"Local responses to migrants with precarious residence status in Europe" - a joint project of the University of Applied Sciences Fulda, the University of Oxford and the Vienna University of Technology.
On 1 and 2 September 2022, around 50 people - including employees of various city administrations and NGOs, including social workers and academics - took part in the final conference of the research project "Local Responses to Precarious Migrants. Frames, Strategies and Evolving Practices" (project leader Prof. Dr. Ilker Ataç from Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Dr. Sarah Spencer from Oxford University and Prof. Dr. Simon Güntner from Vienna University of Technology).
The conference was opened with greetings from Prof. Dr. Ilker Ataç from Fulda University of Applied Sciences, the Deputy Head of the Frankfurt Health Department Dr. Antoni Walczok and Jacqueline Broadhead from the Centre on Migration, Policy & Society at Oxford University. Following this, Marie Mallet-Garcia (University of Oxford), Adrienne Homberger (Vienna University of Technology) and Maren Kirchhoff (Fulda University of Applied Sciences) presented the key findings of the comparative project. This and the cooperation within the LoReMi project were then reflected by the municipal cooperation partners - Dr Petra Tiarks-Jungk and Sarah Alexandra Lang (Humanitarian Services, Health Department, Frankfurt), Sîan Sander (Cohesion and Community Engagement Manager, Cardiff) and Shams Asadi (Human Rights Officer, Vienna).
In the afternoon, Jan Braat, Chair of the European Cities Network C-MISE, and Rossella Nicoletti, Project Coordinator for Migration and Integration at Eurocities, commented on the results and pointed out that the challenges presented could also be found in other European cities. They underlined the advantages of appropriate translocal networking. Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann (ETH Zurich) and Norbert Cyrus (Viadrina University Frankfurt Oder) discussed the agenda for future research from a scientific perspective. The official part of the first conference day ended with an input from the Mayor of Frankfurt, Dr Eskandari-Grünberg, who underlined the importance of the topic for Frankfurt and thanked the project team for their work.
The second day of the conference was opened by Prof. Dr. Simon Güntner (TU Vienna), who presented some concrete policy recommendations. Among other things, he emphasised the need for information on rights that exist regardless of residence status and the centrality of freely accessible legal advice to enforce existing rights. Virginia Wangare-Greiner (Maisha - Association of African Women in Germany), Doris Peschke (Diakonie Hessen) and Michele LeVoy (Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants) then discussed which policy measures could be an answer to the diagnosed problems in access to social services. In particular, they stressed the importance of firewalls to ensure that access to benefits is not limited by the fear of consequences under residence law.
Following inputs from Koen Van Rompaey, from the Belgian Federal Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers and Voluntary Return (FEDASIL) and Dr. iur. Katerina Dimitrakopoulou, Head of the Integration Sector of the European Commission, national responses and possible actions of the European Commission in this field were discussed. Jacqueline Broadhead closed the event. She spoke in favour of comprehensive urban approaches. In the long term, the way of thinking and talking about migrants with uncertain residence status must also be changed. They should be recognised and addressed as future citizens of the city.
The project results and reports can (in future) be accessed online at: https://www.hs-fulda.de/sozialwesen/forschung/sozialer-raum-sozialstrukturanalyse/loremi or https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/loremi/
