Localising migration governance: The case for cities as governance actors
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Camille Mackler
In the summer of 2022, as buses carrying migrants began arriving in New York from Texas and Arizona, advocates gathered to think ahead. The consensus was immediate: cities needed both rapid response and long-term infrastructure. What followed was rapid response only. Several years later, with a hostile federal administration accelerating enforcement and cutting funding, New York found itself rebuilding from scratch because it had never built anything designed to last.
That story is not unique to New York. Across the Americas, cities absorb the consequences of migration policy decisions they did not make, using systems they were never given the resources or authority to build. When those systems strain, the failure is treated as local, even when its causes are not.
Migration is governed nationally but lived locally. National governments determine who may enter and under what status. Cities determine whether those decisions become schools, housing, healthcare, legal services and, ultimately, belonging. Yet the places where migration is experienced most directly remain largely outside the systems that govern it. Bogotá, Montréal and New York illustrate that tension in three very different ways.
Bogotá is perhaps the clearest example. Under Mayor Claudia López, the city built an innovative response to the arrival of more than 600,000 “New Bogotans” from varied migration flows. It established an intersectoral commission bringing together 15 city secretariats, opened Intégrate centres close to migrant communities, and worked to ensure that Colombia’s Temporary Protection Permit translated into meaningful access to local services. The national government recognised migrants on paper. Bogotá made that recognition mean something on the ground.
In October 2023, the city went further, adopting a 12-year Public Policy of Reception, Inclusion and Development for New Bogotans, backed by a planned investment of COP 2.8 trillion. That commitment has survived a change in administration. Mayor Carlos Fernando Galán has continued the same approach, demonstrating that Bogotá’s migration strategy has become a municipal commitment rather than one mayor’s project. But Bogotá also exposes the limits of local leadership. The city can build institutions, co-ordinate services and invest in inclusion. It cannot change the national funding formula to reflect the population it actually serves. It can build the architecture. It cannot make the national government pay for it.
Montréal presents a different version of the same problem. Québec is often held up as the leading example of devolved immigration governance in North America. Under the 1991 Canada–Québec Accord, the province has unusually broad authority to set immigration levels, select economic immigrants, select resettled refugees jointly with the federal government, and deliver settlement and integration services. But that authority stops at the provincial level. Montréal, which has historically received nearly 70 percent of Québec’s new arrivals, has no formal role in the bilateral decision-making structure.
When municipal leaders challenge provincial immigration policy, they do so from outside the governance framework rather than within it. In February 2026, Montréal and Québec City issued a rare joint statement urging Québec to preserve access to a now-discontinued permanent-residence pathway. The city responsible for welcoming and integrating most newcomers could advocate. It could not decide.
New York illustrates a third model. Over the past decade, the city and state have pioneered assigned counsel for detained immigrants, community-based legal services, and representation for children. These programmes changed lives, but most emerged in response to specific political moments rather than as long-term investments in migration governance. When federal policy shifted again, New York found itself rebuilding rather than building forward. The cycle repeated because cities were expected to carry responsibility without the authority or sustained investment to match. The City Comptroller’s 2025 report documents both the recent federal cuts to children’s representation and the elimination or retrenchment of several city legal-services programmes.
That same tension is visible at the regional level. The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, launched in 2022, and the Denver Declaration, adopted at the Cities Summit of the Americas the following year, reflected an effort to build a more co-ordinated hemispheric response while recognising that cities are central to whether migration policy succeeds.
Yet neither fundamentally changed the role cities play within migration governance. Mayors can commit to belonging. They cannot, on their own, create legal pathways, redesign asylum systems or secure the resources needed to make those commitments durable. The declarations recognised municipal leadership without fully incorporating it into the governance structures they envisioned. More than 50 mayors and civic representatives signed the Denver Declaration on City Priorities for Regional Cooperation, which expressly included migration among its shared priorities.
What is emerging, slowly and without a common vocabulary, is a movement of cities claiming a governance role of their own. Bogotá did not wait for the national government to design a municipal integration strategy. New York did not wait for federal permission to fund legal representation. Across the Americas, cities have been building migration governance long before formal frameworks recognised what they were doing.
The principle at stake is subsidiarity: decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people they affect. Recognising cities as governance actors is not a challenge to national sovereignty. It is an acknowledgement of where migration governance is already happening. Regional frameworks should reflect that reality by giving cities formal governance roles, dedicated funding and a seat at the table.
Migration has always been local. Our governance frameworks have yet to catch up.
Camille Mackler
Camille is the founder and principal of The Other 54 Strategies, an immigration and national security consulting practice specialising in local immigration policy and the translation of federal policy into municipal and state-level implementation. A licensed immigration attorney with twenty years of experience, Mackler has led crisis response at every major inflection point in US immigration policy over the past decade, from the Muslim Travel Ban to Afghan resettlement to the asylum crisis at the southern border. She is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Truman Center for National Policy. Website: theother54.com
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