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How does urban migrant and refugee settlement occur in face of national inaction on immigration policy? This paper focuses on recent migration to Cairo, a Global South megacity that is home to migrants and refugees from across sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Using in-depth fieldwork, it examines the informal policies that have developed in the absence of national legislation, and explores the impact these have on: (1) the ability for individual migrants and refugees to participate socially, politically and economically; (2) the ability for civil society organizations to organize, provide social services, or engage in activism; (3) occasions when the Egyptian state will forego its hands-off approach in favour of direct intervention. This informs our understanding of the relationship between national policy, informal urban governance, and migrant and refugee settlement in the context of Global South cities, with potential applications to other urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly work on migration to Europe and North America asserts that states adopt liberal migration policies when migrants are able to mobilise and when they are assisted by state and non-state institutions. To what extent does this explanation for mobilisation transfer to the Global South where authoritarian state structures might be in place, thereby constraining certain political behaviours? This paper examines why migrants and refugees have been able to mobilise to a greater extent in Morocco than in Egypt. Drawing primarily on original data from semi-structured interviews, this paper assesses the formal and informal rules that constrain or permit certain political behaviours among non-national populations in each host state. I find that the Moroccan system has been more responsive than the Egyptian state to migrant and refugee mobilisation due primarily to the type of authoritarian governance in place. While both Egypt and Morocco seek to retain control overt opposition, the Moroccan regime since the 1990s has allowed for a degree of openness, permitting visible forms of resistance and ultimately co-opting critics, whereas Egypt – especially since 2013 – has sought to violently eliminate any form of contestation and since 2014 has also sought to limit any associational activities related to human rights promotion. The findings address the question of whether extant explanations for migrant mobilisation and subsequent policy reform travel to the Global South, and also contribute to understandings of whether and how the political mobilisation of migrants and refugees can take place in non-democratic spaces and to what effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines policies toward migrants and refugees in the transit-turned-host countries? Compared to the vast literature examining migration to Europe and North America, we know relatively little about why ‘newer’ host states pursue a liberal strategy with access to residency, employment and services on par with citizens, or what drives them to treat migrants and refugees with exclusion. This paper argues that there is a third choice: the idea of indifference-as-policy. Indifference refers to indirect action on the part of the host state, whereby a state defers to international organisations and civil society actors to provide basic services to migrants and refugees. The paper uses data collected over two years in Egypt, Morocco and Turkey to examine how this tripartite understanding of engagement maps onto empirical reality. Drawing on this analysis, the argument in this paper is two-fold. First, indifference is a strategic form of engagement utilised by host states, and that it creates a specific type of environment that allows for the de facto integration of migrants and refugees. Second, even when host states take steps toward a more liberal engagement strategy, examining policy outcomes, rather than outputs, demonstrates that indifference is still the dominant policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]