Metropolis: an Agenda for the Future 
Demetrios G. Papademetriou
Metropolis co-chair, USA
International Migration Policy Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA

The metropolis rationale and context

The complexity of international migration guarantees that its recent placement at or near the center of policy and political debates throughout the advanced industrial world will continue into the next century. That complexity stems in part from the process multiple trade-offs, which pose almost as many challenges as they present opportunities; in part from immigration s even more complicated distributional effects; and in part from the fact that those effects, as well as the effects of a government s (or a community s) responses to them, are also distributed unequally among different levels of government, across otherwise discrete policy domains (such as various economic and social policy realms), and among society s constituent groups.

At its most general level, Metropolis was conceived as a process and a vehicle for identifying a set of coherent responses to one dimension of international migration s most elusive effects: those on the receiving societies cities and their residents. Its point of departure is that there exists a common set of urgent, migration-related issues, centered on the interactive effects of international migration on our large urban centers, where most immigrants are found. The process of understanding these effects better and devising appropriate responses to them would benefit enormously from systematic research on different cities within and across national borders. Success in that quest would lay the foundation not only for more thoughtful and measured responses to immigration, but, through them, also for the more successful pursuit of the associated public policy goals of good governance and social peace.

The importance we attached to the effort is best understood by making explicit one of Metropolis key antecedent judgments: that the long-term viability of many of our societies in the next century may be more contingent upon solving the immigration puzzle (and particularly the immigration/integration nexus) than most of us may appreciate. Hence Metropolis interest in re-introducing in a forceful and systematic way the urban into immigration research. This requires that we should treat the urban environment (its cultural, social, political, and economic facets) not just as a space in which immigrants just happen to live, but as one with which immigrants are always in a dynamic relationship. Put differently, the experiences immigrants encounter in urban settings shape their opportunities just as their presence produces social, cultural, and economic changes not to mention political reactions that in turn alter the urban fabric.

The resulting dynamic becomes even more unpredictable when taking into account the fact that large cities are also where some of the more intractable fault-lines of late 20th century are most pronounced and are felt most anxiously from deepening fiscal crises and enduring economic uncertainties to the human effects of competition in the global economy.

To recapitulate, Metropolis is a joint, cooperative and comparative international enterprise that focuses on addressing this problematique. In its commitment to reflect the interests and priorities of all its partners, Metropolis offers a simple yet ambitious promise: to create a framework for the systematic analysis (and a process for assimilating its results) of the effects of immigration on some of our largest and most vibrant cities cities that are simultaneously experiencing the interrelated effects of such immense social and economic forces as technological change, deeply liberalized international trade (and its effect in accelerating economic and labor market changes and exacerbating the social effects of such changes), growing physical and social infrastructure needs, increasing fiscal deficits, and increasing inequality. Most critically, perhaps, these forces are released in the midst of a brewing social and cultural crisis that for many Metropolis partners seems to challenge the very foundations of the social compact on which western social democracy has been built.

For Metropolis to succeed in another of its underlying objectives contributing to the improved integration of our societies it is essential that while we try to better understand the pluribus, we do not lose sight of the importance of the unum; put differently, that as we study immigrants and immigration we constantly keep in mind the interests and priorities of the broader society. Exploring the complex interaction between newcomers and a city s other residents is critical because successful cities now and in the future must understand better and exploit more systematically immigration s potential benefits (economic, social, demographic, or in terms of revitalizing the physical infrastructure) while at the same time controlling and attenuating or at least managing more effectively immigration s adverse effects (crowding, segregation, competition among marginalized groups for resources of all types, and the like).

Seeking to understand better such critical concepts as integration, membership, and citizenship always in the context of a country or city unique history or traditions also underpins the philosophy behind the Metropolis effort and promises to have the broadest possible appeal to a wide variety of stakeholders and constituencies. Among them are policymakers and program administrators seeking answers that work to complex public policy challenges; NGOs seeking ideas on how to negotiate constantly shifting political terrains; immigration/ethnic group leaders trying to understand why the terms of the debate regarding their groups or issues have changed so dramatically; researchers seeking knowledge for knowledge sake particularly cross-cultural and comparative knowledge; those responsible for generating options and evaluating ideas for their political principal; policy makers and politicians who want to understand better the issue of the movement of people and its effects on their portfolio/constituency; finally, and in one sense most importantly, anyone

who appreciates the fact that all of the societies represented in Milan are multiethnic societies yet is concerned that in certain fundamental ways particularly in the way they make critical decisions about the allocation of public resources they may be neither sufficiently democratic nor plural.

Setting strategic research priorities

The quality of the broader international comparative work will rest heavily not only on careful and multidisciplinary research designs and data collection efforts, but also on leaving behind as many as possible of our philosophical assumptions about immigration s value, as well as our intellectual and methodological preconceptions about how to measure its effects. Yet, even the most ambitious and well-funded research endeavor must by necessity make choices among many worthwhile research topics. In a joint effort that includes research teams from more than a dozen countries representing virtually all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, choosing the few topic areas on which the Metropolis partners will devote most of their energies in the next five years inevitably excludes some important research areas; it also fails to do full justice to the intellectual energy and hard work the Milan Working Groups have put into developing and ordering research priorities.

I am humbled by that realization. In the choices that I am proposing below, I have attempted to emphasize themes that lend themselves most readily to comparative cross-national investigation including joint research, parallel research, and iterative case-study research that carefully extracts knowledge from work about which generalizations must be made with extreme care while maintaining the sharpest possible focus on what are most obviously common critical policy and political challenges. In my view, these may be the best preconditions for learning from one another most effectively.

Three years ago, when Meyer Burstein and I began our conversations about what eventually became the Metropolis project, we committed to making the idea compelling enough to persuade people like you of the value of a cooperative, cross-national, and comparative policy-relevant research exercise that would focus on the bi-directional effects between immigrants and cities. Whenever possible, immigrants would be disaggregated analytically by such factors as immigration status, ethnicity, human capital characteristics, demographic characteristics (especially gender), time of immigration, spatial location, location in the labor market, and the location of the economic sectors in which they are concentrating in the broader domestic and international economy. Similarly, cities and their residents would be themselves disaggregated to their constituent spatial, political/administrative, economic, social, and demographic elements.

Your presence here and your engagement for the past three days suggest that we have succeeded. More importantly, however, they suggest that another task that Metropolis had to accomplish between its first planning meeting thirteen months ago and today the critical task of turning what was seen at that time (with some skepticism, as some of you may recall) as too much of a North American initiative into an initiative wholly owned by the Metropolis partners has now also been attained. As of Milan, Metropolis reflects the interests and priorities of all of its constituting partners. Furthermore, as the presentations and commentary of so many senior policymakers has made clear, Metropolis is already creating expectations and, to put it perhaps inelegantly, already developing a consumer base.

Research clusters

A. Immigrant labor market and economic participation issues
The primacy of issues related to immigrant labor market and economic participation cannot be emphasized enough. Not only are these critical for the successful economic incorporation of immigrants but, perhaps even more critically, for their effect in shaping the host public s view of immigrants as net contributors to and creators of additional public assets, rather than as net consumers of such assets that is, as economic and social resources rather than as economic and social liabilities. The following research questions are particularly urgent.

1. Labor market and economic contributions of immigrants. In addition to studies on the economic progress of immigrants, this question should also examine the degree to which immigrants may be importing significant amounts of both human and physical capital, their contributions to business and job creation, and their role in trade openings and the revitalization of city neighborhoods.
2. Labor market competition and adverse job opportunity and wage effects especially on a society s marginalized groups. The issues of immigration s effect on the ability of other marginalized groups to advance economically and of immigrants contributions to the informal and underground economy require particular and sensitive attention.
3. Immigration and municipal budgets. Related to the previous points is the impact of immigration on municipal budgets. This requires looking at taxation and revenue generation through the consumption of goods and private sector services, and business formation, as well as through these activities attendant forward and backward economic linkages. It also requires looking at expenditures (in the form of the consumption of public sector services and benefits).
4. Labor market responses to immigration. The mutual adaptation of labor markets responding to the supply of labor, and of the supply of labor responding to the conditions and preferences of labor markets, require closer investigation. (In this regard, it must be kept in mind that neither the feminization of much recent immigration nor the heavy male dominance of earlier flows have been incidental.)
5. Immigration and economic restructuring. It is as important to study how immigrants in some instances facilitate economic restructuring as it is to investigate their role in prolonging the transition period or even impeding or retarding the entire process. In either case, the role immigrants play in that process holds important implications for a country s economic competitiveness and becomes an important measure of immigration s overall effects on the host society. (The critical policy question in this regard becomes whether and how immigration policies might facilitate an orderly restructuring process.)
6. Immigration and low skilled jobs. Among the key analytical issues in this regard is who takes the low-skilled jobs that are continually produced in even the most advanced economies in the relative absence of immigrants, and the role of the welfare state and government policy in this process.

B. Immigrant spatial concentration and its social and economic determinants and consequences
Immigrant physical segregation and spatial concentration are among the most challenging issues arising from large-scale immigration. The development of immigrant enclaves affects the ability of immigrants to become socially and economically integrated; these enclaves frequent characterization in the popular press as ghettoes also affects the perceptions of immigrants by the host population. As such, issues surrounding such concentration demand priority attention by the Metropolis research teams. The following are a sample of the questions such teams might address.

1. Types and evaluation of concentration. What are the types of immigrant spatial concentration across the Metropolis partners? What are the advantages and disadvantages of concentration for immigrants and other residents?
2. Causes and effects of concentration (part I). Specifically, is spatial concentration the result of voluntary preferences by immigrant groups who opt to organize themselves in enclaves so as to combat their exclusion, protect themselves socially and culturally, and advance economically by using ethnic resources to maximum advantage? Or is it the precursor/predictor of such social pathologies as marginalization, troubled intergroup relations, disaffiliation, and fragmentation? How does spatial concentration affects the pattern of immigrant interactions both with the broader host population but particularly with other ethnic and marginalized groups?
3. Causes and effects of concentration (part II). Looking at the issue from a different perspective, is spatial concentration the result of exclusionary policies and the effect of public and private discriminatory practices by the host society (the result of unequal access to housing, jobs, social goods and resources, etc.)? Or is it a rational process that uses ethnic solidarity as a transition belt to eventual broader societal integration?

C. Immigrant Mobility
An expanding body of literature, as well as impressionistic evidence, suggest that upward mobility may becoming an increasingly distant goal for immigrants and especially their children. This emerging hypothesis must be tested analytically in as many settings as possible as the first step to addressing the issue as a public policy challenge.

1. Education and language training. If education is the key to mobility, what are our critical successes and failures in these areas? And since host language acquisition is a necessary precondition to economic survival and social and economic mobility, how do we teach immigrants and their children that language most effectively? How can we appraise the effectiveness of different models of teaching the host language, such as immersion, bilingual education as a transition to mainstreaming (i.e., education in the host language), and the various models of multi-culturalism?
2. Obstacles to mobility. What are the obstacles to the mobility of immigrants and their children and how are these obstacles ranked in each research site? Is it the way local labor markets are organized, a locational mismatch between where the jobs are and where the immigrants are concentrated, public and private acts of discrimination, inadequate or otherwise inappropriate kinds of human capital endowments (education/skills/language) or accurate information about the local economy and the host social and political system? Is it a lack of other resources that contribute to economic advancement? Is it a public philosophy and attendant public policies that are too hands off in labor market issues or perhaps too involved in them? Is it the effect of trade liberalization and technological matters that make many low-knowledge/ technology content manufacturing jobs both poorly paid and redundant?
3. Variations in integration levels. Even the casual observer notes that different immigrant groups attain different levels of success in their ability to integrate. What accounts for the more or less complete (successful) integration of different groups? Race? Ethnicity? Religion? Immigration status (including whether newcomers are formally viewed as a minority, or as a returning ethnic, or as an immigrant)? The place of different groups in the labor market?
4. Enhancing mobility prospects. What enhances immigrant mobility in ways that are both effective and socially responsible? Is it the adoption of special programs for immigrants? The creation of level playing fields without regard to ethnicity? Or the systematic provision of social services, education or training for all people who need transitional or remedial assistance?
5. Ethnic entrepreneurship and mobility. Is ethnic entrepreneurship more of a mobility or a survival strategy? A pathway to advancement or an avenue of last resort? Are there public policy measures such as rudimentary feasibility and location-decision assistance, information and technical assistance, or assistance with modest seed loans and certain types of regulatory relief that can facilitate business creation and survival? Do these policies work?
6. Formal and informal labor markets and mobility. Is the formal or informal labor market the better path to mobility considering immigrant characteristics in each study site? What are the advantages and limitations of each path? What mediating role can societal (and especially community) institutions play when either of these pathways begins to fragment?
7. The children of immigrants and mobility. What is an accurate and neutral way of portraying and analyzing the issues surrounding the mobility of the children of immigrants each of our societies future citizens/workers? Are we in need of new conceptual tools? (The second generation of immigrants concept in use in some European contexts may be too politically and ideologically loaded, while the relative research void on the mobility of children of immigrants in North America may be partly the result of a priori judgments about that generation s success that are not particularly useful either in an analytical or a public policy context.) How well/poorly are we doing with the integration and mobility of the children of immigrants and what are some of the initiatives of note in each research site? What are the critical reciprocal impacts of immigrants on schools and of schools (including educational theory and philosophy) on the aspirations of and opportunities for this cohort? How does one deal with mobility challenges; that is, what are the critical elements of success or failure in the social, cultural, health, and economic advancement of this generation?

D. Promoting societal cohesion
The unambiguous thrust of the remarks of Canadian Minister Sergio Marchi on the first day of the Conference was that the alternative to failing to work always toward (and making progress toward achieving) the societal integration of newcomers is not only to miss an opportunity to benefit from immigration but, more importantly, to risk creating different classes of membership in our societies and, eventually, to affect adversely societal cohesion. Tolerance, inclusion, equality, effective inter-group relations, hope, and cohesion, are thus not abstractions or lofty ideals that any of our societies has the luxury of ignoring they are indispensable elements of successful multi-ethnic societies. That canon holds regardless of whether our national mythologies have caught up with that reality or our politicians acknowledge it, for all of us involved in the Metropolis project are members of multi-ethnic societies.

1. Promoting inclusion (and rejecting exclusion). How can public institutions public schools, bureaucracies, public service delivery agencies, police and judicial systems, political parties promote inclusion (and reject exclusion) more effectively? What roles do (and can) private institutions such as unions, individual employers and their associations, banking institutions, churches and other social assistance agencies, foundations, and self-help and mutual-aid organizations play in both these areas and in offering the necessary mediation and conflict prevention/resolution services?
2. Addressing exclusion. The inevitable other side to social cohesion and tolerance are exclusion and intolerance. Social exclusion spans issues of physical segregation, social and cultural discrimination, marginalization, and the absence of, or reduction in, economic opportunities. It ignores the critical fact that immigration not only entails a process of social, economic and cultural growth for immigrants but also for their hosts. Combating social exclusion (and the racism and discrimination that typically accompanies it) is a priority for all our societies. How does one better understand and ultimately treat/remedy the antonyms of the critical elements of inclusion listed above e.g., intolerance, exclusion, inequality, racism, ethnic-based discrimination, hopelessness, inter-group conflict, and disaffiliation?
3. Public attitudes toward immigration. The rise of negative public attitudes toward immigration is one of the defining social and political phenomena of the twentieth century s last decade and one of the most troubling. What forms does this reaction take in Metropolis partnering countries? Is the reaction a passing phase or has it become socially and politically embedded? What in the host society (such as the language or behavior of governmental or non-governmental opinion leaders and/or the language and behavior of immigrants) cause and fuel such attitudes, and what defuses them? What effects has immigration had on each research site s civic and political life? Has it contributed to rising social tensions? To a perception of increased insecurity, crime, and a sense of a breakdown in civil society? (Do the facts on the relationship between immigration and these social ills conform with these perceptions?) How can these attitudes and reactions be addressed in a positive way? How can an informed and honest public discourse on this issue take place without the charges of extremism and the recriminations that have defined recent debates ?

E. Cities and the nexus between integration and immigration policies
Cities are undeniably the ground zero of immigration policies the place where immigration and integration policies meet. It is in cities that competition for often scarce resources occurs (from housing and social goods, to jobs, education, and political power) and where the real laboratory is found for testing different models of living together successfully as members of a community with shared purposes and goals that emphasize the "we" more than the "I" or the "they". Since cities, then, are the crucibles of integration, it is important that we assess their capacity for performing this critical (and traditional) role.

1. Cities and integration. Are cities as capable of integrating newcomers today as they were in earlier times? If they are not, (i) what are the specific areas in which they are falling behind and (ii) what accounts for that change in their integration capacity? Are there any innovative ways for successfully incorporating newcomers into the social, economic, and political life of our research sites? What are some of the programs and initiatives to feel most encouraged by?
2. Commitment to integration. On the assumption that the ability to integrate newcomers effectively is as much a matter of good models, solid research, and fiscal resources, as of public attitudes a public commitment, as it were, to the value of integration is there any evidence in the research sites of changes in public attitudes about such a commitment? Are there some concrete examples of such a change positive or negative? How can they be evaluated in terms of both causes and effects?
3. Involving cities in decisions about immigration policy. In many of the Metropolis countries, there has been a trend toward a pronounced devolution of authority from national-level to lower-level administrative units. Has that shift in the locus of authority translated in cities having more influence formal or informal in shaping national immigration policies and programs? Since most effects of national immigration policies are local, would bringing cities into consultations about immigration policies ultimately produce different immigration or integration results? Put differently, do local and municipal interests diverge a priori from national interests with regard to immigration policy? (Are the outlooks of cities too shortsighted and parochial to be able to accommodate the mix of challenges and opportunities immigration presents?) Are there different models in this regard, and have they produced different outcomes?

Conclusion: addressing the research/policy nexus

The central goal of Metropolis is to provide a framework for comparative and cross-national research results to shape the policy debate enough so as to lead to better policies. The starting point for achieving this goal is by asking policy-relevant research questions and identifying, examining, and evaluating best policy practices for policy makers to consider as policy options. In practical terms, and at its most ambitious, Metropolis aims at being able to outline for the most relevant policymaker a minister, a mayor, a city-manager, or an administrator of a major program the major options available to him or her with regard to a relevant issue and the most likely effect and implications of each option on the basis of more than one study, in more than one country/city/ research site, in more than one country. This would be the ultimate meaning of best policy practices as envisioned by Metropolis. Meeting this ambition even in part will require great foresight and imagination (even luck), as well as extraordinary amounts of patience and planning.

Among the preliminary objectives that we must set for ourselves and that each one of us must meet fully are the following:

1. Our research must produce robust results that can withstand the scrutiny of those who are likely to oppose the policy implications of the findings.
2. 2a. We must collectively shed the traditional reticence of many academicresearchers to tease out and discuss explicitly the policy implications of their research. Failure to do so would not only betray the expectations of several of the Metropolis constituencies but would allow others with their own political agendae to interpret the results of Metropolis research.
3. 2b. We must, in fact, go even a step further and become advocates for sound, reasonably presented, and neutrally worded yet firmly stated policy options.
4. Our conduct in planning and carrying out our research must itself demonstrate the overall project s aims of inclusiveness, access, and the promotion of shared objectives. In pursuing those aims, we must attempt to incorporate from the planning stage a built-in outreach component cultivate a client-base, as it were that will help shape the research (within normal objectivity and independence tolerance levels). This client-base will be able to understand and take ownership of the process, will be a willing and eager consumer, and might even advocate the research results. If we are successful in most of these goals, it would become a much smaller step to capturing our multiple constituencies attention, bringing them back to the annual Metropolis conferences and Metropolis-sponsored events, and expecting them to listen, contribute, and learn.

To an extraordinary degree, then, the realization of the international policy ambitions of Metropolis hinges on the success of each partner s domestic research planning and execution effort and on each partner’s ability to keep their policymakers interested on their work. What Metropolis offers is the framework and infrastructure that can sustain this interest as it were, building and maintaining the bridge which policymakers and other key stakeholders must cross in order to reap the benefits of Metropolis. Unless the domestic research both builds a solid, reliable, and distinguished research record, and develops and nurtures a habit of a dialogue between researchers and policymakers, attracting senior policymakers to Metropolis and having them listen to and become consumers of the international effort s results will be much more difficult.

The goal of attracting the sustained interest of senior policymakers will also become more achievable if the proper intermediaries are attracted to and become committed to the Metropolis objectives. By intermediaries I have in mind those who guard the intersections between research and policy and who, by controlling the access points to senior policymakers, can either facilitate or severely hamper the realization of the Metropolis international policy objectives. This applies equally to those among the Metropolis partners with well-developed and coordinated policy development processes such as Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, or France, to name a few but particularly to those that invest much less in policy coordination and may require, as a result, a more sustained effort from the rest of us. In all cases, we must expect to work very hard to be policy relevant in full knowledge that three canons will always militate against our meeting that goal: (a) the timetables of policy and research are hardly ever parallel and are almost never co-terminous; (b) the angles of observation of researchers and many policymakers (and almost all politicians) are typically different; and (c) researchers and policymakers can only rarely anticipate correctly and meet the timetable of politics.

In closing, let me emphasize once again one by-now obvious dictum: before we can turn the full promise of Metropolis into reality, before we can reap the policy fruits of the project’s international comparative value, we must first generate unimpeachable knowledge domestically.