ABSTRACT While some (progressive) cities have been proactive in forced migrants' reception and integration policy formulation, the central state is ultimately the chief architect of migration policy and the legal framework. Legal status considerably shapes all facets of forced migrants' lifeworlds and thus has significant implications for policy and integration. The Italian government has recently made significant changes to its migration system, affecting asylum‐seekers and refugees' legal status and subsequent city‐level integration efforts. This article thus investigates the interplay between asylum‐seekers' legal status, national migration policy framework and local integration programme. Employing the concept of legal uncertainty and qualitative exploration of a local integration project in Bergamo, it problematises the state's institutional production of uncertain and precarious migration status and how this shapes the prospects of asylum‐seekers' integration processes. It is shown that the city's efforts to integrate asylum‐seekers, starting from their arrival, are stifled by the national migration legal framework.

ABSTRACT This article explores the importance of belongingness in migrant entrepreneurs' (MEs) engagement within entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs), focusing on emotional and social dimensions often overlooked in favour of structural factors. Through two case studies in Germany's Ruhr area, the article demonstrates how a strong sense of belonging enhances resilience, trust and social capital, essential for business success. The experiences of two MEs, Ilyas and Elif, illustrate belongingness as a catalyst for connectedness and embeddedness, enabling access to networks and resources while countering discrimination. The study suggests that policy frameworks should acknowledge and support the emotional and relational aspects of MEs' integration in EEs. Emphasising informal support systems, community engagement and tailored interventions could help overcome structural barriers and foster more inclusive ecosystems. Future research should further examine these dynamics across diverse cultural and geographical contexts to offer a more comprehensive understanding of MEs' entrepreneurial trajectories.

ABSTRACTThe capacity to establish migrants' legal identities is key to states' attempts to control access to their territories. This paper introduces the concept of regimes of proof to shed light on this often‐neglected aspect of border and migration control and related migrant struggles. Negotiations around legal identities play a central role in deportation, but also in migrants' access to rights and government services. At the current conjuncture, this tension has become particularly relevant: new digital means of identification such as biometric residency cards or the analysis of mobile phone data are rapidly being introduced across the globe to establish and fix migrants' identities and to determine their country of origin. Drawing on ethnographic research in West Africa and Germany, we consider the implications of shifting regimes of proof in the context of asylum, deportation and regularisation procedures to highlight the centrality of identification to all aspects of migration management.

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates how countries within Europe limit and control the right to exit of negatively racialised minorities, especially Roma. Based on a socio‐legal analysis of four case studies, the paper argues that ‘countries of origin’ limit the right to exit in collaboration with possible countries of destination. They do so by making different multilateral and bilateral agreements, which promise countries of origin a sort of reward (like visa‐free travel for majority citizens), while countries of destination use it as a ‘remote control’ to prevent access to their territory to unwanted migrants. The paper discusses the following examples: first, the case of the UK's border officers being stationed at the Prague airport, disproportionately not allowing Roma to board flights to the UK. Second, it discusses the incentives France used to discourage Romani EU citizens from leaving Romania and Bulgaria towards France. Third, it investigates European Parliament restrictions on the visa‐free regime, should there be a greater number of Romani asylum seekers from non‐EU former Yugoslav countries. And fourth, the impediments Romani refugees faced when trying to exit Ukraine after the full‐scale Russian invasion.

ABSTRACTResearchers broadly define sanctuary cities as localities with policies that limit local cooperation or participation in federal immigration enforcement, but this is often a binary definition. Existing scholarship has examined the roles that sanctuary cities play in limiting cooperation in federal immigration enforcement but has tended to rely on an inconsistent definition of what constitutes a ‘sanctuary city’. Much of the existing research also analytically treats sanctuary cities the same, regardless of the individual components of a given policy. To address these shortcomings, we draw on a content analysis of 379 municipal policies passed from 1971 to 2021, coding each policy along a seven‐point scale originally developed by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC). We draw on individual city case studies to illustrate each component of the scale and then score each locality from one to seven based on a content analysis of the policy's text. We demonstrate that policies vary in the limits they place on cooperation in federal immigration enforcement and that these limits vary geographically and temporally. We find that sanctuary policies have added new components over time, as federal immigration policies and agencies have changed, with the most comprehensive policies passed after Trump won the presidency in 2016.