The sanctuary of

After every humanitarian crisis that leaves citizens displaced, the spotlight usually pans to discussions around supporting refugees at a national level and almost always overlooks the significant role local government plays.

The topic of refugees tends to focus on national level responsibilities like border issues, visa regimes, and immediate support while dismissing the fact that refugees, asylum seekers and internationally displaced persons (IDPs) settle in specific places. Local authorities in those places shoulder the core responsibility of providing crucial services like housing, education, employment, healthcare, language learning and general community integration and wellbeing. For urban municipalities, large influxes of migrants can make the scale of delivering support to hugely varied and diverse populations a key challenge. For smaller or more rural communities, the disruption of previously homogenous populations can cause tensions, while being unaccustomed to swift demographic change may highlight cracks in service provisions. But more often than not, local authorities are happy to try stepping up to the opportunities and challenges that larger waves of immigration bring. The international Mayors Migration Council say they stand ready to welcome refugees while calling on national governments to ‘urgently work with the global network of city leaders’ to expand pathways and provide humanitarian support.

In the USA, over 100 cities have declared themselves ‘sanctuary cities’ – a well-established form of local immigration policy whereby municipalities create a set of policy conditions to improve the precarious situation of irregular migrants. They are particularly effective at doing so thanks to US local governments not being obliged to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In other governance structures, municipalities can still deploy a range of policies and services to support migrants, in some cases challenging or countering the national stance on immigration.

A Viennese project, called the Centre of Refugee Empowerment, sought to address two challenges unique to integrating asylum seekers. One was that various areas of responsibility for helping refugees were splintered among public agencies, often working in incompatible ways. The other was to adapt the services available to the individual circumstances of migrants. Language classes, for example, would need to be more intensive but also free, while skills training has to be tailored to restrictions on asylum seekers’ access to work. In one initiative, a competence check usually used to place people in work was instead used to identify a group of primarily Syrian teachers. Instead of being given a job where they would be underemployed, they were given specific training on the Austrian school system and then given places in schools as supporting teachers –more greatly benefiting the city as well as the individuals.