Speaking on behalf of the Metropolis International Steering Committee, I would like to thank the Government of Israel, the Jewish Agency for Israel and the JDC-Israel for their hospitality and for agreeing to host us and this important event on a subject that resonates here as it does in few other countries. As both Jack Habib and Minister Edelstein have reminded us, the history of Jewish life is a history of migration. There are very few Jewish families that are more than two generations removed from the struggle of relocating in another country - sometimes voluntarily, often coerced.

We - those of us who are your guests - agree completely with Arnon Mantver that there is a great deal that we can learn from you and, over the next four days, we hope to absorb some of your experiences and your lessons. But we also hope to leave behind some of our own lessons and some of the ideas that inform our own approaches to migration.

All three speakers this morning spoke about the large numbers of immigrants that Israel has been absorbing. This is not unfamiliar ground. Like Israel, Canada and the United States are countries that have been largely built by immigrants. On a per capita basis, their flows are comparable to those of Israel and they are considerably more diverse. Europe, too, is changing as a result of significant in-migration creating everywhere a convergence of interest, ideas and responses.

Before I start into the theme of my talk, I have an important duty to perform. I would like to recognize the people who made this conference possible. It is important to acknowledge their efforts but I also want to use this opportunity to underline the fact that this conference - and indeed the International Metropolis Project -- is a collective enterprise. It is sustained by the voluntary efforts of our members, by the quality of the ideas being exchanged and by our continued willingness to invest in knowledge, thus creating value for each other.

Let me start with our host. We are, all of us, in debt to Shmuel Adler and his organizational team for assembling the logistics and for organizing the domestic part of our program. Shmuel has been an enthusiastic proponent of an Israeli conference since he joined the Project in 1996. I think this conference more than adequately expresses his enthusiasm and his hard work.

I also want to thank the members of our International Steering Committee for their ideas and their time. It is remarkable and it speaks to the strength of our Project and the importance of the issues we treat that, without core funding, we are still in existence and gaining momentum three years after our start in Brussels. I am especially pleased that we are being joined at this conference by representatives from Portugal, from Greece, we have a delegation from Croatia, and we have representatives from as far afield as New Zealand, Japan and Argentina.

We trust that all of you will - at the end of the four days - feel that you have made a wise choice and that you are able to take away with you specific knowledge on the issues that interest you, a list of people with whom you would feel comfortable collaborating and a template for future action. On this score, all of us owe a special debt to the workshop organizers. They are our intellectual muscle and we are counting on them to carry us forward. I will return to this later.

Special recognition is due my co-chair Demetrios Papademetriou, his assistant Deborah Ho and two Canadian members of our international secretariat - Howard Duncan and John Biles. If we work half as hard and have half as many wonderful ideas, this conference will surely achieve the success they have toiled for.

I would now like to turn my attention - and yours - to the business that will occupy us for the next four days. Here I will try to be as precise, and as concise, as possible. Sometimes, it is the job of a speaker to behave like a poet laureate: To inspire ... to elevate the proceedings ... and to levitate the audience to a higher plane of consciousness. I will not do this. Rainer Baubock will.

My job is to be your engineer and to describe to you the blueprints for this conference. And, as engineer, my first instruction is for you to think of this conference, and of Metropolis, as a machine. The point of this machine is to produce policy advice and policy options based on scientific research.

I will begin by presenting the core ideas which I will do in staccato fashion because many of you have heard them before, starting with the fact that:

• Migration is here to stay: all the drivers point in the direction of increasing rather than diminishing migration pressures. I take it that you all accept this or you would not be here.
• Migration poses enormous challenges and, less consensually, enormous opportunities for the rich, liberal societies that we, in this room, belong to.
• Immigrants along with the rest of us flock to cities, so, for cities to be successful - harmonious, affluent and dynamic - we will need to manage migration and its consequences in urban settings that are themselves being transformed, rewired and re-joined.
• This management will require public intervention, coordination of public and private resources and a measure of public support.
• Intervention will be necessary for all societies irrespective of national ideologies, histories and reception capacities.
• Successful interventions will require knowldedge drawn from academic research.

What Metropolis aims to do is to develop options for decision-makers to respond to migration based on sound research. Sound means multiple studies, in more than one country, often comparative. Difficult decisions will have to be made - decisions requiring political and bureaucratic courage. If we want to stoke that courage, our prescriptions will have to originate in the best knowledge we are able to generate. Anything less would not be ethical. We cannot, however, do everything at once. Migration and integration are huge fields which cover every aspect of human behaviour and institutional response. And so we have had to establish priorities and to make choices.

This conference in Zichron Yaacov is the third in our series of annual international conferences. Each has marked a stage in the maturation of Metropolis. A two minute history is in order:

At our lead off conference in Milan in 1996, we identified five key research clusters or themes. The first focussed on labour markets and issues of economic participation; the second focussed on spatial concentration - its social and economic determinants and consequences; the third focussed on social and economic mobility; the fourth on promoting societal cohesion - managing the tensions associated with intolerance and engendering equity and optimism; and the fifth focussed on cities and the nexus with integration and immigration policies. In every cluster, we committed ourselves to examining bi-directional effects between migrants and hosts, individual and institutional.

Our second international conference in Helsingor, Denmark, in 1997, allowed us to reinforce the collaborative model we had been nurturing. It helped cement our network. And our examination of ten cities in North America, Europe and Israel confirmed to us that we had chosen the right priorities in Milan.

The focus of this year’s conference in Zichron Yaacov is on management - on the challenges we face as pluralistic societies in attempting to respond creatively and positively to migration: challenges to our labour markets, to our political and educational institutions, to our health systems and, more fundamentally, to the way we view ourselves. These challenges and the policy options that are available to address them will occupy us for the next four days.

There are three questions that I would like to pose and answer before turning the conference over to you. They are the following:
(1) What makes Metropolis different from other similar projects?
(2) What makes this conference different from previous Metropolis conferences ?
(3) Where do we go from here?

I will start with the Project.

It is not our focus on cities, on urban processes or on migrants that makes Metropolis different. There are hundreds of conferences on these themes each year. What makes Metropolis unique is our emphasis on creating enduring relationships between policymakers and researchers and our efforts to develop an infrastructure to sustain these relationships .... an infrastructure that consists of committees, boards, delegates, telecommunication links, systems for informing researchers about policy concerns and systems for translating research into a language that decision makers find accessible.

Are we there yet? No we are not. Judging by our experience in Canada, we are still several years away from having a functional, active network. We are, however, on the right track and all the signs are encouraging, particularly your willingness to invest in the Project and to help create enduring relationships.

My second question concerns the conference and how it differs from the conferences in Italy and Denmark. The difference is that, until now, we have been in the business of creating appetite. This conference marks our first real attempt to sit down to a meal. Those of you who have been to previous conferences will immediately recognize this. We expect this conference to be far more purposeful and focussed than previous events .... and better intergrated: The plenaries and site visits are intended to contextualize our workshop discussions, both in theoretical and policy terms; also, our Israeli hosts have done a really good job in developing a structure for putting forward their policies and their research and in creating opportunities for us to go out and to engage their municipal representatives, their service providers and their NGO’s. This will help us to see for ourselves what their policies have accomplished and how it all works on the ground.

Still, the real difference between this conference and previous ones lies in the workshops. The workshops are intended to concentrate interest and expertise, to put flesh on bones. And here, in Zichron Yaacov, we have a complete corpus. The workshop topics span our strategic interests, those of the Project and those of the participants in this room. We attach special significance to the fact that the thirteen workshops being hosted at this conference were not created by the Project’s management bodies but rather by individual organizers, by volunteers with an interest in the topic. We think of these workshops as little factories, factories whose job it is to produce intense, focussed discussion among research and policy experts. The workshops are also a litmus test. They mark a transfer of ownership from organizers to participants.

Please note that workshop hosts are not drawing on a central pool of international money to obtain papers and recruit participants. Their support comes largely from national sources which suggests to us an emerging national consensus around the importance of international comparative research.

My third and final question concerns our next steps. Where are we heading and what do we need to do to get there? One way to get at this question is to identify what would constitute success for this conference. Here is my prescription: This conference will have been a success if it launches a number of international policy research projects involving both researchers and policy makers. It will have been a success if you leave with agreements to work together and with a plan for doing so - a plan with dates and with individuals who are responsible for advancing workshop objectives. We, and I speak here for our Steering Committee and our Secretariat, will help you.

What does this mean? It means that we, the Steering Committee, with the help of our supporters - sometimes you - need to establish systematic avenues of influence with bureaucratic and political decision makers. It means that we need to create the expectation that Metropolis will provide information on specific questions in a language that is intelligible to the policy and political community. And it means that in every country, we will need to manufacture opportunities for decision-makers to get involved in sustained dialogue with researchers. I stress this because recent thinking about how to import social science research into policy development has been focussing on the frequency and quality of interactions as the key to success. What is only beginning to emerge, however, is that interactivity needs a host, a patron. Someone or something has to promote interactions ... to identify channels ... to ensure that communications occur ... that lessons realized in one arena are transferred to another. In short, someone has to worry about connectivity.

Our aim is make Metropolis that someone ... an important and influential intermediary in the field of immigration, diversity and urban migrant integration; an intermediary with the capacity to analyze and to craft policy options; a capacity that will be made available to national governments and to international organizations. To achieve this, our present loose club will have to become better structured. The Metropolis that we hope to see emerge will require partners who are able to engage senior decison-makers; who are able to create links between policy makers and academics; and who are prepared to invest in international exchanges.

This agenda is ambitious. But remember, in three short years, we have transformed an idea into an instrumental structure. We have weathered failures. And we have found supporters. We trust that on December 3rd, you will all be among those supporters.

This conference is now in your hands.