ABSTRACT
Israel has experienced global challenges associated with the influx of labor and forced migrants that highlight pervasive tensions between economic liberalization and political closure. Since the mid-2000s, governmental policies have taken a restrictive turn of control and securitization, while rescaling the details of incorporating migrants to local actors. How have municipal and local actors in Tel Aviv responded to this restrictive turn? Scholarship on urban rescaling of migrants’ incorporation typically emphasizes two possible responses: cooperation or challenge. Drawing on a qualitative case study of Tel Aviv, we argue that national restrictive policies have not transformed the city into either a defiant sanctuary or a compliant subsidiary of state policing; they rather resulted in contradictory trends that accommodate challenge with compliance.
As we show, contrary to their explicit aim, restrictive policies have allowed urban actors to renegotiate the role of the state, expanding the organizational infrastructure dealing with migrants’ incorporation, and bringing to greater involvement of national actors. On the other hand, they also changed the urban logics of incorporation from a proactive paradigm of “community empowerment” to a reactive one of “emergency” in ways that both reflect and reinforce the precarious condition of migrants. Seeing rescaling as a multidirectional and open-ended form of power restructuration opens up for making sense of the paradoxes of migration control and their effects on local actors.
