La Chaire de recherche du Canada sur les dynamiques migratoires mondiales, conjointement avec l’ÉRIQA, vous invite à une présentation en anglais par la professeure Felicitas Hillmann de l’Université technique de Berlin (TUBerlin). Cette présentation se déroulera en mode hybride le mardi 13 février prochain. Vous pouvez y assister en personne à la salle 2376 du pavillon Kruger de l’Université Laval à Québec ou en ligne sur Zoom en cliquant ici.

With the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Ukraine to Germany, many municipalities signalled that they were overburdened with the integration of even more people into their social infrastructure and into already tensed housing markets. Towns and cities expressed that felt left alone by federal policies. This development points to salient contradictory practises in migration governance. For many years those contradictions had been spelled out mainly on the local level. Yet, negotiations on how cities possibly can deal with various types of migration, stretch beyond scales and levels. In a way, they increasingly tend to perforate multi-level governance with practises by civil society stakeholders as well as privately organised migration industries. Interviews with mayors and experts in the settlement sector in the state Brandenburg on their role when Syrian refugees arrived in 2015 – 2017 suggest that their position was somewhat transformed into becoming “glocal bureaucrats” – intermediating between the local population, the refugees and administration. My talk presents conceptual work on the changing role of cities within migration governance and in its second part presents the findings on how the role of mayors in an East German state, Brandenburg, in the years 2015 – 2017 transformed and indicates such perforation of scales and levels. The discussion will allow for a comparative discussion on the situation in Germany and Canada.