ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes how the municipal bureaucracy became aware of the migrant presence in the first half of the 1990s and eventually persuaded the political level to acknowledge this at least as a 'temporary problem', in 1996. However, a more common determinant of local policy change appears to be electoral change. The book shows that beyond the particular conditions of any city, municipal policy responses to labour migrant settlement are comparable, indeed, are often similar. In mayor-led municipalities this means the election of a new mayor with a new agenda, as happened in Rome in 1993, Tel Aviv in 1999 and Paris in 2001. The book illustrates the continuity of an Assimilationists approach in local policy that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century.
