ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some preliminary results from a literature survey of munici pal policies toward migrants in some 24 European cities and Tel Aviv. The core of the survey comprises information gathered in 17 cities during the m p m c project. Additional cities were added on the basis of existing literature and secondary sources, including several other multi-city research networks.1 This ‘database of local policies’ provided the raw material to develop a theoretical framework for comparing local policy reactions to labour migrant settlement. The result is a typology of local policies affecting labour migrants in various policy areas (including labour, education and housing), classified according to each local author ity’s attitudes towards its migrant population. Five basic types of local government attitudes are proposed, based on the concept of Host-Stranger relations as explained below. Such a framework will enable us (a) to compare what appear to be very different kinds of policies in a bewildering variety of local situations; (b) to relate these policies to a common explanatory context (Host-Stranger relations) that can be applied to all the cases.
