Contentious migration policies: dynamics of urban governance and social movement outcomes in Milan and Barcelona

Local governments—of large cities especially—enact policies that crucially affect the daily life of immigrants. Migration policy-making has proliferated across cities of the Global North—and so did its own contestation. The urban environment is, in fact, a fertile breed-ing ground for the flourishing of activist networks by and in solidarity with immigrants. Yet, research on social movement outcomes in the field of migration has been lagging behind. This thesis is aimed to theorize how and under what conditions pro-immigrant activists can affect policy-making at the city-level and beyond. By adopting a strategic-interaction and mechanisms-based approach to the study of contentious politics, the research con-tends and demonstrates that movements can rely on strategic leverages within three arenas of interaction. First, brokerage mechanisms are essential to the emergence of a social movement in the civil society arena. The peculiar qualities of urban spaces—notably, the availability of dense relational networks extended over an array of geographical scales—allow immigrants to create bonds of solidarity, craft alliances, and ultimately turn into vo-cal political subjects. Second, alliance-building mechanisms in the city politics arena have to be activated. Within a propitious political environment (e.g., ideologically sympathetic po-litical elites) activists are able to build potent pro-immigrant coalitions. Once crafted, these alliances can activate upscaling mechanisms to shape policy-making in the multi-level govern-ance arena. Such mechanisms reinforce and concatenate with one another in recurrent fash-ions, producing policy outcomes far beyond the immediate local contexts in which mobi-lization occurs. Yet, a plethora of dilemmas and contradictions are likely to arise, too. The study compares three contentious policy realms—exclusionary policies, policies in support of undocumented immigrants, and asylum policies—so as to assess similarities and dis-similarities across social movement outcomes. Empirically, it focuses on policies enacted in two large South European cities, Milan and Barcelona. Results are drawn from fieldwork carried out in 2017-19 and entailing 57 interviews. In addition, policy documents, media outlets, and the secondary literature have been extensively analyzed.