Cities of Migration: The Challenges of Social Inclusion

Abstract

European cities have always been attractors of people from all over the world (Häussermann 2005) and, according to recent comparative research (Benton-Short et al. 2005), they are strengthening their attraction capacity towards international migrants. An ongoing influx makes cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, or Milan laboratories for the inclusion integration of migrants. These cities are challenged to cope with absolute growing numbers of migrants and with an increasing heterogeneity in terms of backgrounds, claims, and material needs (Vertovec 2010). Therefore, cities are frontrunners of integration policies that often develop innovative blueprints for welfare societies as a whole. In this chapter, we will focus on the determinants of migrants’ vulnerability in local welfare systems, and scrutinize cities’ approaches to pursuing social integration. For this purpose, we use the term migrant very broadly, meaning not only foreigners who for any reason recently arrived in a host country, but also settled and often naturalized citizens with a so-called migration background. Though we see a strong relation between migration and mobility (Cattacin and Domening 2012), we do not consider migrants as ‘mobile persons’ per se, if mobility is considered as a multi-dimensional concept that comprises people’s opportunities for social advancement. With regard to social mobility, migrants’ prospects are often limited.