Blog

On 30 and 31 January 2020, the 4th EU Cities Forum took place in Porto, bringing together hundreds of European, national and local policy-makers and stakeholders on the theme of sustainable urban development. Our senior researcher Moritz Baumgärtel shares his impressions from the event.

Despite its evident role in migration governance, political leadership has so far largely remained off the radar of migration scholars. In this blog, I highlight the need to address this shortcoming and start paying closer attention to the extent and ways in which political leadership shapes immigration and integration policy-making. I present a number of concepts that have been successfully developed or adopted by political leadership scholars, arguing that these concepts can and should be incorporated into migration (policy) research.

Tihomir Sabchev

In this blog I discuss the changes in the domain of migration governance in Greece, which took place after the general election in the country in July 2019. I argue that the agenda of the new national government is almost entirely focused on the securitization of migration and largely overlooks the necessity of implementing migrant integration policies.

Tihomir Sabchev

The recent IMISCOE 2019 conference in Malmö confirmed the increased popularity of the multi-level governance concept among migration scholars. At the same time, it revealed two important issues that need to be addressed – the lack of progress towards developing a minimum consensus on what multi-level governance in the field of migration studies actually means and the problem of concept stretching. In this blog, I argue that while it is very important to continue refining the MLG concept and strengthening its applicability, it is also crucial not to increase the misconception and misuse of it.

Barbara Oomen

Once upon a time, not so long ago, stakeholder engagement by scholars involved waiting until the end of a project, writing up an easy-to-read flyer, pouring out an op-ed in the paper and possibly organizing a dissemination workshop. Our stakeholder meeting at the 2018 Fundamental Rights Forum showed how times have changed. Over thirty activists, policy-makers, politicians have reflected upon our first insights, comparing them against their experiences, critically adding to them and thus crucially strengthening our research.

Barbara Oomen & Sara Miellet

On Tuesday the 10 of October, after 208 days of negotiation, the new Dutch government presented its policy agreement for the coming four years: “Confidence in the Future”. If anything is apparent in reading the 70-page document, it is that this confidence hardly applies to migrants in general, and asylum seekers in particular. Neither, clearly, is there much confidence between the four parties in the new governmental coalition: they dedicate 10 % of all text to setting out the agreements in the field of migration. In contrast, for instance, there is only half a page dedicated to culture.