Given South Africa's renewed internal migration conflicts in May of 2026, we are making available this chapter from Skylines: the modern urban conflict manual on the role of migration conflicts in modern urban conflicts, and the options and practical solutions available to our political and city management leaders.
Published by courtesy of Paradigm Media
(c) Andre Vlok (2025)
CHAPTER 21: THE ROLE OF MIGRATION IN OUR URBAN CONFLICTS
They considered themselves free and no one will ever be free as long as there is plague, petilence and famine.
Albert Camus(from “The Plague”)
Anyone who thinks that the only lesson to be learned was the need to improve what we were already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality.
Pope Francis(from “Fratelli Tutti”)
So there is something I would like to know before I go. If it is not too late, with the barbarian at the gate.
J.M. Coetzee(from “Waiting for the Barbarians”)
Migration as conflict cause – global assessment and best practices – its role in the shaping of modern urban conflicts
As with several other topics in this book so far, we can study the conflict cause and become proficient in managing it, without the necessity to hold a particular political view, or any political view at all. In any given city the political, economic and migration realities will dictate its own good and bad conflict strategies, and these challenges can be met without the limitations of any specific political view.
Experience will show that such political views, other than those logically following or demanding focus in a particular political administration, can easily become obstacles in effective urban conflict management, especially where the best conflict strategy in a given scenario may be contrary to a strategy required or indicated by a specific political worldview.
Of course, having and giving expression to a passionately-held political view can also be productively accommodated in modern conflict management. Neither preference needs to hold us back in our work.
Are Coetzee’s “barbarians at the gate”? Statistics differ from country to country, with the US and many parts of Europe having debates about the extent to which immigration should be allowed.
Many political campaigns in these countries, with maybe the Trump 2024 election victory being the best example, certainly supports the importance of the immigration debate in the popular mind. How does perception, regardless of objective facts, play out in the identity conflicts that we discussed earlier? In December 2024, for example, Argentina’s Javier Milei announced a range of drastic new immigration policies, from the cessation of free healthcare for foreigners, to the automatic deportation of criminals, and many other stringent regulations. A month later the second Trump administration implemented sweeping immigration controls, with Tom Homan and ICE being given extensive powers to arrest and deport migrants across a wide spectrum of causes.
In South Africa, the immigration debate has been developing for years, with this now forming an ever-increasingly part of public debate and social media rhetoric.
Agree with him or not, Douglas Murray (in his “The War on the West, HarperCollins, 2022) states the position of the migration sceptic rather succinctly when he says:
As I stood on the shores of the Greek and Italian islands, watching the boats come in and mingling in the migrant camps that sprang up in major cities, I saw up close the consequences of the developing world moving into the developed world. I never blamed any migrant for wanting to make that journey. I had been to many of the countries from which the migrants were fleeing. Whether the migrants were fleeing war or (as in the majority of cases) economic deprivation, they were doing something that was very understandable. What I had a problem with was why the Europeans were allowing this to happen and why they were expected to abolish themselves in order to survive. People talked of Europe’s having a historic debt that legitimized this movement. But even those who argued this failed to address where the limit to this movement was. Would there ever be a moment when this Western “debt” would be repaid?
Referring to the Biblical reference to “angels unawares”, I have written on some of the conflict realities of the migration debates. The 2022 article can be accessed here:
OPINION | Andre Vlok: Is our approach to immigration justified or xenophobic? | News24
From our specialized viewpoint of looking at migration conflicts as they manifest in urban environments, we need not follow the line of causation of why these movements of people happen in the first place too far upstream.
As city administration political leaders and conflict team members, we need to focus on what lies before us, and what can be done within the parameters of our city and its prevailing conflict dynamics. These conflicts are often also managed, at least as far as policy is concerned, by national and even global considerations, and here urban influence in a specific migrant-related conflict can be very limited. It is nevertheless of interest, and potential conflict policy value, to be aware of some of these forces shaping the conflicts that end up on our doorsteps.
Karachi, as an illustrative example of an urban environment often beset by migrant conflicts, seems to suffer from conflicts in part created by migration from existing localised Afghanistan conflicts. Sobia Ahmad Kaker, in Kaldor 133, says this:
Although the theaters of conflict lie in Afghanistan and the tribal frontier regions across the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, the ongoing conflict and related displacement of populations from the region has deeply affected urban life and security in Karachi.
Can we then really say, with this example before us, that these larger conflict forces, seemingly so totally out of our control and jurisdictions, can be disregarded and ignored, or should we continue to ask questions and obtain potentially relevant data about the migration crises we are dealing with? I suggest that the latter is clearly the superior option, even if it is only applied in an occasional and limited way.
While we are contemplating Karachi as an important case study, the earlier lessons about the value and importance of working with correctly assessed conflict causes again comes to our service. Immigration conflicts contain, nearly invariably, a high concentration of complex and combustible conflict causes and interlinked potential further conflicts, depending on how those already manifested are managed. The resultant melting pot of conflict causes and outcomes is well summarized (on 134):
With the arrival of these actors, conflict among various ethno-political-criminal gangs has intensified, and the number of felonious activities that victimize ordinary Karachiites has spread across the city. Irrespective of where they live, work, or circulate, Karachiites live under the constant threat of extortion, armed robberies, kidnapping for ransom, muggings, and vehicle snatching. Added to this, citizens are increasingly frightened by the relentless terrorist attacks that target government and military offices, foreign consulates, luxury hotels, and busy shopping districts within the administrative districts of Saddar Town and Clifton Cantonment (Yusuf 2012; Anis, Anthony, and Mangi 2014). Against this background Karachi has gained notoriety as “one of the most dangerous cities in the world.(Khan 2013; Magnier 2013)
This brief passage contains a list of manifested urban conflicts and criminal events that would be very familiar to those involved in urban conflict. We also note the cascading of further conflicts, making our future work more difficult with how early and accurately we assess and then manage these conflict causes, related as they are here to immigration. This is an example, to emphasize one such implication, of a new military urbanism, where cities not part of formal war zones, nevertheless develop security systems based on military lines and practices.
The immigration battles (it feels rather coy to refer to them as debates at this stage) in Europe have, in many instances, taken on a very distinct focus, changing from vague complaints about numbers and resources to a pointed objection to one specific dynamic: Islam. In early 2025, and not for the first time, Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, complained of the “Islamization of Europe”, and the “problems of compatibility” between Islamic and European cultures. As with Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission (“Submission”), much of the urban conflict here may be experienced as an erosion of existing values and lifestyles of the incumbent society, a slow ideological transformation that may be as difficult an urban conflict to deal with as something more sudden, more exact, such as public violence or protests.Cities where this type of narrative around Islamization are meaningful actual or potential urban conflicts should note that, in an operational sense, this particular conflict can be seen as two very interlaced conflict causes.
The causes and triggers, strategies and solutions of a general immigration conflict in a city is complex enough, and requires a very specific level of conflict knowledge and experience. The Islamic question, at the level that we have referred to above, is not just an instance of more immigration conflict, it is immigration conflict with a very specific added dimension, an urban conflict where extremely powerful identity conflicts, religious, cultural and, to some, existential drivers come into play, and it would be an egregious error to approach this specialised form of urban conflict as one running solely on numbers and settlement patterns.
What then distinguishes one city, with a large Muslim community, peacefully and productively integrated with the rest of that city, from one where this specific component – the religious and cultural identity of some of the citizens of that city – becomes an actual conflict cause? This is the task of the conflict team and the city’s leaders, to find the conflict causes and to implement the solution, using the tools that we have discussed.
Zeke Hernandez, in his book The Truth About Immigration, provides clarity in these modern, complex urban conflicts either by way of inspiring our agreement, or by virtue of how we can reasonably disagree with his arguments and conclusions, all of which we should be getting used to in the pursuance of our urban conflict competencies.
He is a rather eloquent proponent of immigration and a relatively free flow of people, laying heavy emphasis on the benefits that immigrants bring to the local society. An example of his reasoning would be this:
But with all due respect for the idealism and morality of the victim argument, it’s weak. It tells people that immigration is good for immigrants, but it doesn’t tell them how much natives benefit from it as well. The villain argument is more effective, albeit factually wrong, because it makes a case for how immigration directly affects the native-born. It causes outrage and mobilizes voters.(Hernandez 4)His arguments are characteristically and ostensibly heavily driven by facts, charts and figures, seeking to base these arguments in a scientific foundation, from which these arguments then seek to take on a nearly axiomatic weight and invincibility. Simply put, the evidence shows that without immigration we would have a “swamp society” that stagnates because it lacks inflows of novel ideas, talent, motivation, and investment. Immigration ensures that we live in a “lake society” with a healthy renewal of those critical inputs.(Hernandez 5)
From these facts-based arguments, Hernandez then seeks to draw general and universally binding guidelines for immigration debates. It is in the process of these reaches that he runs into fatal headwinds, in my view.
While most of his applied facts relate to the US, and even though a lot of those arguments in themselves are open to debate in their own right and at face value, these lines simply cannot be drawn further than, at best, localised value for certain US cities. To use examples of immigrants who landed in the US and went on to invent important societal boons, or created start-ups employing thousands of people, his arguments based on investments, and so on is simply disingenuous at worst and misleading at best.
These examples, potentially inspiring as they may be, simply do not become universally applicable, as a comparative study of migration patterns in Johannesburg or Berlin, as examples, may show.
This type of argument is obviously generally true, and always valuable, but a specific city will have to design a very specific immigration policy, at least as part of its conflict program, taking on board all local facts, nuances and solutions. The Hernandez volume can certainly be recommended as is, as a block of work and statistics that really make the case well for liberal immigration policies and their benefits, or at least it may put the brakes on the victim- or fear-based arguments that are often equally tilted towards an unrealistic assessment of these conflicts.
A simplified and theoretical argument that should feature in our urban conflict considerations and policies is the seemingly attractive line that more people equal more consumption, which in turn equals more opportunity, more work, more markets and so on.
The consumption argument seems a sound argument, regardless of global location, but as this debate in places like South Africa have come to show, it is a potentially simplistic argument, loaded with a list of assumptions that may not materialize, such as the question as to whether more people really turn into more productivity and opportunity, or whether more people just add an immense burden on already overstrained resources and services, not to mention the limited employment market.
Here again, as with several earlier topics, we note that the primary object of the chapter is not really to argue pro- or anti-immigration positions. Strategies and policy decisions will depend on specifics, on perceptions, on political mandates. In working with examples of these arguments however, we build confidence in our understanding of the nuances of these intricacies, we become comfortable with some of the known debates and arguments, and we can start applying, with necessary modifications, these arguments and conflict experiences to our actual work.
The observant reader would have already noticed how, for example, our knowledge of identity conflicts become invaluable when dealing with immigration urban conflicts, with the movement and housing of people, with the range of socio-economic conflicts that are generated by these immigration realities. Even a cursory study of the various urban immigration debates and global experiences will show that there are no universally and absolutely compelling and globally applicable arguments, and that these conflicts will remain.It remains the responsibility of urban leadership to craft the best immigration conflict policies and action plans on the ground, as applicable to a specific urban environment.
The city administration will have to, as we have seen earlier, notice and resolve the tensions between objective facts and lived experiences in a community, and work with those tensions as we have discussed earlier.
Are immigrants really “stealing jobs” in that area, what positive contributions do they make, what negative contributions, are they really disproportionally contributing to local crime, are there valuable distinctions to be made between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants in a community and so on.
These tailor-made strategies that we design and work with, may find some practical assistance from Hernandez, who handily divides the debate into an economic and a social division. This can be a very practical handle on an existing immigration conflict in a particular urban area, especially when it may be difficult to know where best to start the intervention.
Senior leadership often oversimplifies the immigration conflict debate with a tacit or express argument running along the lines that “solve the crime in the area, and the economics will solve itself”. This seems to be practical rule of thumb and order of preference, especially when limited resources must be applied and publicly accounted for.
But that oversimplification can also lead to a complete mischaracterization of the problem at hand, with consequential errors in conflict management that then have to flow from getting that first assessment wrong. So we find, for example, as far as crime and migrant communities in the US are concerned, that:A synthesis of fifty-one different studies covering the period 1994–2014 concluded that immigration does not contribute to crime; if anything, it slightly reduces it. Note that this also applies to undocumented immigrants.(Hernandez 164)
Our abovementioned crime and then business mantra would have been utterly wrong, as strategy and as objective reality management. The various operational challenges that may arise between national and local, urban migration policies and interpretations, legislation and litigation, changes in local city administrations or staff, and other practical conflict considerations often make this a difficult urban conflict to get a practical and sustainable handle on for city leadership. In general, one wants an effective and enduring policy that extends beyond the vicissitudes of political winds of fortune, but at the same time being dynamic and flexible to deal with often rapidly changing migration events.
This is, in a nutshell, the challenge for political and other city management teams. There are simply too many variables to really even attempt a one-size-fits-all conflict approach in this category, and attempts to do so often end up as being either more constrictive or more useless in practice than the more dynamic approach.
Using the conflict principles we have studied here, we are in a position to effectively deal with a city where migrants are streaming into the city, or where migrant crime is a problem, or where more migrants should be encouraged to settle, and so on.We will return to conflict considerations for an effective urban conflict policy as regards this important topic, but I have found that a solid grounding in several of the current urban migration conflict topics and debates serve as a helpful place to start deliberations from, and it often comes in handy in the midst of complex conflict that deal with these considerations.
That is really then the main practical use of this chapter, to familiarize ourselves with some of these issues and ways of thinking about these issues in ways that can later on prove to be of value to our own, more specific work. As is so often the case with complex conflict work, the right questions often prove to lead to the rights answers.
Our earlier work with conflict causes would have shown us how a conflict cause further upstream becomes the problem of the urban management team. It is easy, understandable and tempting to avoid these questions, and to simply deal with urban conflicts as and when they materialize. This is often our only option in any event, due to budget constraints, political realities and so on, but it is nevertheless our duty to consider earlier interventions, predictive conflict work and, at the very least, to have this knowledge available and updated in order to be aware of our options, even though all of them may not be available to us at a particular time.
These reflections reiterate and emphasize the conflict management reality that urban conflict manifestations have a multitude of influences and causes, and even the most conservative or anti-migration stance should take heed of these causes. These debates and assessments are often mistaken for a legal-type argument to bring about a better understanding of such conduct or events, to influence sanctions and policies, and of course, to an extent that they may well be. But when we deal with advanced conflict work such as this, our better and more valuable focus is to obtain relevant data, study and implement such causative factors not as mitigation, but as predictive and management tools.
We need to approach conflicts like these as problem-solving projects, with the best interests of the city, taking every relevant dynamic into consideration, as our goal. Once this is practiced, the normal political and socio-economic considerations and debate points become easier to manage.
A few practical examples and case studies may illustrate these strategic benefits available to us. Migration is often a traumatic process, before and during the time a person, family or group come to our attention. Migration itself can have effects and influences on the children and gender aspects of conflict, as the following passage shows:
Factors pushing children from their homes remain understudied, but those identified include poverty and loss of family members due to HIV/AIDS (Chiliya, Masocha, & Zindiye, 2012; Save the Children, 2008; Save the Children Norway Zimbabwe, 2010). In Peru, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe, the internal migration of children from depressed rural areas to urban slum communities contributes to rapid urbanization and a host of challenges for newly settled families and children (Anderson, 2016; Bray & Dawes, 2016; Rushing, Watts, & Rushing, 2005). Migration can also be gendered: in Peru and Viet Nam the “feminization” of migration is well documented evidenced by women seeking livelihoods both abroad and within national borders(Balvin 314-315)
Should a modern conflict program simply accept the arrival of that package of existing and potential conflict causes, or would early intervention, awareness, dialogue, focused aid programs and so on have a beneficial impact on some of those later conflicts? Immigrant integration should be an important part of any modern urban conflict strategy and policy, especially as so much early good work can be achieved at the source of future conflicts. So we see that
…ethnic tensions and conflict have been a major concern in the urban policies of several European cities over the last two decades...(Pastore 8)
Early interventions, and programs alert to that possibility, provide the city with a range of conflict tools and benefits. It hands the conflict team options and solutions that may very well disappear once the situation has settled down, escalated or other conflict dynamics have started taking control.
This hopefully inspires us to see the value of such early work, an early warning system that I would argue is very difficult to completely omit from our conflict work. This balance of disparate interests and urban operational requirements, this dealing with and the search for a “discordant harmony”, as Pastore describes it, also shows us the need for that pre-emptive, early work, as opposed to the more passive, reactive conflict work involving migration issues.
The more visible, front-page conflict outcomes we see in these immigration conflicts are often the result of months or years of unattended conflict causes, frustration and despair.
The Year of the Global Big Vote, 2024, immigration debates sweeping the US and Europe, and the escalation of these debates caused by the second Trump administration, starting in January 2025, have set in motion conflict forces that will demand modern, advanced conflict knowledge, experience and conflict competency from political leaders and city administrations at vastly higher levels than before. As chaotic and disorientating as some of these conflict events may seem, we must recall that underneath the din and the roar, we are still dealing with the building blocks of human conflict, as it plays out against our urban backdrops.
I hope to see an increased and multi-disciplinary approach to research and praxis involving urban migration conflicts, including specific case studies, either as replacement for some of the more general global or national treatments of this crucial topic, or as a healthy adjunct to such programs. So much necessary and relevant on the grounds, in the specific streets of a specific city, becomes lost or blurred in the larger studies, as important as these latter endeavours are.
We remind ourselves of the dynamic nature of urban conflicts, and how different cities would have different conflict dynamics, even within the same city. These areas are where integration and conflict management get tested. Neighbourhood and spatial segregation best practices, as one example, do not always make it to the conflict policy design tables of city management.
An example of how easily a slight miscalculation here can skew the correct urban conflict policy would be this passage:
Moreover, both segregation and diversity are usually framed as ‘problems’ because of tensions between people of different backgrounds that can sometimes turn into riots, so that policies are often aimed at reducing social and ethnic homogeneity rather than social inequality.(Pastore 12)
We have earlier dealt with some of the unexamined questions and philosophies that drive urban conflict and management programs, and how this can affect our questions and our answers. Here again, the questions that we sit with can be as valuable as some of the eventual solutions, for instance, what lens do we use to assess a neighbourhood – levels of diversity, levels of inequality, or what other conflict driver?
What role does immigration play in our assessment, our strategies, or do we choose to rather deal with the conflict symptoms, such as unemployment, crime and so on. What would our assessments, and solutions, look like if we were to treat immigration numbers and realities as conflict opportunities as opposed to problems? What role do social networks play in these conflicts? Do the worldviews that migrants start out with travel with them, and if so, what effect does that have on the conflicts we get to deal with?
The conflict team would do itself a favour by distinguishing between relevant groups and categories of migrants, a distinction that can have enormous strategy, policy and conflict outcome consequences. The challenge and potential involved here deserve our attention.
In this line of thought a fundamental distinction is the one between categories and groups. While groups can be defined as bounded collectivities with a sense of solidarity, shared identity and sense of belonging, and capacity of collective action, categories are cognitive frames (Wimmer 2013; Brubaker 2002, 2006; Jenkins 1994, 1997).
Therefore, as Brubaker (2002, 2006) points out, ethnic categories can exist without groups. In any case, ethnic categories can have real consequences since they influence – in some cases quite strongly – ways of seeing, thinking, talking and behaving.(Pastore 24)
As before, we work with migration as a conflict dynamic, become as familiar and experienced with it as circumstances require, and then we step back so that this dedicated focus can integrate with our other urban conflict knowledge, where the migration part of that competency becomes a practical part of the bigger whole, there for us to make use of when needed.
Crucial as this aspect is, it should not be seen and treated in isolation. There is a dynamic interplay at work between migration, in this instance, and conflict factors such as law enforcement, enabling a local community to become more conflict competent, spatial design and transport problems, to name a few.
Claudia Kohler has done valuable work on migration and intergroup conflict, specifically in the modern-day city of Nuremberg. She deals extensively with the correct framing of a conflict in an urban setting. We have noted earlier how important the framing of a conflict, its participants and its options can be, and her work helpfully also shows how stereotypes lead to an “intensification of the conflict”.
Kohler speaks of the Intercultural Gardens projects, an idea from the US that was implemented in the Nuremberg area. Small, open areas where Germans would garden, interact and hopefully learn to integrate. In 2008 Nuremberg made the decision to install such a garden (Kohler 102). From the start in 2009, residents were against the project, due to lack of prior consultation, fear of noise, etc. Various groups, various agendas, perceptions, communication failures and so on contributed to some early jitters and problems with the program, but in 2012 a rather well-integrated project became established.
This case study is a simple example of small steps progress that can be made with perseverance and the necessary skills. What narratives and frameworks are prevailing in specific city streets, and how can we change them? Are these narratives and perceptions aligned with the work that we intend doing?
Kohler’s work also has valuable contributions showing how conflict triggers often have different effects and outcomes across an age, gender and a few other markers’ spectrum. Race, as an example of such a conflict trigger, here involving different communities, seems to diminish in younger groups. Among the young generation, ethnic boundaries appear to have lost relevance while other criteria, e.g., the identification with a territory, gain relevance.
The analysis suggests that here, the relevance of ‘other criteria’ by far overweighs the relevance of ethnic boundaries. We find that particularly within groups of young people, the identification with the neighbourhood of Gostenhof and the city of Nuremberg is much more relevant than that of ethnic origin. In fact, young interviewees of Gostenhof refused to refer to ethnic or national origins when speaking about inter-group relations in the neighbourhood, arguing that these criteria do not matter to them or impact interactions in the neighbourhood in general. Among the young generation in Werderau and Langwasser there are tendencies towards this approach, but it is not as explicit as in Gostenhof.(Pastore 115)
Migration often creates its own unplanned urban conflicts simply because migration numbers and influx patterns, for instance caused by a war in a neighbouring country or some natural disaster, resulting in increased pressure and conflict in urban zones of encounter, which can in itself create significant barriers or bridges between communities so thrown together.
Transnational mobility does not always translate to local urban mobility, again creating potentially very harmful urban conflict causes. The immigration conflicts are examples of identity conflicts where high emotions are in play, and where statistics and cold studies would have limited traction at times, if not used in the correct manner. People who believe, and are told regularly, that they are being overrun, that they are losing their national or group identity, or who’s perception, rightly or wrongly, indicate that jobs and access to healthcare, for example, are scarcer and more difficult to obtain because of immigration do not want to be lectured on how wrong they are, how “right-wing” they are, or how they should ignore and comply.
The steady build-up in Europe and the US of anti-immigration narratives in recent years is exactly proof of how ineffective and counterproductive this type of conflict strategy is. This does not mean that we work in a conflict environment of moral relativism. Facts still matter, and will always matter. But those facts must be woven into a larger identity conflict best practice (I have supplied the link to my article on the topic above).
Objective facts must be timed to precision and conveyed as support for subtle nudges and changes of opinion and behaviour, nowhere more so than in the powder kegs of immigration conflicts.In this regard we can use a range of reputable global studies dealing with successful migrant community integration into a community, if that is where we want our city or a specific community to be guided to.
The 2024 updated version of the UN’s Habitat Flagship Program, in its section headed Inclusive Cities: Enhancing the Positive Impacts of Urban Migration, shows the value of evidence-based integration programs in cities like Bogota, which we have discussed earlier, One of the valuable contributions of this report is its finding that it shows failures in such integration in rapidly urbanizing areas of sub-Saharan Africa because of weak governance and data deficiencies.
A 2023 scholarly review in ScienceDirect, called Migrants’ Community Participation and Social Integration in Urban Areas, analysed 28 cities between 2011 and 2021, and found that community participation, the intelligent use and application of urban space and, importantly, locally focused programs, do lead to measurable success in integration and reduction in the marginalization that so often drives future conflict. Cities like Barcelona showed inspiring statistics in this study, and should be used with confidence as a comparative study, where appropriate. This study, as expected, also however shows the problems and failures with such integration in cities with developing economies, inadequate infrastructure and problematic levels of inequality.
The World Economic Forum’s Migration and Cities analysis deals with this topic, and helpfully includes a discussion on urban planning, and concludes that cities that constructively embrace and make use of urban planning (where the needs of migrant communities are included) often see positive outcomes in such integration projects. Cities like Hamburg and Toronto have had good results by leveraging their economic contributions and encouraging community engagement.
The study solidifies our emerging pattern where warnings are sounded for cities where infrastructure is inadequate, where discrimination persists, all following our established conflict outcome patterns by leading to segregated enclaves, simmering social tensions and increased conflict rigidity. We may also wish to make use of an argument that short-term sacrifices and difficulties for local communities in these immigration events may soon settle down into a new normal, with beneficial results for all involved.
For those who are persuaded by the argument, there is an interesting study to be found as published in an article by the Migration Policy Institute, titled After Crisis Of Unprecedented Migrant Arrivals, U.S. Cities Settle Into New Normal (published August 2024). The report focuses on cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, who struggled initially with an intake of arrivals from the US-Mexico border. It sets out how, despite these initial challenges these cities adapted to the “new normal” through co-ordinated efforts by local government, non-profits and national assistance. Importantly, and something that must factor into your specific deliberations and strategy, is the fact that the “new normal” here does not pretend to be a better solution than what went before. Its highest argument is that people adapt, over time. The study concedes remaining difficulties caused by such migration events, such as housing shortages and ongoing pressures on national and local finances.
So we find that there is certainly a strong evidence-based argument that can be mustered in favour of immigration, but that even the strongest and most credible of those studies warn of certain caveats and limited successes, all conditional on some top-class conflict management. It also requires, as we have seen, the precision in delivering the message persuasively as forming part of the inarguable identity conflict that these conflicts are.
A general rule of thumb in immigration conflicts is that local commerce is the central pillar around which the other immigration identity markers and foundations are built, and that significant work should be done on this aspect of migrant integration, if for no other reason than the fact that this conflict cause is also linked to unemployment, crime, education, travel and so on, and success or failure in the one conflict arena affects success or failure in the others. The studies we looked at above support this in direct and indirect manner. So we should look at the way in which an immigrant community settles in – is it isolationist, or an aggressive hammering out of a place, setting up zero-sum dichotomies? Does the incumbent community see any loss or risk in the immigration developments, either in the short-term or patterns? All of these are invaluable conflict tools for specifically early detection and management of current and future conflicts.There are also specialized conflict studies and strategies that the conflict team should be aware of, and where appropriate, implement into the designed strategies.
One of the more hopeful integration theories in getting different cultural groups to live together, is the so-called intergroup contact theory (known by several similar descriptive names). Simply put, this theory holds that different race and cultural groups should spend quality time together, shares their lives in a normal setting, and in that natural exchange, differences will be reduced or removed, and conflicts with those racial or cultural causes will be either reduced or resolved.
This theory has a lot going for it, and ongoing work needs to be done. Much of the initial positive reception and optimism has however been curtailed somewhat by later studies and observations, among which I can recommend the helpful study by Matt Lowe (2025), which can be accessed here:
Lowe-2025-has-intergroup-contact-delivered.pdf
The strategy works, but to a much more limited extent than originally claimed, and it needs additional support and ideas. The strong academic work done in the field recently can and should be crafted into a particularly localised program, even going so far as to distinguish between relevant areas and communities.Sooner or later we will again be faced with the question whether urban space shapes inter-group relations, with the added dimension of immigration communities now adding an important nuance.
How are these conflict markers and strategies affected when we consider huge differences of opinion regarding local work ethics, perceptions of the common good, real or perceived loss of identity, and so on? The tools we have discussed here should give you a good place to start from.
With this information at our disposal, we can start to integrate some of the other related conflict concepts that we have studied thus far, and keep them in mind in our design and implementation of these complex conflicts. For example, how do memories shape our sense of belonging, or of alienation in a community? Does a city consider these conflict drivers in its conflict policies and programs? How easy is it for a migrant community to integrate into a specific urban area, are they encouraged or discouraged to do so? What follows for individuals or groups that fail to integrate, settle down, feel at home?
Urban immigration debates and conflicts are often stripped down to a resource battle. As important and sometimes self-evident as these resource considerations may be, the abovementioned examples make it clear that economic, resources, employment and other commercial factors are not always the only conflict building blocks that we need to incorporate into our thinking, planning and implementation. The lack of resources issue is not the only conflict driver, but the allocation thereof, how budgetary considerations are communicated, perceptions managed and so on.
The general and social media can be scanned for ongoing examples of conflicts arising from resource allocation debates and conflicts in cities like Cape Town, for example. Much can also be gathered, as case studies, in how these cities treat these conflict events as reactive challenges. Ferruccio Pastore talks of “cleavages”, ie reasons for difference and conflicts in societies trying to integrate migrant populations.
It is noticeable how often city administrations cobble together crisis management programs to deal with these efforts, without even trying to understand these “cleavages” into its local solutions. This is a preventable error.
Often these conflicts, especially when they spill over into the media, become very heated and harmful. The early 2025 Twitter / X spat between US deputy-president JD Vance and a range of experts on the “correct” priorities that we should have in taking care of our families, compatriots and migrants is an illustrative example, with generalisations, ignorance and even eventual contributions by the Pope led to more heat than light, further leading to polarization and the entrenchment of value positions in this complex, important conflict.
The exchanges reminded me of that other submerged danger in urban conflicts that we so often run into, and that is the wonderfully titled Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (or more popularly known by its even more entertaining description of “bikeshedding”), where organizational behaviour studies tell us that people will tend to start spending disproportionate amounts of time and energy debating and working on relatively minor, even trivial issues where those minor issues are easier to understand (and comment on) than the more important, more complex larger issue. Keep an eye on that popular little distraction in the conflict team.
What role does environmental concerns play in a city’s immigration conflict preparedness and challenges? Here again we are dealing with a conflict category that can easily be ignored (even for apparently good reasons) or undervalued in conflict risk assessments. It often finds its place on those unwritten lists of recognized conflict causes that we sense we should be dealing with, but the symptoms are often different to discern, different to draw a causal link between cause and effect, it can be contentious, expensive and difficult to show short-term positive results. Real world observations will show how there are always seemingly other, more urgent, more “real” conflict threats that we need to spend our time and money on.
The question of the impact of immigration on a city’s environmental capabilities should be studied and updated every few years. Immigration, seen as the movement of people in, through or from an urban area, quite naturally will add layers of complexity and challenges to existing class and resource conflicts.
Most of the physical production that remains in Western nations, like manufacturing, agriculture, and mining, including fossil fuel extraction, along with infrastructure construction and upkeep, occur far from the fashionable downtowns and affluent, inner-ring suburbs where most of the managerial overclass lives and works.
Overclass elites in urban hubs therefore can favor stringent environmental regulations at little cost to themselves. Heartland communities are more likely to be sensitive to the costs of environmental policies than hub city managers and professionals. What is more, the property-owning, working-class majorities of the heartlands are also likely to be more sensitive to environmental restrictions on what property owners can do with their property than the denizens of the hubs, where not only the working poor and the working class but also many professionals must rent because they cannot afford to own homes.
And most working-class individuals in low-density regions rely on their personal cars or trucks for commuting, shopping, and recreation. The French yellow vest riots of the winter of 2018–19 illustrated the intersecting intersecting fault lines of class and place in environmental policy.(Lind 19).
An important class of modern urban conflict is how people respond to environmental concerns and programs. These programs, viewed by some as well-founded and necessary, even urgent, are viewed with great scepticism by some, and there are even arguments offered that these environmental concerns, valid as they may be at times, are also often used as excuses to wage organizational war against specific communities, including the homeless, migrant communities and so on.
Stephen Graham argues that cities in the Global South are particularly involved in this type of urban warfare against so-called undesirable populations or groups. Meanwhile, in the expanding cities of the global South, securocratic warfare is often being launched against informal settlements, which are commonly demolished, erased, or surrounded by militarized borders because of the threat they seem to pose to the body politic, or to public health, or to achieving the city’s goal of being regarded as global, high-tech, modern or attractive to the wider world.
As Loïc Wacquant points out, regarding state violence against the favelas of Rio or São Paulo, many states are resorting to a strategy of ‘punitive containment’ towards informal cities – ‘the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.(Graham 112)
I do not see how this is ultimately fair criticism, as these considerations are, firstly, often rather blatantly applied in other cities as well, and, secondly, the criticism does not deal with whether these conflict events, where they do exist, are justified or not. In urban conflicts, we should be careful not to confuse motivations with justifications.
Are the considerations mentioned by Graham then not valid considerations and concerns in their own right? Our city conflict policies should, where these are used as comparative case studies, respect the different trajectories and developmental time periods involved in the urban lives of the involved cities. Comparing say Johannesburg, who has only emerged from a post-apartheid environment thirty years ago, with Rio de Janeiro or New York may bring about skewed guidelines, and here the question of immigration normally plays an important role in the categories mentioned by Graham.
Where do drugs, its manufacture and distribution feature in our urban conflict policy, how does immigration impact this conflict variable? How does the media in that area frame, label, explain and influence immigration conflict dynamics, and how can the conflict team play a constructive role in that process?
The year 2024 has shown us important case studies of how media mismanagement in urban conflicts can create moral panic, inaccurate reporting, criminalization of foreigners and migrants, vigilantism, extreme polarization and a range of extremely harmful urban conflicts.
The year has also shown us, again with case studies that take a few hours to cause harm, how fast these conflicts arise, spread and get out of control, the patterns of errors that we have seen across especially Europe in dealing with these conflict events, with immigration conflict themes at their centre, with slow reaction times, a clear lack of reliable early warning systems, law enforcement being untrained for certain specific conflict events, clumsy political interventions, and underlying, unresolved urban conflicts that then get triggered into these ostensibly primary conflicts.
Urban conflict teams should ensure effective working relationships with media outlets, and constructive debates, workshops and information exchanges can work wonders in eliminating or minimizing these conflagrations, when they do occur.
Andrea Pogliano makes the following stinging remark, as an example of media influences in shaping public perceptions involving immigration conflicts:
As has been emphasized in several studies, the news media typically adopt a double standard in framing stories of people fleeing persecution or escaping wars and disasters. In the foreign news they are always described as victims within a humanitarian framework, while in the domestic news they are very often described as intruders within a law and order framework.
(Pastore 289)
Pogliano also deals with the failure of moral panics as a concept, one that is a handy addition to the conflict team’s practical immigration and media conflict toolbox:
One of the first studies dealing with the failure of a moral panic is by Curran (1987), who analyzed cases in London during the period 1981– 1986. Since then, the conditions for the failure or success of moral panics have been called into question in several studies. There is now a general consensus in the literature about the factors leading to the failure of a moral panic.
Critcher (2006: 11) has summed up these factors in the following six points:
a. A failure to establish an issue as sufficiently new or threatening to provoke the formulation of a new label or the resuscitation of an old one;
b. A lack of media unanimity in accepting the legitimacy of the label and its connotations;
c. An attempt to brand as folk devils groups whose social status precludes such vilification;
d. Opposition to the moral panic from an alliance of effectively organized pressure groups (counter-claims makers);
e. Divisions among elite groups over the seriousness of the problem or its causes and remedies when its seriousness is agreed;
f. The absence of available and effective remedies.We may add to this list the eventual absence of further events which the media and moral entrepreneurs are able to put into the same discursive category, so as to interpret them as new episodes of the ongoing phenomenon.
(Pastore 305)
The question of the moral panic must not be overplayed and used as an excuse, but the fact of its existence and effective use should be a welcome tool in the conflict manager’s hands. We see many of its clearest examples in public discussions of immigration topics.
Social media as driver of urban conflict, especially involving immigration debates, is a visible and ongoing case study of both the risks and the levels of skill that urban conflict teams should possess in order to be effective in these battlefields.
The disturbing 2024 UK riots, with fake news, blatant lies, group mobilization and the poor leadership reaction (and overreaction), causing a plethora of secondary conflicts, will provide conflict practitioners with study material for years. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s reactions to these unfolding urban battles were clearly indicative of an administration, local and national, poorly prepared and lacking in urban conflict best practices, all of which create its own secondary conflicts (extended polarization, in-group extreme narratives being allowed to take hold in the public conversation, etc.), in addition to muddling the primary conflicts.
Obviously, this also creates trust deficiencies and future conflict rigidities in local urban communities.
What role does differences in ethnicity in the incumbent and the migrating group play in urban conflicts? Pastore and Ponzo make the following rather obvious but important point and qualification:
According to our findings, ethnicity remains one of the most relevant inter-group cleavages. However, this is experienced differently in different contexts, depending on nationally and locally specific histories. The majority and minorities can indeed have very different profiles which, even at neighbourhood level, are strongly influenced by national, regional or city-level cognitive frames and rhetoric.
(Pastore 326)
As our work with identity conflicts have shown, these interactions and engagements can be fertile fields for urban conflicts, with identity threats and value incompatibilities (real and imagined) potentially playing crucial roles in the apparent face of these urban conflicts. The tinderbox effect of these various actual and potential conflict causes and triggers are not always timeously respected, studied and provided for.
Pastore and Ponzo make the following practical urban conflict management points flowing from this:
A specific lesson from our case studies in the city chapters is that the connecting potential of public places also depends on rules of use, the absence or ineffectiveness of which can generate conflicts quickly turning into ‘moral clashes’ along ethnic lines. From our fieldwork, we can derive some hypotheses on how to improve the effectiveness of site-specific sets of rules. In the first place, these rules can be partially embedded in spaces. Indeed, sometimes the very setting of the place suggests the ways in which it should be used thereby limiting negotiation and preventing conflicts; in other cases, places are very open to different uses and the agreement on them is completely delegated to users who could be unable to find a satisfying arrangement. If the first option tends to limit conflicts, overly neat distinctions between areas designed for specific purposes can also limit contacts.For instance, in the SPA gardens in San Paolo or the Tres Xemenies Park in Poble Sec specialized areas (a skateboarding area and basket or football fields for adolescents, playgrounds for children, benches for elderly people, etc.) certainly prevent conflicts but also seem to prevent meaningful interactions since each group uses a specific area without contacts with others. This sort of space planning conducive to inter-group encounters should not, however, be seen as something mechanical or deterministic and it can also be the object of negotiation, as in the case of SPA gardens in San Paolo mentioned above. The second element which can help to identify common rules of use for places is formal or informal mediation facilitated by organized actors such as associations, open market organizations, housing associations, etc. In fact, several authors who have- 606 -investigated interactions in urban places have underlined the crucial importance of the intermediation of third parties (Amin 2010, 2012; Wood and Landry 2007; Sandercock 2003). For instance, in our case studies from the investigated London estates, tenants’ and residents’ associations (TRAs) – elected bodies that manage social activities on estates and dialogue with service providers – seem to soften potential conflicts among residents.
(Pastore 345-346)
While case studies are easily distinguishable and small variations in conflict dynamics lead to important differences in outcomes, integration with immigration communities are improved with what Wood and Landry (2007) call ‘zones of encounter’, and Amin (2002) defines as ‘micropublic’ engagement, concepts which are compatible with Mac Ginty’s everyday peace idea, and where considered and meaningful interactions between involved communities engaging (and encouraged and allowed to engage) in communal activities and shared aims can take place.
We have seen the value of these integration policies in some of the studies that we looked at earlier. Failing to have an informed, updated and flexible immigration conflict capacity in the conflict management team then, as we can see, creates unnecessary blind-spots and potentially serious urban conflict problems for the future. This can have adverse conflict outcomes and political consequences. A tenuous urban peace in an environment where immigrant conflicts are latent can become very difficult to try and catch up on at times. Barely submerged conflict patterns and unresolved grievances can flare up due to dramatic events, violent acts by lone actors or small groups, and can quickly escalate these latent or unresolved conflicts, as the November 2023 Dublin riots would be a good case study for.
This can now create an environment where provocation, in aid of say group-making, in-group narratives, political manipulation and so on, becomes a conflict cause and accelerant that must be dealt with. The 2023 and 2025 US-Mexican border conflicts and public arguments, while initially of a national nature, flowed down into severe urban conflicts for several US cities in the reach of these migratory events, with very few of these city administrations and law enforcement groups being adequately trained and prepared optimally for these urban conflicts, as foreseeable as they may have been.
Many of the anxieties of identity conflicts are focused in the family, school, and home. This is understandable, and gives us a very practical handle on a point of departure for preventative work. If we accept that immigration disputes involve a range of identity markers, we can see how pre-emptive work on schools, workplaces and street-level communities can be very fruitful. These relatively manageable areas can be sources of trouble, or sources of integration and peace.
Urban conflict management remains poorly served globally by effective and proactive policies and implementation. The immigration conflicts in several countries are simply left to stagger along, without much direction or assurance being given to the affected populations by national or city governments. A series of stabbings and killings in London and Austria, all filed under the migration battles in the media and social media, in 2025, as recent examples, and they are met, if with anything at all, template-level mumblings of unacceptability and some future prevention.
This is conflict management by ignoring the problem, leading to an ever-increasing polarization, frustration with city and law enforcement leadership, and kicks the can down the road to some really tough times ahead.
What should our tailor-made urban conflict policy provide as far as the differences between incumbent and migrated communities are concerned when we focus on differences of class, lifestyle, lived values, religious disagreements and so on?Let us use religion as a particularly contentious urban conflict driver for purposes of our team debates and policies. What role does religion play in urban conflicts? Is it a real doctrinal conflict, say between Muslims and Protestants, or is it an excuse to mask other intolerances?
In Europe, as one very pertinent focus point, immigration debates and localised urban conflicts more often than not involve the various conflict talking points about Muslims, Islam and the compatibility of disparate cultures, values and ways of life.
The parameters of these arguments are well-drawn by public figures like Geert Wilders, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray and others. We are, again, not called upon to choose sides, but it does come close to professional negligence, in my view, not to make use of the important conflict tools of identity conflicts at our disposal.
Religion could arguably be one of the most deeply held emotional drivers of potential conflict causes and symptoms, and Muslims, with their generally high levels of faith commitment, must be understood and approached with these conflict skills well understood and integrated in conflict teams. A rather voluminous book can be written setting out the modern-day examples of urban conflicts where an already bad conflict situation, often involving immigration aspects, is made significantly worse by the manner in which these faith-based conflicts are mismanaged, often at an early stage. Ignorance of face saving dynamics, unwarranted appeasement or compromise, ill-placed neutrality and other examples, in addition of a remarkable absence of high-level identity conflict skills, have become some of the earmarks of these conflicts.
This example, one of many volatile combinations between immigration and one or more other conflict causes, shows us the complexity and depth at which we should be aiming for.What role does local legislation and policies as conflict drivers play in immigration conflict? It can of course not be argued that such laws, customs and practices should be adopted to suit the needs and expectations of immigrants, but so many daily urban conflicts revolve around the breach of some by-law or rule, whether than be trespass, sleeping in a public space, the erection of informal dwellings or trading. Information campaigns and consultations with immigration leaders can certainly clear some of the unnecessary underbrush that could later on prove to be unnecessary, or more involved conflicts.
This includes the management of fines, citations and court appearances for relatively minor infractions. Is multiculturalism, in this context, to be distinguished from say racial conflict dynamics, or any of the other related identity categories? Much work has been, and continues to be done on these fascination and practical questions, across a range of scientific disciplines, and a comprehensive study of these interlocked ideas for purposes of application in our urban conflicts is always a most helpful idea.
For our purposes here, we can note the following practicalities. In his foreword to the Shimizu volume (see bibliography), Prof Koichi Iwabuchi makes the following pertinent statement on multiculturalism and migration (the book dates from 2014, and relates to the situation in Asia, but remains globally instructive):In the new millennium, multiculturalism has significantly declined as a policy and social aspiration. While multiculturalism has long been criticized for connoting the mosaic like cohabitation of mutually exclusive cultures and communities, it has come under much stronger attack and critical scrutiny, particularly since September 11, 2001. Multiculturalism is alleged to be nation dividing, a detriment to national unity, and harmful to national security.
Thus, the denunciation of multiculturalism has been accompanied by the intensification of national border controls and the reclaiming of national integration; this has resonated in a reactionary fashion, further amplifying people’s growing sense of anxiety and longing for a secure and peaceful community in which to live. However, the demise of multiculturalism has diminished neither the dynamics of national border crossings nor cultural diversity within national borders. The speed and scale of transnational mobility and interconnection have become even more intensified.
Stuart Hall (2000) famously distinguished the “multicultural question” from multiculturalism, which refers to policy discussion on the management of immigration and cultural diversity. An imperative multicultural issue we need to engage with is “how people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different languages, different religious beliefs, produced by different and highly uneven histories, live together and attempt to build a common life while retaining something of their ‘original identity’” (p. 210). The decline of multiculturalism necessitates that we develop better analytical tools and approaches that seriously tackle the multicultural question by involving a wider strata of people and institutions.(Shimizu loc 95)
This is excellent advice for the framework that multiculturalism should occupy in any modern urban conflict program. It is clearly a potential conflict cause, with conflict symptoms that are ordinarily distinguished quite easily from the causes. In both the design and implementation phases of these conflict dynamics care should be had not to confuse the operating principles and dogmas of a particular political or socioeconomic philosophy that may be used in the city administration, say eg neoliberalism, or hybrid capitalism, with the assessment and application of these conflict causes and their resultant strategies.
These are two separate thought patterns, and while both can be attended to, confusing them in design and implementation stages can lead to adverse conflict outcomes. Pure, high-level urban conflict management deals with, studies and understands political and socioeconomic forces and processes, but it does not become any of these things.
Under Pope Francis, the Catholic Church has made some valuable contributions to the global immigration debate, building on its centuries old social justice doctrines. Some of these arguments, I find, tend to focus debates around appropriate urban conflict policies on migration, either by agreement or disagreement with those submissions. The value of the Church’s views are often found simply flowing from their experience as a global organization that have long been dealing with the social fallout of immigration, through internal organizations such as Caritas in Italy.
The Catholic formal approach to some of these questions can serve as a framework for some reflection and inclusion in a conflict policy, if for no other reason than its attempt at balance. In the Church’s Catechism (CCC 2241), the following framework is set out:2241:
The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him. Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.
Many of these considerations may of course not fit into a specific city’s political or budgetary realities, and as we can see from the level of heated debate and even dissension in the Church’s own ranks, the framework itself is not that widely accepted. It nevertheless serves as a helpful point of entry for those necessary design debates. When we start working with many of these concepts they start to take on new meaning, a concrete reality that can sometimes be missing around the negotiating table.
This is one of the reasons why we, in this book, try to at least consider and become conversant with so many urban conflict ideas, so that these ideas have an opportunity to become a part of our conflict competency, even though we may not be working with them directly at that moment. With immigration conflicts, as we have seen so far, a tremendous amount of conflict generation happens away from the negotiation table, and long before these conflicts manifest.
We are often called upon to deal with these symptoms without allowing ourselves the time and effort to carefully study and identify the conflict cause or contributory cause, setting us off in the wrong direction, or leaving us less than fully prepared. The exclusion and marginalization of immigration-affected individuals or communities can be caused, exacerbated or maintained by powerful but extremely nuanced, nearly invisible and often even unintentional conflict realities.
Such marginalization does not just happen, it is often created and maintained by processes. Urban conflict management can often achieve more when these processes and causes are correctly identified and managed, as opposed to dealing only with the more visible symptoms.
Bear in mind that urban immigration conflicts, because of the high level of media attention and complex issues under discussion, can easily distract us into reactive, defensive patterns of conflict crisis control, which in general is an unsustainable and poor conflict strategy.
An increasingly common strategic mistake made in dealing with urban migration conflicts is to approach them as a monolithic category of urban conflicts, often based on clichés and perceptions established in simplified media narratives.
Migrant urban conflicts differ from each other in important respects, in that the dynamics of the situations often lead to volatile and unpredictable conflict outcomes, and conflict causes do not always lead to the same conflict results when these factors are included in our calculations. An immigrant community that is experiencing racial tensions from an outside group may, for instance, react very differently from such a group that were born, and have lived their entire lives, in an area where they now experience such racial or other tensions. Immigrant communities are of course also of various nationalities, cultures and backgrounds, and the traumas (or absence thereof) of their migration journeys may contribute to their integration abilities and the timing around various conflict interventions and preventions.
Obviously, local dynamics also play a role, such as the availability of resources, the type of community receiving the migrants, and so on.A very popular approach to building community resilience and conflict abilities in dealing with immigration pressures is to have, and establish, a range of faith groups, NGOs and activist organizations to assist with integration concerns, practical urban conflicts experienced by the community or the migrants, resource distribution and so on, and as a general proposition this is a wonderful response, with a rich global tradition of helping everyone involved in the experience of immigration.
City administrations often regard existing NGOs and non-profits as forming part of networks that can assist with such management projects, and may even on occasion encourage or implement the establishment of new organizations to bear some of the brunt of these events. This type of network building is an important skill that should form an important part of the conflict team’s general approach to urban conflict, with the caveat that some of these NGOs can also, often without having such intention, or being able to notice such effect, be silencing the voices of the migrant population themselves, or distorting those real needs and suggestions.
Once this possibility or actual obstacles have been notices, the joint voices of such participants can be harmonized to everyone’s benefit. Any enduring conflict between such groups and the migrant community are really instances of poor conflict management.
The second Trump administration’s early 2025 decisions to effectively terminate the services of many global non-profits that worked in the immigration and integration fields will need city administrations in affected cities to craft new alternatives, where possible, using much of the same tried and tested patterns, with a few obvious improvements.
Another easily observable conflict leadership error that we see in many global immigration-inspired urban conflicts is absence of clear and timeous communication, not just with media and incumbent communities, but also with migrant communities, and ensuring clarity in these communications can have important consequences for not just the short-term assessment of the real or potential conflicts emanating from migration events, but the wider horizons involved. Certain options and solutions are either created or removed in those early stages, based on the leadership that the city provides.
Critical citizenship and border scholars also highlight that, rather than excluding immigrants, migration laws and devices for migration control are designed to produce processes of differential or subaltern inclusion (Oliveri 2015; Anderson and Hughes 2015; Anderson 2010a).
That is, discourses and practices shape differential paths of economic and social inclusion of immigrants and racialized communities in receiving societies, because they preclude immigrants from pursuing certain paths.
The permitted paths, in turn, often result in a concentration of specific “ethnic” or “racial” groups in marginal or unequal socioeconomic positions (Chaudhary 2015), (Cappiali 16).
Here again, the urban environment in which these events occur shapes, in important respects, the options and responses available to the immigrant community. In addition, displaced persons are likely to be victims of discrimination in areas of relocation, and find themselves unable to make use of previously acquired skills in new unfamiliar urban settings (Mac Ginty 265)
Would the conflict team regard naturalization or citizenship projects or encouragement as an effective conflict strategy? Do we not effectively shape the conduct of immigration communities by having clear, and clearly communicated, goals before them, to become citizens of the place that received them? Conversely, if a city makes achieving those goals inordinately difficult to achieve for such a community, does this not give rise to negative conduct and adverse conflict outcomes? I believe that this is certainly a worthwhile aspect to consider as part of a comprehensive conflict strategy.
Cyclical, even generational conflicts can easily be started, or prevented, in this manner, and this can be extended to not just the achievement of citizenship, but in the assessment of the laws and rules of that city in general.
Research done by international organizations such as the IOM and Amnesty International indicates that since immigration laws are “ineffective and open to abuse” (Amnesty international 2012, 13), they expose immigrants to exploitation and institutional discrimination with very little chances to contrast them (IOM 2010, 3).(Cappiali 36).
The case studies and statistics in the debate around the shaping of migrant options and directions of development in a wide range of activities and important parameters are clear, and certainly underscores our responsibilities here.
Over the past three decades, the literatures on citizenship, migration studies, and social movement theories concerned with immigrant activism have shown that the receiving society plays an important role in shaping the institutional and political opportunities for participation and mobilization (Bloemraad 2006; Ireland 1994; Koopmans 2004; Soysal 1994).
This framework, known as the institutional or political opportunity approach, shows that context matters and that immigrants’ participation trajectories are shaped by “political opportunities,” particularly institutional factors, such as legislative, institutional, and/or political discourses and practices of inclusion (e.g. immigration and labor laws). These factors are relevant in shaping civic participation, including the formation and characteristics of immigrant associations (Martiniello 2009; Pilati 2010), conventional politics such as voting and running for elections (Hochschild et al. 2013), and less conventional politics like protests and grassroots mobilizations (Koopman and Statham 2000; Giugni and Passy 2004).(Cappiali pp. 55-56)
Our earlier discussion on the importance of creating and allowing clear communication and collaboration between immigration communities and focused activist and other social movements now makes even more sense, when observed from a conflict resource point of view.
Studies focusing more specifically on immigrant social movements show that, under similar national and local conditions, immigrant mobilizations may take place in some urban settings but not in others, suggesting that something other than institutional factors is impacting immigrant collective action (Monforte and Dufour 2011; Steinhilper 2021). In these instances, the creation of alliances between pro-immigrant and immigrant groups is crucial. Research shows that, by offering material and symbolic support, pro-immigrant groups in a receiving society play a vital role in opening up opportunities for immigrant participation and in determining favorable mobilization outcomes (Cappiali 2016, 2019; della Porta 2018).
These supporters, moreover, become crucial allies and play a key role in developing positive narratives about the role of immigrants in receiving societies, especially when public opinion and political actors turn toward nativist and xenophobic rhetoric framing immigrants as an “economic burden” or “security threat” (d’Appollonia 2015).(Cappiali 58)
Time and global case studies have provided us with a few general patterns to look for in managing the dynamics of these potential alliances, which could certainly be monitored and included in the conflict team’s own work.
How pro-immigrant actors construct immigrants as objects of inclusion is largely affected by their ideology. Previous research has shown that ideology affects the way in which local actors, and especially policy-makers, promote inclusion (Caponio 2006; Mantovan 2007; Penninx et al. 2004). Church-based organizations tend to mobilize in favor of immigrants’ protection, by resorting to legal devices to fight discrimination and by offering assistance to the most vulnerable (Ambrosini 2013).
Moderate left-wing actors often prefer to mobilize in favor of the greater inclusion of all immigrants and racialized communities by promoting a vision of the receiving society as multi-ethnic, focusing on the value of sharing ethnic and cultural differences, defining immigrants as would-be citizens and a resource (Campomori and Caponio 2014). More radical left-wing organizations (political parties, trade unions, and grassroots movements) tend to mobilize in favor of immigrants’ rights claims and self-determination, supporting political forms of participation, and focusing more overtly on capitalism and class issues (Adler et al. 2014; Cosseron 2007).
Finally, the extra-parliamentary or radical left and grassroots unions of Marxist, socialist, or anarchist orientations —such as the No One Is Illegal! or No Border movements — tend to support mobilization in non-conventional politics of immigrants in vulnerable conditions (e.g., sans-papiers, refugee-status claimants, and workers employed in the underground economy) (Cosseron 2007; Hansen 2019; Siméant 1998).(Cappiali 257- 258)
Immigration activism can be a very helpful aid in our overall conflict work, with the possibility of natural alliances forming.
Against this, my research found that activism occurs not so much despite, but rather because of the highly hostile environment in which they operate (Cappiali 262). It is nevertheless also potentially a volatile and contentious arena that benefits from some level of formal or semi-formal inclusion in the more formal urban conflict policies and strategies.
This now allows us to take our earlier discussion on prevailing narratives and perceptions in a community further. Does the prevailing narratives in a specific urban community, or city itself, oppose or support immigration, in whole or in part?
As with all complex conflicts, the city administration should be aware of the unedited arguments in this instance, as dealing with anything less than the accurate version of a party’s best arguments in a conflict often leads to frustrated goals and results. In London, as a very helpful case study, these narratives have crystalized into very helpful conflict tools. The “de-whitening of London” and the so-called replacement theory speaks of concerns of lineages of white Britons being asked to accept the ethnic transformation of the UK. The distinguished economist Paul Collier, for example, speaks of “the indigenous British” becoming “a minority in their own capital”. Such narratives normally speak of a limitation of immigration, although the tumultuous global events of 2024 have certainly expanded such arguments to now include actual deportation of various classes of immigrants.
These narratives, and their various nuances, have firmly taken hold in the rest of Europe and in the US, and should no longer be viewed as extremist positions, only to be rejected or opposed in the design or implementation of our work.
The online narrative in South Africa as to immigration has developed along similar lines as much of the European and American instances. The conflict leadership can deal with the realities on the ground in a particular city without the need for specific political affiliations or commitments, as we have noticed earlier.
If the majority of citizens in a particular urban community regard further immigration, integration or other potential conflict flashpoints as being unfair, or something to resist, it is gravely irresponsible to wag a finger at such views and to dismiss them as “populist” or some other dismissive response. The conflict realities are the dynamics before us, and that is what we need to work with.
A similar trend can be observed in South Africa against the backdrop of increasing violence and social unrest in the country’s impoverished townships and informal urban settlements, including xenophobic intolerance against migrants from other African countries.(McNamee 156)
South Africa, as a vivid case study, shows an increasingly hostile urban reception to immigration, a powder keg that is largely ignored at national level that I predict will have increasingly dire future consequences for several of the country’s largest cities.
The patterns and causes of past extreme views on immigration are still there, still unresolved, and in many respects far more potentially volatile and unstable than a decade or more ago.In the aftermath of the 2015 xenophobic unrest in major urban areas across South Africa, efforts by the Orange Farm LPC to promote reconciliation between foreign nationals and their South African counterparts were held hostage by political party posturing within the committee.
Community dialogues convened by the local peace committee “were marred by political jostling by ANC members who refused to allow the meetings to continue unless the ANC branch chairperson facilitated proceedings.(McNamee 162)
It is good to notice new and responsible conflict work being done in some of these cities, and they are certainly far better equipped for the coming immigration battles ahead.
To what extent should a city be pro- or anti-immigration? Are these cyclical events, linked to the whims of the prevailing political parties and leaders? To some extent, unfortunately yes. A conflict team that can establish some sort of enduring arc of a relatively stable immigration philosophy, whatever that may then be, will be at a meaningful advantage in that it would have a relatively stable working environment, decision making framework and even infrastructure and resource stability on which to rely.
What would such a meta-approach look like? Is the following approach too naïve, to unrealistic for the specific city? Given the highly connected world we live in, the global village is a reality, and a community of nations with a shared future is no mere slogan. It is a statement of fact.
Naive isolationism that means closing borders and severing all connections to outside world is not going to work in the long term. It is no real solution at all. In times of calamity, helping others is helping oneself, simply because it is impossible to live in total isolation in the age of globalization. Globalization is not the enemy; it is the solution.(Wang 126)
Many would differ rather vociferously with such an approach. We have seen study after study indicating the crucial importance of successful integration of the migrant community. We have seen ways that have been tested and proved to be successful in these studies in achieving that integration. Throughout these studies we however see, time and again, that there is no automatic magic in diversity, and that sufficiently diverse communities need skilled, specific conflict work to make that integration happen. It is a thin dividing line, with enormous consequences for a city.
Criminologist Joshua D. Freilich, for example, calls diversity in an unsuccessfully integrated community a potential “violence precipitator”. What do case studies and statistics tell us in this regard.
A point of departure can be the following framework:
The possibility of a relationship between population diversity and crime was first raised by Blau (1977) who argued that population diversity had two dimensions: heterogeneity (the horizontal dimension, which included cultural and ethnic diversity) and inequality (the vertical dimension, largely defined as the economic structuring of society). Blau suggested that high levels of inequality and heterogeneity would produce higher levels of conflict in society, one indicator of which he took to be violent crime. In an empirical assessment of this thesis, Blau found that high inequality in metropolitan areas was related to violent crime (Blau and Blau 1982), and other studies on North American samples (Sampson et al., see below) have found varying support for the theory, though with some modifications and extensions to other theoretical perspectives.(Freilich 62)
Diversity has, even at a level of urban conflict, been rather poorly managed in many respects, leading to a current level of global scepticism and escalating rhetoric of the various aspects of these debates. Freilich then makes the following helpful addition that could be of some assistance, at least in the design phase of our work:
In this paper, we clarify the concept of population diversity by amplifying Blau's dimensions and incorporating them into a typology of population diversity consisting of four types: biological, structural, cultural, and dynamic. Further, we identify two underlying dimensions of population diversity that cut across all four types, the dimensions of complexity and integration.(Freilich 63)
In our practical policy or implementation work then, we can understand complexity as the levels of variation in the population in relevant categories and indicators, such as biological, structural, cultural, and dynamic, and we can understand integration as equity and social integration in those same categories.
Practically, for our purposes, we can here view complexity as the many observable differences in an urban community, and integration speaks to the levels of successful and sustainable acceptance of those differences, and their consequences, in that community. Levels of successful integration largely determine the success of our conflict work in that community, as complexity on its own will invariably lead to urban conflict, protests and even violence.
Community diversity, and its conflict potential, challenges and possible solutions are enormously complex, and very space and time specific. Add to that the fact that even the remarkable achievement of effectively dealing with this urban conflict demands constant monitoring and changes as the conflict dynamics change, and the urban conflict team has its work cut out for it.
Accepting this high bar also means that we become more efficient at what we are doing. Knowledge brings policy and implementation consequences. For example, does poverty create crime? This is a stock question and accusation in immigration arguments. Focusing our energies and resources in that direction too much would be counterproductive, as the statistics help us with.
See for instance the excellent article at Inclusionary housing: A novel approach to building integrated cities | Econ3x3
In early 2025 the UK Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch announced sweeping plans to “fix” the UK immigration system, with “bold changes” being promised.
National policies will, at least for the next decade or so, become increasingly important at city administration level, and they will have to be understood at not just a legal level, but also at an advanced conflict management level, and cities affected by these conflict causes will need to incorporate any such changes, wherever they come from, into an effective and meaningful conflict strategy.
I would like to believe that our discussion here has effectively dealt with the more versus less immigration debates. Every city has its correct answer, and it becomes a highly specific place and even time-related question that should be accepted by involved leadership and the conflict team. The conflict principles and strategies that we have discussed make any answer, any national or even city-level policy on immigration workable.
While I would hesitate to unconditionally join him in this enthusiastic argument for more immigration, this interview of Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason, sets out the case for such an approach, all just making it clear that there are more than one workable conflict approaches available to us.
Alex Nowrasteh and Bryan Caplan: The case for more immigration
In both the theoretical conceptualization of much of the immigration arguments as well as practical on-the-ground conflict work, the question can with great benefit be seen as a question of delineation, of drawing lines, a balancing of interests.
In January of 2025 a rather fascinating X (previously Twitter) argument (briefly referred to above) broke out between Rory Stewart and vice-president JD Vance as to the priorities of who we should care for, who gets preference when we decide how to allocate our resources, space, time and love? Very soon the argument changed into a rather helpful (at times) reminder of the Catholic concept of ordo amoris, with even Pope Francis and a range of intellectuals and other contributors offering much food for thought. A “hierarchy of obligation” was fiercely debated, and as much as the online debate simply caused further polarization (a rather excellent case study in the wrong way of arguing in identity conflicts, I thought), it does support my delineation argument.
This delineation and our data-driven practices have other clear examples where we benefit, and escape certain urban myths, in this instance the narratives about the need for the incarceration of immigrants and their involvement in high crime rates, at least as a general proposition. In their important study (see resource list), Ran Abramitzky and others (2024) tell us that:
As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites).
(Abramitzky and others 453)
I would suggest that from this we can conclude that immigration conflicts in a city only become intractable and highly problematical by virtue of neglect or mismanagement by the city’s leaders and conflict team. The assessment of the policies, the implementation of effective and appropriate local conflict strategies are all very capable of being assets of a city.
(Chapter end)