by Jovana Ostojic – No Way Home? An event organised by Erasmus University Rotterdam on European asylum and return policies on Friday, March 13th, 2026 in Rotterdam.
Migration policy in Europe is mostly made at the national level — or increasingly at the European level. Governments in The Hague, Berlin, and Brussels set the rules: who can stay, who must leave, how long the process takes, what rights people have while they wait.
But the consequences of those rules land somewhere else entirely. They land in cities. In shelters, schools, and hospitals. In streets where people who have fallen through every gap in the system end up sleeping.
Some cities have been dealing with this for a long time. A few of them have figured out what actually works. And almost none of that knowledge is making its way into the rooms where policy is made.
What makes Utrecht different
Jan Braat is a senior policy adviser on migration and inclusion. He works in Utrecht — and Utrecht, he explained at the event, is not like most Dutch cities when it comes to migration.
In 2010, Utrecht formally adopted what is called a Human Rights City framework. This means the city committed itself — in its governance, in its policies, in the way it organises its services — to treating the universal human rights framework as the standard for how it deals with all of its residents. All of them. Including people without legal status.
The city built a Local Human Rights Coalition, bringing together NGOs, civil society organisations, politicians, policy officers, scientists, and businesses. Over the years that followed, this produced a wide range of concrete policies: a Children’s Rights Agenda, LGBTQ+ inclusion programmes, anti-discrimination work, and — critically — a Refugee City designation with a sustained commitment to supporting undocumented migrants.
The Hague and Rotterdam have no equivalent designation. That is not a small difference. It means that Utrecht has a formal, institutionalised foundation for doing things that other cities find politically impossible — and that it can defend those choices across changes in national government, because they are anchored in something deeper than any single political majority.
The cost argument — and why it is not the main point
Braat is direct about the economics.
“If you invest in homelessness prevention and that costs six million, it will save you at least twelve million. We can demonstrate, with our data, that this approach works and that it is cost-efficient.” — Jan Braat, senior policy adviser on migration and inclusion, Utrecht
This argument matters, and it opens political doors that purely moral arguments sometimes cannot. When you can show a sceptical politician that inclusive policies save public money — through reduced emergency healthcare, less street homelessness, better public order, lower long-term social costs — the conversation changes.
But the cost argument is a consequence of the Human Rights City approach, not its foundation. Utrecht does not help undocumented migrants because it has calculated that doing so is cheaper. It helps them because it has made a commitment that all people living in the city have rights that the city will protect. The cost saving is a result of doing the right thing — not the reason for it.
That distinction matters. A policy built only on cost calculations can be dismantled the moment someone produces different numbers. A policy built on a rights commitment is much harder to undo — and Utrecht’s track record shows this. The approach has survived multiple changes in national government, including some that were significantly more hostile to migrants than the city’s own approach.
Building political support across the spectrum
One of the questions Braat gets asked most often is how Utrecht maintains political support for inclusive policies when migration is so contested at national level. His answer is instructive.
The policies are not framed as being for migrants. They are framed as being for the city.
When Utrecht invests in addressing homelessness — which disproportionately affects undocumented people but is not exclusively about them — the benefits reach everyone who uses public spaces. When the city ensures children can go to school regardless of their parents’ status, it invests in the social fabric of neighbourhoods. When it ensures access to healthcare for people without papers, it protects public health for the whole population. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this last point became particularly obvious: a city that vaccinated everyone, regardless of their legal status, had better public health outcomes.
This framing — inclusive policy as locally beneficial, not nationally divisive — is what allows Utrecht to bring along politicians who are not instinctively sympathetic to migrants’ rights. It is not compromise or evasion. It is a genuine insight: the things that help vulnerable people in a city tend to help everyone.
The governance problem
The frustration underneath all of this was given a sharper edge by another voice in the room: Tabasum Westra-van Til, spokesperson Asylum of a coalition party and migration researcher, University of Amsterdam. She brings a perspective that is unusual in this debate — someone who sits both in the academic world of migration science and in the political world where local policy is actually made and defended.
Her point was direct. Local governments are dealing with the consequences of decisions made at national and European level — decisions they had no role in making. When the national government cuts legal aid, speeds up return procedures, or reduces support for people waiting for a decision, those changes do not happen in a vacuum. They happen to real people, in real places, who then show up in municipal services, city-funded shelters, and emergency healthcare.
“We are working with the end result of ill-equipped policies. It ends on our streets and we have to deal with it. And our experience and our empirical data are not being taken into account.” — Tabasum Westra-van Til, spokesperson Asylum of a coalition party and migration researcher, University of Amsterdam
This is a governance failure as much as a migration failure. Utrecht and cities like it have 25 years of evidence about what works: which interventions reduce long-term costs, which approaches build enough trust to make case management possible, which policies simply push problems out of sight without resolving them.
That evidence is not making it into national policy in any systematic way. The people who know the most about what migration policy produces in practice have the least influence over how it is designed. And Westra-van Til’s position — straddling the local council chamber and the university — illustrates exactly why that gap is so costly: the knowledge exists. It simply is not being heard.
What other cities can do
Utrecht’s Human Rights City model is not just a local story. It is a template. Other cities can adopt the same framework — the formal commitment, the cross-sector coalition, the embedding of rights into governance. Some already have. The network of Human Rights Cities is growing, and the model has been shown to work across different political environments.
Braat’s call is for those cities to connect more actively — to build coalitions that can take their evidence to national parliaments and European institutions and say, clearly: we are dealing with the consequences of your policies. Here is what we have learned. Here is what works. And here is the cost of ignoring us.
The city is not just a victim of national policy. It is also a source of knowledge that national policy urgently needs. Finding ways to bring that knowledge into the rooms where decisions are made is one of the most practical things that could be done to improve migration governance in Europe right now.