greece to Hungary, and why, once placed in a reception centre in rural Germany or northern Sweden, they try to move on.”
Thus, the influx of migrants poses a unique challenge for local governments, testing their resources and the robustness of strategies already put in place to tackle the issues faced by new…