Research on the multi-level governance of migration and migrant integration. Reversed pyramids.

Although international migration is per definition a transnational phenomenon, migration and migrant integration policies are mostly associated with national policies. The national models approach has been dominant throughout the 1990s in the study of both immigrant integration and immigration control policies. However, for decades already, several aspects of immigration and immigrant integration policies have increasingly been shifted upwards, to the international level (to the European Union (EU) and international organisations), downwards, to the sub-state level (regional and local authorities) and outwards, to sending states, civil society and private actors. Since the early 2000s scholars have been more engaged in making sense of these processes of the redefinition of state competence and the diffusion of power. They have challenged the ‘national models’ heuristic and its underlying assumption of the existence of internally consistent and homogeneous national approaches to migration. In the general political science literature, the move away from the nation state as the ‘natural container’ of political processes, and therefore as the main focus of scientific investigation, had already started at least one decade before. Confronted with the increasing consolidation of supranational EU institutions as well as with processes of devolution of powers towards lower tiers of government and non-public actors, political scientists coined the concept of multi-level governance. To undertake a literature review of this emerging and burgeoning literature in migration policy studies is a challenging and complicated task, especially because only very few studies on migration policies have explicitly adopted the MLG conceptual tools. We argue, in this chapter, that existing MLG-relevant research on migration policy on the one hand, and immigrant integration policy on the other hand looks like two reversed pyramids. While research on migration policy focuses mostly on the interaction in upper governmental tiers, namely between international organisations (IOs) (among which the EU) and the state, research on the multi-level governance of migrant integration is mostly situated at lower tiers of government, namely between the state and the local authorities and/or regions. Beyond differences between the subfields of the multi-level governance of migration and migrant integration, the chapter also sheds light on different research foci of North American and European research.