A world map represents the contribution of funds made by migrants and natives in P I B. Maximum contributions are from Mexico, Philippines, China, and India. A bar graph below plots principal destinations which contribute towards funds. The text is written in a foreign language.

Remittances sent by migrants to their countries of departure (in billion dollars)Americas: Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Colombia, Equador, Dominican Republic, Peru, Bolivia, BrazilEurope: France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Portugal, Serbia, United Kingdom, Check Republic, Austria, Sweden, Russia, UzbekistanAfrica: Morocco, Nigeria, Egypt, South Sudan, KenyaMiddle East: Turkey, Jordanian, Yemen, LebanonPakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan

Various forms of migration diplomacy have now developed, which make use of several tools. This typically involves bilateral and multilateral agreements regarding the externalisation of borders and the provision of visas for highly-skilled migrants from the Global South in exchange for the repatriation of undocumented migrants and the creation of new development policies. Countries of origin have also adopted new strategies in this domain, including adopting a greater openness towards dual citizenship, allowing national voting rights for migrants in their countries of origin (notably in Latin America), developing remittance policies, supporting diasporic associations, and promoting their elites abroad. Migration diplomacy is also conducted at the regional and global level, including in contexts of free circulation at the regional level. New actors advocating for migrants’ rights and human rights are also emerging at the global level.

Migration diplomacy is not only a strategy developed by Northern immigration countries, through the use of the externalization of borders and return policies in exchange for the provision of visas for elites or the construction of roads and other development projects. It is also used by Southern countries of emigration towards the North, who thereby attempt to influence immigration countries through the size of their diaspora (sometimes binational), their geographic position on migration routes (particularly Morocco, Turkey, Libya, and Mexico), or by promising their support to vote in support of the policies favoured by some Northern countries at the UN General Assembly, in exchange for assistance and funds.

5.1 I – Borders, at the Centre of Migration Diplomacy

Borders are at the centre of migration diplomacy. As Michel Foucher writes (2007), we have never had so many borders since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Some authors have long complained about the abundance of borders in the world, such as this passage from Stefan Zweig’s 1942 autobiographical work Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday; 1993), comparing his present historical situation to the era before the First World War:

Nothing, perhaps, makes more apparent the tremendous setback the world has suffered since the First World War than the restrictions now placed on the freedom of movement of men and, in general, on their rights […]. There were no permits, no visas, no cumbersome procedures; the same borders which, with their customs officers, police and gendarmerie posts, have been transformed into a system of obstacles, represented nothing more than symbolic lines which were crossed with as much thoughtlessness as the Greenwich meridian.

The proliferation of border crossings poses a challenge for the policies and diplomatic positions of nation states faced with large migration flows: “harraga” (migrants from North Africa who burn their identity papers) are “burning” borders, and while countries of origin conclude agreements with immigration countries to prohibit illegal departures, human smugglers continue to offer expensive and dangerous routes of entry, transnational networks facilitate border crossings by means of family, economic, cultural, or social links, and dual citizenship is used as a means to bypass visas systems. All borders are challenged by various forms of transnationalism, because the will of individuals looking for a better future, for asylum, or for jobs is stronger than the will of military troops to close borders. Nation states that are afraid of the disorder that might result from migrants crossing their borders are mostly adopting the approach of externalising their borders. However, other forms of diplomacy are being practised on a large scale, while city networks and other transnational mobilisations are also emerging as new actors in opposition to security-based approaches.

5.1.1 Bilateral and Multilateral Agreements

Many bilateral and multilateral agreements have been concluded between individual emigration and immigration countries (bilateral agreements), or between groups of countries (multilateral agreements).

The EU-Turkey agreement of March 2016 included Turkey’s acceptance to host the majority of refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries in exchange for €6 billion and increased international recognition. Some of Turkey’s other demands, such as its application to work towards membership of the EU and the simplification of visas for Turkish people travelling to Europe, were not granted. The border between Calais and Dover continues to be managed according to the Touquet agreements, which were concluded between the UK and France in 2002. According to the terms of these agreements, France controls the borders in an effort to stop irregular migrants or asylum seekers from reaching the UK. This is the only situation in which a European country controls the border for another, at departure rather than at arrival. This task of containment is more often demanded of countries in the Global South. The management of this border is often a cause of conflict between France and the UK, despite the fact that the encampment of migrants near Calais, the so-called “jungle”, has been cleared several times (2002, 2009, and 2016), before being reconstructed by newcomers, and despite the cold reception that awaits them on the other side. The border between Ceuta and Melilla, and the geographical position of Morocco across the Mediterranean Sea from Europe, has been used by Morocco to negotiate many bilateral agreements with EU Member States, but not multilateral ones with the whole EU, since Morocco does not want to damage its relations with Western African countries. These negotiations are leading to a kind of thick border covering the whole country, owing to the requirement imposed by EU Member States to control the whole Moroccan territory. Libya took advantage of its long southern Mediterranean shore to conclude the largest number of bilateral and multilateral agreements with European countries, in exchange for millions of euros, infrastructure projects, and recognition of its legitimacy on the international scene during the Gaddafi period until 2011 (he was officially invited by French and Italian governments). For countries in the Global South, these agreements have led to increased recognition in the North, and an opportunity to better equip their internal security forces.

The externalisation of European borders has been extended to the domain of asylum control. Many EU Member States are sub-contracting their asylum procedures to third countries at the external borders of Europe, with which they conclude readmission agreements in exchange for development policies, various kinds of external cooperation, and visas for elites. France has concluded the greatest number of readmission agreements of any EU Member State, followed by Italy, the UK, Switzerland, and Sweden. Each country has chosen a distinct approach. During the 1990s, bilateral agreements were mostly concluded with Eastern European countries, including Albania and Ukraine, before the admission of some of those countries into the EU. Conditional negotiations were conducted with Balkan countries. From 2002 to 2018, these agreements were extended to Africa, with a wide range of working arrangements or partnerships, combining security, humanitarian missions, development, and trade. However, the approach of externalising borders is mostly used for containment and deterrence at the point of departure.

Recently, the externalization of borders has been extended to the domain of asylum policies, with some Northern immigration countries in Europe (the UK, Sweden, and Denmark) trying to assess candidates for asylum while they are still in their countries of origin or in transit countries. In this context, Rwanda, in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, was chosen for its political and economic stability to be a partner for these countries. This approach aims to avoid the arrival of mixed flows in Northern countries, so that “true” candidates for asylum can be identified, instead of the usual blurring of categories leading to large numbers of irregular migrants. Although this practice contravenes the Geneva Convention of 1951 on asylum, which requires that candidates for asylum be granted access to the asylum country, it has become a popular idea in European and national debates.

5.2 II – International Conventions and Declarations

The term “governance” is generally understood as a “broad concept that refers to mechanisms for steering systems towards their goals”, in which states are one of many competing sources of authority, along with other multilateral actors. For James Rosenau (1990), governance also refers to a global level, where transnational issues require hybrid forms of cooperation between disparate types of actors. It came to be applied to migration management in a context of great disorder and violation of human rights, when migration gradually came to be viewed as a world issue. This situation of confusion, the manifest discrepancies between objectives and results, and the perverse effects of some national policies all called for a global system of governance.

During the 1990s, several specialists of migration focused their books on the “global migration crisis” (Weiner, 1995) and on nation states “losing control” of borders (Sassen, 1996b), while others emphasised the contradiction between the contribution that mobility brings to human development and the closure of borders by visas systems across two-thirds of the planet, or highlighted the emerging demand for a right to emigrate and to practise mobility, as a world public good, in a world that is currently restricting that mobility. The gaps between policy objectives and their manifest failures led to the idea that migration would be better managed at a larger level than that of the nation state. Earlier attempts to develop mechanisms of global governance for issues with a global dimension (the environment, population issues, women’s rights, etc.) suggested that such mechanisms could be enlarged to address migration.

At the global level, migration is approached as a matter of international relations. There are a number of universal declarations and international treaties relating to migration: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 says that every human being has the right to leave a country, including one’s own. The Geneva Convention of 1951 protects refugees and defines the necessary criteria for being granted this status. While refugees have universal protection from the Geneva Convention of 1951, which was first written to apply only to Europeans, then enlarged in 1967 and 1969 to extend to the whole world, migrants lack such general and universal rights, because they are governed by the laws of immigration states, which define rights of entry, work, and settlement at the national level. Most countries in the Global South do not have any immigration nor refugee policies, and few of them are signatories of the International Convention on Refugees (1951), or of those on statelessness (1954), equality of social rights at work with nationals (ILO resolutions N° 97 and 143), or children’s rights (1989). In 1990, after ten years of work, the United Nations invited Member States to sign the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW). This convention, now signed by 56 countries – all from the Global South except for Kosovo and Montenegro – does not provide any innovations or access to new rights. It simply refers to all rights already existing in the world for migrant workers, while granting some minimum rights to irregular migrants. For this reason, no immigration country of the Global North has signed the Convention. However, Southern countries who signed this convention with the aim of protecting their nationals abroad often encounter difficulties when they are themselves confronted with immigrants, as new immigration countries.

5.2.1 Towards an International Governance of Migration

Since 2003, the idea that migration would be better managed at a larger level than the nation state began to emerge in Geneva, with the Geneva Migration Group of experts.

The project to develop a system for the global governance of migration was launched by Kofi Annan, General Secretary of the United Nations in 2006 (Badie et al., 2008). He was interested in a process undertaken in Geneva in 2003 by several international organisations and NGOs, which aimed to open up a broader reflection on migration (the GMG, “Geneva Migration Group”, and later “Global Migration Group”, established in 2003, which rapidly gathered 17 participant organisations). In 2016 Kofi Annan undertook to create a High Level Dialogue at the United Nations headquarters in New York, followed by annual meetings of the Global Forum on Migration and Development in Brussels (2007), Manilla (2008), Athens (2009), Puerto Vallarta (2010), Geneva (2011), Mauritius (2012), Stockholm (2014), Istanbul (2015), and Berlin (2017). The United Nations organised a second High level Dialogue in New York in 2013.

The main idea behind this project is to draw on a larger body of expertise and to create space for multilateralism as a decision-making process. The ineffectiveness of national border controls, in spite of security-based discourses and practices and the violation of human rights in virtually every operation, progressively led to the idea that a supranational level of decision-making would be capable of taking account of more contradictory factors and ethical principles than decision-making at the national level, which is embroiled in national politics and public opinion, and therefore tends towards security-based discourses. The Global Forum on Migration and Development is a work in progress, whose reflections are based principally on the ICRMW. However, the Forum has only limited legitimacy on the international scene, as the High Level Dialogue itself does not belong to the sphere of international diplomacy, but rather to that of parallel practices.

In 2015, after the refugee crisis, the UN National Assembly decided to launch a Global Compact for Migration and a Global Compact on Refugees, with the aim of establishing (through the multilateral decision-making process of global governance) a non-binding text that most countries could agree on, to be followed as a framework. The topic had never been placed on the agenda of any world conference of the United Nations before (the issue of “population” was debated in Cairo in 1994, “women” in Beijing in 1998, and “discrimination” in Durban in 2002). The topic of migration had not even been debated at G8 meetings or at the UN National Assembly before 2015. The reason for this is a lack of transnational mobilisation on issues of migration and refugees. Those who are in favour of opening borders are emigration states (mostly signatories of the UN Convention of 1990), associations of migrants involved in the development of their countries of origin, human rights organisations, and large companies seeking sources of labour force. These actors have no tradition of fighting in transnational mobilisations together – a fact which weakens the project to develop a global governance of migration. Aristide Zolberg names the actors in such mobilisations “strange bedfellows” (Zolberg, 2006): for example, while employers may share the goals of leftist or charity activists who support the opening of borders, they otherwise have little in common. Similarly, defenders of welfare provisions may share the goals of nationalists who support the closure of borders, but are otherwise very different in their views.

The Global Compact was opened to signatories at the end of 2018, with the aim of facilitating “safe, orderly, and regular migration”. It defines a roadmap to be followed for migrants and refugees respectively. However, immigration states continue to be reluctant to implement the Global Compact, which specifies 23 objectives (with regard to migration) to be followed by the General Assembly of the UN and 4 main points (with regard to refugees) to be followed by UNHCR.

The global governance of migration involves immigration and emigration states from the Global North and Global South, IGOs, NGOs, the EU, and many actors from civil society: trade unions, migrants’ associations, human rights organisations, churches, associations for local development, experts, and all other such actors involved in migration and refugee issues. Southern countries are now active participants in the debate. Some of them are emerging immigration and transit states (such as Turkey, Morocco, and Mexico). These states are developing forms of soft diplomacy that capitalise on this new position and establish diasporic policies towards their emigrants, demanding rights for them in their immigration states. Through these new kinds of soft diplomacy they are beginning to have a voice in World Social Forums, FMMD annual meetings, and in the Global Compact.

Some small states are gaining a voice thanks to their advocacy on environmental issues or regarding the treatment of their nationals abroad (“indigenous work”). For example, Bangladesh has developed these sorts of “soft diplomacy” thanks to the support of experts. Meanwhile, a number of issues that have a strong impact on migration and which could more effectively be debated at the global level have not yet been put on the agenda, such as the price of cotton, extensive fishing in African waters by Asian countries, open markets in raw materials, and demography.

However, in the future, the disorder of the world will be addressed by new forms of international relations, which will be more socially-orientated, with a larger role for the Global South, and less dependent on nation states of the Global North as the main actors of international relations. As Bertrand Badie observes: “We are analyzing migration questions in terms of inter-state relations, whereas the world system no longer works this way” (Badie, 2022). At the global level, social issues are becoming more important than strategic ones. At the international level, the social question is becoming the foremost factor in the destabilisation of the world, owing to inequalities in human development, poverty, civil wars, environmental crises, and demography. The forces of globalisation are creating relations of interdependency, which contradict the principles of sovereignty. The pressures associated with societies are often stronger than those associated with states, and this reality is highlighted by the patterns of migration flows. International relations are also being shaped by the effects of global pandemics, whereas they would previously have been dominated by relations of military power. Migration flows are a manifestation of the changing dynamics of societies, as they emerge in ways that seek to limit inequalities, fill gaps, and reciprocally satisfy new needs. The project to establish the rules of this new global order requires the recognition of migration as a legitimate factor in the debate, which has not yet been accomplished.

Recent crises (the Syrian civil war, COVID-19, and war in Afghanistan) have revealed a large gap between, on the one hand, the objectives of multilateral methods of governance connected with the Marrakech Global Compact, and on the other hand, European and national solutions to new migration and refugee flows. The only way to resolve these questions is by establishing legal channels of mobility for greater numbers of migrants.

5.3 III – From Local to Global: Cities as New Actors in International Migration

Other transnational mobilisations are also entering the field of international advocacy and questioning the role of nation states. Owing to the increasing urbanisation of the planet, cities are becoming important territories of departure and arrival. During the past thirty years, some major cities have hosted informal markets for newcomers, such as Berlin and Vienna after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, and Istanbul, with its informal markets for circular migration. There is a diverse range of actors involved in the management of cities in relation to migration: the EU, with its regulation of circulation, municipalities, humanitarian NGOs, associations, and citizens involved in receiving migrants and lobbying public decision-makers. The cases of Palermo, Barcelona, Strasburg, and other cities are well-known. Small cities are also involved, but citizens who decide to provide hospitality to irregular migrants or help them cross borders often find themselves in contravention of the law. There has been an increase in these “crimes of solidarity”. One such high profile case was that of Cédric Herrou, a farmer in the French Alps, who was prosecuted and found guilty for his role in assisting irregular migrants, before the cases against him were overturned by the Constitutional Council, the Highest Court in France, on the basis that such actions of “fraternity” (one of the founding values of the French Republic, alongside freedom and equality) are protected by the Constitution. This story was documented in a film, Libre, produced after the successful resolution of Herrou’s court cases. The legal cases involving Domenico Lucano, the mayor of Riace in Italy, and those of the inhabitants of Briançon, are bringing to light contradictions between legal justice and ethics.

In some places, the work of receiving migrants with the help of NGOs, and sometimes with European funds, can be an opportunity to create jobs in solidarity management. This work combines the public and private sectors, and often takes place in regions of unemployment or rural depopulation, such as in Sicily (Bassi, 2015), the Nord-Pas de Calais region in France, or on Greek islands. Cities are also initiating civil society solidarity networks with migrants, involving mobilisation at the local, grass-roots level, aimed at supporting unaccompanied minors, irregular migrants, asylum seekers, and families.

Cities may also develop networks on an international scale when they are involved in environmental crises, such as Dacca in Bangladesh and others located at sea level, such as Mumbai, Kolkata, or New Orleans in the wake of Storm Katrina (Gemenne et al., 2016). Some international agreements between Northern and Southern cities involved in immigration and emigration respectively have also aimed at developing better forms of management in Southern societies confronted with the challenges of rapid urbanisation. These co-development agreements address issues such as waste treatment, access to clean water, urban social housing, uses of remittances, and the improvement of daily life in urban areas as well as in rural ones.

The forces of both globalisation and localism are therefore revealing new facets of cities and migration, in ways that bring to mind Immanuel Kant’s emphasis on hospitality as a universal duty of a citizen in a cosmopolitan world, followed by Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity (Wihtol de Wenden, 2013, referring to Kant, 2006; Bauman, 2000).

5.3.1 Cities as International Networks

In the mid-1990s, Saskia Sassen’s (1996a) work on the “global city” drew attention to the weakening of nation states and the strengthening of transnational networks in economics, finance, and trade, using the examples of London, New York, and Tokyo. This “local turn” was also examined by authors including Peter Scholten (2015) and Bianca Garces-Mascarenas and Rinus Penninx (2015) in the Netherlands, focusing on the role of cities in implementing migration and integration policies and processes in Europe. These works raise the question of the role of cities in migrations flows and the construction of networks beyond the level of nation states, and thus their role in integration policies and global governance at all levels of scale. In their book on city networks, Thomas Lacroix and Sarah Spencer (2022) ask the question: will cities come to govern the world with regard to integration policies and the global governance of migration, in place of national and international policies? The perspective of governance from below, studied at the meso-level of city networks, is a good place to observe the large diversity of situations, thanks to the emergence of new actors and new fields in connection with cities.

Little research has been devoted to cities in relation to migration policies, either as actors involved in the reception of migrants, or as experts in governance from below (at multi-scale levels) in reaction to national and international policies imposed from above. In her work on multilevel decision-making processes, Tiziana Caponio (2022) emphasises the ambiguous, horizontal dimension of meso-level governance. She writes that the horizontal level of towns as new actors of migration policies at the local, national, and international level has been “poorly conceptualized” and effectively considered as being subordinated to vertical, intergovernmental relations of only secondary relevance. The collaborative, multilevel, and inter-sectorial governance found in connection with cities can be analysed from several perspectives, including those of networks, activists, and the structuring role of the political context on cities in their migration strategy.

5.3.2 Smart Cities and Cities of Marginalisation

While some global cities have been termed “smart cities”, attracting highly qualified migrants from all over the world, they are also creating cosmopolitan forms of citizenship beyond nation states by receiving newcomers from poor countries and lower social categories. In his work on the reception of migrants, Michel Agier quotes Jacques Derrida (2019, p. 84):

If we refer to the city rather than the state, is it because we hope to receive from a new figure of the city that which we have almost given up expecting from the state. […] What we call (calling it what we would wish it to be) the “city of refuge” is no longer simply a set of new attributes or new powers added to a classic and unchanged concept of the city. It is no longer just a question of new predicates to enhance the old subject called “the city”. No, we are dreaming of another concept, another law, another policy for the city.

In France, urban policy has been at the centre of integration policies since the 1990s, but this situation was conceived as the implementation of national policy at the local level, with few international outputs, and without cities being actors of these policies. The arrival of large numbers of refugees, first in 2011 and then with the so called “refugee crisis” of 2015, brought about a significant shift. The questions then arose of the role of cities in affecting the reception of migrants, and of the effects of migrants on the city. These cities have witnessed the emergence of informal practices, significant numbers of residents of irregular status, many cases of passage without settlement, and the continuation of provisional ways of life, together with practices of hospitality from below.

The city is central to the development of migration, since, at the global level, migration is closely related to the increasing urbanisation of the planet (in particular it is predicted that the population of Africa will change from being 70% rural in 1950 to being 70% urban in 2050). Urban residents are generally more educated, more open to new technologies of information and communication, and also more vulnerable to the offers of human smugglers owing to their dream of a future abroad. They may be attracted by global cities, but then effectively come to reside at the margins of those cities. As Saskia Sassen (2014) demonstrates, most poor migrants are effectively excluded from cities, relegated to living in camps (Agier, 2014), border cities, transit zones, slums, or deprived inner-city areas. This process is accelerated by the difficulties that migrants experience in obtaining legal access and status in the course of their travels, leading to the creation of new peripheries which hardly look like cities (such as the camps or “jungles” described by Michel Agier). The sorts of “transit zones” housing “transmigrants” studied by Alain Tarrius (2010) and Anaïk Pian (2009), such as those in Morocco or Calais (the so called “jungle”), are often dismantled but always rebuilt. Border cities such as Tijuana in Mexico or El Paso have also seen the emergence of ghettos, in which communities reconstruct their former ways of life.

5.3.3 Sanctuary Cities and Welcoming Cities

The growth in the role of cities in migration has also led to the emergence of “sanctuary cities” and “welcoming cities”, in which hospitality is conceived in terms of networks of solidarity. Urban actors have diversified themselves. Notable examples include Strasburg, Barcelona, and Palermo, which was named a cosmopolitan city by its mayor Leoluca Orlando. Another case is that of Riace, a town in Puglia in Southern Italy, where the mayor, Domenico Lucano, was prohibited from staying in his own town by the state, and then charged with allowing newly arrived undocumented migrants to work in cooperatives in order to help them to settle and integrate. Grande-Synthe, a suburb of Dunkirk, which was led by its mayor Damien Carême until his election to the European Parliament in 2020, similarly tried to find another way of receiving newcomers, in opposition to the behaviour of some mayors and local authorities. He created the association ANVITA (Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants, which gathers participants from 53 territories). Meanwhile, in Belgium, the “Communes hospitalières” network includes 126 participant towns and villages, and across Europe 747 such “welcoming cities” can be now be found. These endeavours are helped by the emergence of civil society solidarity networks devoted to assisting irregular migrants, focusing on pragmatic solutions to a sensitive multilevel governance issue.

In some cases, efforts to develop cities’ hospitality to newcomers are motivated not only by ethical concerns but also by the desire to create employment in the fields of expertise and the management of associations for migrants, in contexts of nationwide unemployment. This may be funded at the local, national, or European level, and would not be possible without the arrival of newcomers. In Lyons, Nantes, and Strasburg, local authorities have been involved in the development of migration-related city networks. Strasburg was granted the status of “welcoming city” (“ville accueillante”) in 2018, partly thanks to the establishment of a council for long-term settled foreigners. Some cities faced with large refugee flows, such as Grande-Synthe, Saint-Denis (near Paris), Lyon, and Briançon have had to cope with the dismantling of settlements and conflicts between activists devoted to welcoming migrants (who may be prosecuted for “crimes of solidarity”) and the police. Meanwhile, refugees in this context face difficult decisions between staying, going back, or continuing on their journeys. The network of welcoming cities is now a world network, with a global parliament of mayors and 14 networks of refuge towns.

In Germany, some towns played a crucial role in welcoming refugees during the 2015 refugee crisis (Hinger, 2021), either as a complement or as alternatives to actions carried out by the state, with the help of citizens in their homes. These towns and the networks of social relations that they developed became a driving force for improving the governance of immigration. In this federal country, towns exercise some autonomy in implementing integration policies and European recommendations at the local level. With the help of non-profit associations such as Caritas, they participated in resettlement programs for refugees and contributed to opening the labour market to refugees and asylum seekers, in order to avoid them falling into a so-called “duldung” status (in which they are neither granted a legal status, nor expelled), thus separating social issues from the issue of migrants’ legal status. In Berlin, the city subsidised housing for each applicant at a rate of €750 per month. In the city of Halle, the town rented 700 flats for newcomers, as it made a priority of guaranteeing that there was housing for everyone. In this country, immigration was not a principal topic of debate during the elections for a new chancellor after Angela Merkel.

City networks can also include universities, which can facilitate network socialisation through knowledge exchange regarding integration and inclusion. As policy agents, city networks help to formulate and implement immigration and integration policies.

5.3.4 Cities Are New Actors in Transnational Projects

In the Mediterranean region, large cities have created transnational and international networks of knowledge and migration management. Ricard Zapata-Barrero et al. (2017) speak about “the local turn” in migration governance, in which Mediterranean cities acting “from below” have created resilient regional networks. Taking the example of Barcelona, he shows that global cities’ experience of migration settlement has led to opportunities to relocate governance in the Mediterranean region from states to cities (for example, through the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the Charter of Palermo of 2015, and the Palermo/Izmir Partnership) but also to address the management of irregular migration, unaccompanied minors, and asylum seekers. A new way of thinking emerged, based on the construction of networks across the Mediterranean region, and in which cities can be a focus for promoting alternative forms of regional migration governance, while also taking account of the Global Compact Agenda 2030 for sustainable development.

Cities are also developing networks between the Global South and Global North, giving rise to city-based forms of diplomacy and decentralised cooperation, which can avoid the polarisation typical of national debates and conflicts between migrant associations and local elites in the South. These networks also tend to promote goals of human development in preference to the approaches favoured by Western development models. Some examples in Senegal and Mali, facilitated by their diasporas and migrant associations, are focused on achieving autonomy at the local level in preference to the national level, in order to promote local development in regions of emigration and demonstrate good practice (according to UNDP recommendations).

At a larger scale, big cities can also become subjects of international relations when they are involved in facing huge international challenges, such as environment challenges. They take on a global dimension when they are victims of environmental crises and when they become the focus of major international problems. If sea levels continue to rise, many big cities situated at sea level, particularly in Asia, will see larger numbers of environmentally displaced persons and many deaths, primarily among the poorest, who have more limited options for internal mobility within their country (for example, in Dacca, Kolkata, and Mumbai). No internal status exists for environmentally displaced persons, and this fact led Bangladesh to develop, with the support of experts, an approach of soft diplomacy in the UN, aimed at advocating for the future needs of those large cities, even though this approach has not yet yielded obvious benefits (Baillat, 2015). The experience of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is also emblematic in this regard: the poorest stayed in place, owing to a lack of resources, while others left for other regions of the US, although the city made efforts to move parts of its population. The policy response to this disaster involved the national (federal) state, the state of Louisiana, and the city (Gemenne et al., 2016). Multilevel analysis is particularly relevant in such a case.

Networks of large cities are also creating further mobilisations by moving policy-making to different political levels. The rising importance of cities as international actors has had an impact on the Global Compact for Migration at the global level. Cities have also organised themselves through associations and networks involved in knowledge exchange and action aimed at redefining governance, such as through the role of individual mayors as global leaders (for example, at the Mayoral Forum 2014 and the GCM 2018 in Marrakech), through city mobilisation in response to the humanitarian needs of vulnerable migrants, and through agreements between cities as a means of providing channels for inter-state mobility. The impact of migration therefore appears at the local, national, and international level. Migration policy has an influence on various levels of governance, as can be seen, for example, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when coalitions of towns, cities, and nation states emerged to protect the undocumented. Cities and mayors are involved in addressing climate issues, the challenges of urbanisation, the implementation of the GCM, and in facilitating cooperative localism, anti-discrimination practices, and the strengthening of networks (Thouez, 2022). In a context in which traditional actors of civil society have declined – such as trade unions, churches, and even companies – cities are now welcoming migrants, although entry policies remain the remit of nation states. Non-state actors have acquired significant, and sometimes crucial roles thanks to the practice of multilateralism, including the proliferation of partnerships with non-state actors. Thanks to city networking (including contacts between universities, activists, and migrants), horizontal forces are strengthening and developing transnationalism, multilevel forms of governance, knowledge exchange, and new abilities to work in emergency situations.

5.4 Conclusion

The development of migration diplomacy is drawing attention to the role of new actors: emigration countries of the Global South, city networks, transnational mobilisations, diasporic associations, and networks for supporting elites abroad. It is also producing a wide range of outputs: bilateral and multilateral agreements, development policies, dual citizenship agreements, voting rights in countries of origin and of settlement, and remittance policies. In immigration countries, most of these outputs are the result of multilevel decision-making, involving actors from the local to the global level, since migration diplomacy has also been conducted at the global level, through the development of forms of global migration governance.

Some recent examples illustrate the role that migration diplomacy has played, in situations where emigration states have influenced migration management and border policies in the Global North. Just before the closure of borders owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, in January and February 2020, Turkey decided to open its borders with Greece to refugees settled in Turkey, because it considered that, although the EU had paid the funds that it had reluctantly agreed to, the two other conditions demanded by Turkey in the EU/Turkey agreements of 2016 had not been fulfilled: the simplification of visas for Turks travelling to Europe and the re-examination of Turkey’s application to join the EU. Consequently, migrants could freely travel by bus to the Greek border, until the COVID-19 crisis led to the closure of the border and the repatriation of Syrians in Turkey. Another manifestation of the struggle between emigration states and EU Member States was the disagreement between Morocco and Spain in summer 2021: as Spain had received an activist belonging to the Polisario movement (contesting Moroccan settlement of the Western Sahara region inhabited by Sahrawi populations), Morocco retaliated by opening the borders of Ceuta and Melilla to Moroccan migrants wishing to travel to Spain. Perhaps the clearest example of such migration diplomacy is the decision of Belarus to attract Middle Eastern migrants to its border with Poland in winter 2021, as a way of applying pressure on the EU, which had been critical of the country’s government. This attempt to use migrants and refugees as bargaining chips resulted in many people struggling to survive in swamps and snow in the depths of winter, while trying to cross the Polish border and seek refuge.

Another aspect of migration as diplomacy has emerged from the development of a transnational movement of religious diplomacy centred on Islam since the 1980. Although organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood are informal and asymmetric actors in relation to nation states and international geopolitics, Islamic radicalisation has proved to be an influential force in the construction of threats to security, and Islam has been used as a tool in strategies of alliances and conflicts.