Even in challenging times, cities are progressing with the integration of migrants and refugees, as the latest Eurocities Integrating Cities Report (2022) highlights.

The report finds that local governments actively communicate their commitment to equal opportunities for everyone living in the city and ensure equal access and non-discrimination across their policies. Integration means facilitating engagement from migrant communities and removing barriers to participation, providing equal access to services to which migrants are entitled (e.g. language learning, housing, employment, health, social care and education), and ensuring that migrants’ needs are understood and met by service providers.

Internally, municipalities reflect their urban diversity in the composition of their administrative workforce, ensuring that all staff experience fair treatment and understand and respect the values of diversity and equality. In their relationship with other stakeholders, cities apply principles of equality and diversity in procurement and tendering, promote principles of equality and diversity among their contractors and develop a diverse supplier base.

As policymakers, service providers, employers, and buyers of goods and services, cities are at the forefront in welcoming and integrating migrants. Within the Integrating Cities Framework, Eurocities collaborates in projects that build local capacity and allow cities to exchange in depth on specific aspects of integration and migration. This initiative creates a favourable environment for cities to learn from one another, and to build tools to promote integration and to co-design strategies.

In the EU-funded CONNECTION project, which concluded in 2022, 14 core cities and eight fellow cities worked with other stakeholders to develop best practices on how to create strategic approaches to integration. In addition, seven cities are learning from these interactions in order to implement a new integration policy that brings concrete and immediate benefits to migrants and their receiving communities.

For example, Zagreb developed the very first local strategy for integrating asylum seekers and persons granted international protection in Croatia. Madrid has now developed a new coordination procedure that will soon be integrated into its regular activities. Sofia opened a Bureau for information and services for third-country nationals, a single place where migrants can find information and advice on accessing the labour market.

Dortmund also benefitted from these exchanges, by setting up a one-stop-shop to support the integration of new migrants and refugees, which was based on the approach of Athens.

Another current EU-funded project, UNITES, encourages cities to collaborate with new partners, by adopting a whole society approach. This is to say including stakeholders from non-governmental organisations, migrant-led initiatives and individuals from local communities in policy development. Furthermore, a co-design approach considers migrants to be central protagonists and actors in developing each city’s approach, rather than passive beneficiaries of the strategies. The outcome will contribute to the continual evolution of city learning on integration approaches, by creating an open-access online course to train cities on better approaches to co-design.

What does co-design look like in practice in the cities? Within UNITES, Athens is working on developing a migrant advisory board to identify the needs of migrant communities, setting up a working group for the development of a new integration strategy and making use of community-based work to further develop actions in tandem with migrants.

Zaragoza is working on evaluating its previous local integration strategy, analysing unmet needs and planning towards a new strategy with stakeholders and migrant residents. Another example is Grenoble Alpes Metropolitan Area, which plans to establish the AGORA, a new permanent panel of 12 refugees to advise the metropolitan government on a series of integration issues that will serve as the basis for a feasibility study for a migrant welcome centre or ‘House of Hospitality.’

This daily integration work done by city administrations is closely linked to Eurocities high-level advocacy messages.
Beyond short-term responses in arrivals, there is also a need to provide opportunities to integrate, both in terms of finding employment and connecting newcomers to their new environment. The most recent challenge, the sudden arrival of millions of refugees from Ukraine, is putting additional pressure on a system already under stress, most recently due to the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

European and national level funding is vital for cities’ long-term integration strategies, and to enable them to face this monumental challenge. To build cohesive asylum and migration policies that take account of local realities, cities must also be closely involved in the EU and national responses to receive refugees from Ukraine. Very clearly, cities are at the forefront of managing new arrivals, and are eager to step up their contributions to European and national responses. The knowledge and practical experience offered by cities to policy development in the reception of asylum seekers and the organisation between cities to share information and know-how can provide a path to better manage Europe’s ongoing migration challenges.

As open, multicultural places, cities call for a non-discriminatory approach for all refugees in Europe, regardless of their origins and identity, no matter the colour of their skin, their gender, sexual orientation or religion. At local level this is also something that cities continue to work on.