Project description
Understanding municipal responses to precarious migrants
The increasing number of migrants assigned a precarious legal status creates challenges for city governments. While some municipalities strictly enforce national laws, others adopt flexible measures. This raises questions about how cities justify their responses and the effectiveness of these initiatives. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MITIGATE project will compare London, Milan, and San Francisco, each with distinct political contexts and policy traditions. The project will conduct expert surveys and in-depth interviews with local officials, NGOs, and precarious migrants, using grounded theory and qualitative comparative analysis. The project will analyse municipal responses to precarious migrants and identify the factors that influence them, thereby developing an empirical framework for understanding urban strategies across different governance levels.
Objective
The growing presence of migrants with precarious legal status—defined as individuals lacking secure residency or at risk of losing it—presents operational challenges for city governments. Legal restrictions often exclude this population from essential services such as welfare, healthcare, and formal employment. These exclusions may, in turn, affect cities' ability to address broader priorities including public health, homelessness, and safety.
While some municipalities comply strictly with national mandates, others interpret legal frameworks more flexibly, implementing local initiatives such as municipal ID cards. These practices raise key questions about governance within constraint: How do municipalities conceptualize and justify their responses to precarious migration? What concrete measures are adopted, and to what extent do they reflect intentional strategies? What tensions or gaps exist between intended and actual outcomes?
MITIGATE addresses these questions through a comparative, interdisciplinary study of three global cities—London, Milan, and San Francisco—that vary in institutional context, political orientation, and policy traditions. Using a mixed-methods design, the project combines expert surveys, in-depth interviews with local officials, NGOs, and precarious migrants, grounded theory, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The objective is to analyze municipal responses in their political and institutional contexts and identify conditions that shape them.
Rather than advancing a prescriptive model, MITIGATE seeks to build an empirically grounded framework for analyzing urban strategies toward precarious migrants across governance levels. By focusing on how city actors navigate constraints and opportunities, the project contributes to scholarship on multi-level governance, migration policy, and urban diplomacy, while offering analytical tools to understand local variations in practice.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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50014 Fiesole
Italy
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