WORLD MIGRATION REPORT 2015 Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility
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HIGHLIGHTS • New and innovative policies are needed to meet the biggest challenges facing urban governance today of ensuring adequate infrastructure and service delivery to diverse and growing populations. Migration and how it is governed is thus at the frontline of urban planning and sustainable development. • Fragmentation of policy between the national and local level is a key challenge when it comes to managing migration in cities. Central government is responsible for setting overall migration policy but this often does not factor in the impacts of migration at the local level in terms of pressures on housing, jobs and services, the domain of city level administrations. Any major disjuncture between central migration policies and local urban development plans and capacities exists mainly in the area of finance. • Some cities in high-income countries are proactively developing their own plans for integration to the extent that they have the autonomy to do so. Good examples of efforts to build institutional structures to promote social cohesion can be found in numerous cities around the world. Partnerships with migrants and migrant associations are key. Notably, city administrations in low- and middle-income countries do not have the resources to institute similar measures. • Migrants can play a role as city-makers, helping their adopted cities achieve a global profile by promoting the historical, cultural, religious and socioeconomic facets, providing the right opportunities exist to enable this to happen.
June J.H. Lee