Very often, migrants don’t know much of their rights and/or have little capacity to enforce them. They are quite frequently “lost in translation”, especially in the early years of their local experience. The details of key bureaucratic procedures are often onscure to those who have little acquaintance with the new language or little literacy, and have a very modest knowledge and awareness of their rights and duties in the hosting countries and cities: they don’t know how to access existing services (be they dedicated to immigrants or universal, open to all citizens). Language courses, education opportunities, housing solutions, healthcare and social assistance services, family supports (as, for example, family reunion) and insertion in the job market can be inaccessible (and related rights denied) if communication and interaction with institutions are not clear, especially for the most vulnerable groups of migrants.
Cities that attract or lure migrants in large numbers, also bear many difficulties and conflicts attached to integration processes while their leeway of action is constrained. So, municipal authorities and other local government bodies play a decisive role in building inclusion as well as exclusion patterns by simply facilitating or making more complex “acts of citizenship”, being they the outcomes of discretionary decisions or just complying implementations of mandatory national or supranational administrative procedures. Moreover, superimposed regulations and the existence of margins of ‘manoeuvre’ at the local level contribute to differentiate the concrete “pathways of migrants incorporation” and to create new and substantial gaps between the dimensions of citizenship and integration.
The objective of EASYRIGHTS has been to develop co-creation eco-systems in which actors belonging to the local governance system can cooperate in increasing the quantity and quality of public (welfare) services available to immigrants. The specific aims have been to improve the personalisation and contextualisation levels, empower the prospective beneficiaries of existing services in getting better access and fruition opportunities, and to engage Quadruple Helix stakeholders in joint, purposeful co-creation efforts, facilitated by the use of hackathons. An easyRights "agent" - with the twin meaning of “aggregation of local stakeholders” and “collection of online and offline tools” - has been developed and deployed in four pilot locations (Birmingham, Larissa, Palermo and Malaga). In so doing, easyRights has created promising opportunities to support immigrants in their search for responses to different needs, making them more autonomous - at least to some extent - from discretionary street level bureaucracies, saving time for both migrants and for social service staff and cutting costs for the public administration.
