Undocumented ‘Amsterdammers’

This case study focuses upon the specific case of the Amsterdam’ policy “Uitvoeringsplan 24-uursopvang ongedocumenteerden”, published during the end of 2018. The policy is a specific plan of the municipality of Amsterdam for the sheltering and guidance of the undocumented migrants in the city. The plan focuses on temporality: the undocumented migrant is taken into the programme for a maximum of 1,5 years. During this time will be established what the future-perspective of the migrant will be. A future that could either be in the Netherlands after a juridical revision of the asylum claim, or a return to the home country. Furthermore, as the policy is part of the broader political picture of the inclusive city, the participation of migrants in the city is a strong aim of the policy as well (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2018, p.24). This raises the question: how can those who are possibly only temporarily permitted in the city, and refused to be recognised by the state to begin with, participate in and be part of the inclusive city? As this research aims to understand what meaning the policymakers and policy bureaucrats give to this policy story, as well as how they explain this both to the researcher and to themselves, I ask the question: “How do policymakers and policy bureaucrats make sense of the (temporary) participation of undocumented migrants in the inclusive city?” Following from 12 in-depth, qualitative interviews with both policymakers and policy bureaucrats involved in this policy, this research firstly explains that the respondents made sense of the participation of the undocumented migrant in the inclusive city by seeing participation as a means to reach the main goal of the plan: creating a future perspective for the undocumented migrant. However, the meaning of the inclusive city in combination with this policy was more difficult to make sense of. Firstly, as the inclusive city represented a broader vision of the municipality, and not specifically just for this policy, the policymakers and policy bureaucrats had difficulty creating a shared understanding of the concept. Furthermore, due to the given definition of the inclusive city as the acknowledgement of the migrant as a group that is part of the city, together with the focus of the plan upon a temporal residence of the individual undocumented migrant in that identity, frictions in the story can be found. The membership of the undocumented migrant to the city seems to exist in a sort of middle-ground, making it difficult for the policymakers and policy bureaucrats to make sense of this relation. Therefore, this research is meant as a moment of reflection for the respondents, as well as a call for further research, upon the complex relationship between the undocumented migrant and the city and the materialisation of this relation into policy.