Responding to the ‘Refugee Crisis’ or Shaping the ‘Refugee Crisis’? Subnational Migration Policymaking as a Cause and Effect of Turbulence

Abstract

This article sheds light on the cognitive dimension of subnational migration policymaking, showing how policymakers’ subjective understandings of migration dynamics can decisively shape the responses of subnational political systems to migration. It also reveals that these responses, in turn, can play a decisive role in the emergence of policymakers’ understandings of migration dynamics, suggesting that policymaking processes can themselves produce meaning, constructing migration as a social and political problem. The paper illustrates these conceptual points by investigating the ‘heuristic case’ of three Italian regions that produced very different responses to the ‘refugee crisis’, drawing from 71 interviews with subnational policymakers.