Introduction

Immigration in France and Italy, whether referring to foreign workers, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants or reunification of family members, has stood out as a key object of political contention and policy intervention throughout the 2000s. In both countries, this has been a decade characterised by the political predominance of the right over the left. Immigration has gained high salience, with major developments in terms of policy interventions and debates about enforcement of border controls, threats to national identity, human rights, international security and religious extremism among others. In this chapter, we aim to provide a detailed analysis of relevant policy processes in the two countries by focusing on the urban level. Our case studies are the cities of Paris, Lyon, Rome and Milan.

It is not only demographic reasons that make the inclusion of cities an important step in our research. The main point is that metropolitan policymaking often stands out as having some degree of autonomy in the field of immigration. For example, it may facilitate access of immigrants’ associations to policymaking; it may create specific consultative structures to foster contact between local government and the migrant population. In so doing, metropolitan policymaking may alter the configuration of institutional provisions and policies that would otherwise be indistinguishable across a whole country, and have a profound effect on migrants’ experiences of integration (see Chapter Eleven, this volume).

In particular, we aim to assess the extent to which actions of policymakers in our cities stand out as an autonomous force vis-à-vis the constraints of laws and institutional arrangements that are already in place, most often at the national level. Our analysis thus draws on a number of studies that, since the path-breaking work of Eisinger (1973), have emphasised the explanatory role of contextual environments and ‘political opportunities’ at the intersection of the urban and the national level of policymaking. We believe that the inclusion of the urban level is necessary to complement other approaches that have either tackled divergence and/or convergence of national models of citizenship (Ireland, 1994; Koopmans and Statham, 1999; Joppke, 2007) or have alternatively focused beyond the national level (Geddes, 2000; Guiraudon, 2001).