The World’s Mayors Want to Change the Conversation on Migration
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Migration is the powder keg of our angry age. Disquiet over influxes of asylum seekers has animated nationalists and nativists on both sides of the Atlantic. An ascendant strain of right-wing politics in Western democracies is rooted in suspicion and resentment of migrants. Outside the West, from Tunisia to India and many countries in between, demagogic leaders grandstand over fears about foreign interlopers.
It’s the main theme of an illiberal zeitgeist. In Austria over the past weekend, the country’s far-right Freedom Party came first in national elections on a strident anti-immigrant platform. Borrowing from rhetoric once only heard among the extremist fringe, it has elevated the idea of “remigration” — the mass deportation of undocumented and even legal migrants — into a central pillar of potential national policy.
In the Anglophone world, home to societies more shaped by migration and multiculturalism, things are turning, too. In Britain, some 66 percent of voters now believe the country has let in too many migrants over the past decade. In Canada, new research shows considerable declines in support for increased migration in what’s been a traditionally welcoming country. And in the United States — where former president Donald Trump echoes calls for remigration to a cheering base — 55 percent of Republicans say increased racial and ethnic diversity is a threat to the country (that figure was 21 percent five years ago), according to CNN, while a majority of Americans believe immigration levels should be decreased, according to Pew.
The U.S. election cycle has produced some of the most garish manifestations of this change in mood. Hysteria and misinformation, amplified by the top of the Republican ticket, about Haitian migrants eating pets drew the small town of Springfield, Ohio, into a national maelstrom, leading to bomb threats, school closures and a surge in racist, anti-Haitian rhetoric.
“It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community,” the city’s mayor Rob Rue, a Republican, told the New York Times. “I am sorry this is going on in our community and that [our Haitian community members] have to endure this type of hate.”
Other municipal leaders concur. “We’re having the wrong conversation on immigration. We’re accepting the premise of the thesis which is that all our problems are because of immigrants or the boats coming from Calais,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told the New Statesman last month, referring to the French port town from where myriad asylum seekers depart hoping to reach Britain. “And I think we’ve got to rebut that. Politicians have got to be bolder and braver at rebutting the misinformation and the disinformation on this.”
Khan is co-chair of an organization called C40 Cities, a network of some 100 cities collaborating together to reckon with the challenges posed by climate change. One of their key concerns is climate-induced migration. They forecast in a recent report that, if current trends hold, some 8 million people displaced by climate change would end up in a sample set of 10 major cities in the Global South.
Last week, along the sidelines of the meetings at the United Nations, a coalition of mayors from around the world came to New York City to trade notes and develop partnerships between their cities, focusing on their shared experiences grappling with the challenge of migrant influxes. “In a moment of toxicity, it’s important to stay pragmatic but also listen to the mayors who are closest to the people,” said Vittoria Zanuso, executive director of the Mayors Migration Council, the New York-based network linking these municipal leaders together. She added that it was important to “challenge this narrative that migration is a crisis simply because our politics is in crisis.”
Carlos Fernando Galán, the mayor of Bogotá and one of the members of this council’s leadership board, pointed to the Colombian capital’s experience. In less than a decade, Bogotá has received roughly a million migrants fleeing the economic collapse of neighboring Venezuela and worked gainfully to not just cope with the influx, but integrate many of the migrants into the city’s communities, schools and public services. This is at a time when Bogotá is also dealing with crippling water shortages thanks to a prolonged drought.
“We’ve done good things, but we still have huge challenges,” he told me last week, gesturing to his hope that a conversation on migration anchored in the needs of cities could help unlock more philanthropic attention and development assistance from international organizations. “We still need help.”
For all the panic of Western nativists, it’s cities in the developing world that arguably are on the real front lines of global migration patterns. Dhaka, Bangladesh, per the estimates of C40, may see 3 million new climate migrants alone by the midway point of the century. The roughly 120 million people currently displaced by conflict and persecution around the world are mostly trapped in war zones and impoverished neighborhoods far from the cities of the West.
“Expanding populations and increasing internal migration will result in 1.6 billion new urban residents worldwide by 2040, and about 80 percent of this urban growth will happen in countries that are least prepared to provide improved living standards,” noted a 2021 assessment put out by the U.S. intelligence community. “Consequently, many new city residents will face endemic poverty and limited access to food, water, and sanitation, increasing motivations to move elsewhere.”
Galán noted how while national leaders can set policy on arrivals and entries, it’s cities that actually have to “manage the implications of migration” and integrate (or fail to integrate) new arrivals into urban life. There are obvious frictions. In Bogotá, concerns have mounted over crime linked to Venezuelan newcomers. But the city’s mayor separates criminality from the simple fact of migration.
“Yes, we have people from Venezuela who commit crimes, but we have many more from Colombia who commit crime,” Galán said, stressing that the myriad new businesses he sees operated by Venezuelans in his city are a mark of the potential boon of migration.
“I see politicians trying to use the situation to advance their political position,” he told me, in a reference to the anti-migrant rhetoric on show in the United States. “But this doesn’t solve the problems we actually have. It doesn’t see the opportunities that we could have.”
