Relational city actorness in global migration governance: A comparative analysis of Dallas and San Diego

Abstract

Chinese

This article examines the—to date, relatively sparsely researched—role of US cities as international actors in migration governance by employing a comparative study of San Diego and Dallas from 2017 to 2024. Situated within a national context marked by fluctuant and highly partisan federal and state level migration policies, this study explores how Dallas and San Diego create agency and establish actorness within a policy venue traditionally viewed as the domain of the nation state. To do so, this article takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literature from urban studies, international relations, and migration studies to theorize city actorness as a dynamic relational construct. Despite divergent state-level—restraining versus permissive—political contexts and local characteristics, both cities actively engage in migration governance, from local to global levels. Following a three-level analysis—local, transnational, and global—findings demonstrate that both San Diego and Dallas have adopted institutional infrastructure, citizen engagement, narrative framing, legal and symbolic contestation of federal/state level migration policy, national and transnational network engagement, and mayoral leadership as key strategies through which they engage in global migration governance. Moreover, the case study highlights how San Diego’s and Dallas’s geographic, economic and political embeddedness shape the cities’ strategies to navigate and influence existing migration governance structures and agenda-setting despite lacking formal international legal status. The cases also reveal that city engagement is driven not only by practical governance concerns but also by commitments to international norms and standards.

Keywords

city actorness city diplomacy migration governance networked agency relational cities US cities

Introduction

Cities are on the frontlines of navigating citizens through collective action problems, such as migration. Within the domain of migration governance, and especially where national policies often remain unable to address local issues (Emmanuel, 2020), such as guaranteeing migrants non-discriminatory access to public services, providing housing, and developing successful integration policies, cities have taken the lead. They not only foster effective on-the-ground policy action but also merge the traditionally rather disconnected realms of the local (integration) and the national (migration policy). While functioning as top-down policy implementors, they also develop independent integration strategies and feed local perspectives into (inter)national debates on migration, through formal and informal channels. For example, US cities have formally established dialogue with federal policymakers through the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM).

In this vein, cities have emerged as global actors and developed “their own agency in international governance” (Stürner and Bendel, 2019: 219). While much of the migration related literature has primarily focused on cities and city networks in Europe (Caponio, 2018; Caponio and Jones-Correra, 2018) and, to a lesser extent, in the Global South (Stürner-Siovitz, 2021; Zhang et al., 2020), this article contributes to the debate of cities’ emerging global actorness in migration governance within the US context through a comparative case study of San Diego and Dallas ranging from 2017 until 2024. The cases were chosen on the grounds of being broadly comparable mid-sized economic hubs with similar immigrant shares yet embedded in sharply different state-level political contexts and geographies, allowing for structured comparison of city strategies under contrasting constraints. Notably, through initiatives such as Obama’s Senior Advisor for Global Cities (DoS Archives, n.d.) or Biden’s Subnational Diplomacy Unit (Lewis et al., 2021), the US government has repeatedly formally recognized US cities’ diplomatic capabilities. Hence, US cities offer a distinctive institutional and political context in which to examine cities’ negotiation of agency and global actorness amid tensions between national sovereignty, state-level policies, cities’ domestic policies and migration diplomacy.

Dallas and San Diego serve as insightful cases to analyze how state-level political cultures, policies, and geographical differences may result in different strategies for migration governance despite overarching national migration policy frameworks. The two cases inhibit both striking similarities and notable differences. Both cities are comparably large economic hubs (yet smaller than US mega cities such as Los Angeles or New York) and have similar shares of migrants, around 25% (American Immigration Council & City of Dallas (AIC), 2024; Census (US Census Bureau), 2023). Dallas is home to the US’s third busiest airport (FAA, 2024) and serves as a as migrant receiving city—both from within and outside of the US (Decker, 2023; Moslimani and Passel, 2024)—in a US-Mexico border state known for its restrictive migration policies, preemption of “sanctuary” cities, and border militarization (Operation Lone Star (OLS), n.d.; Riverstone-Newell, 2017; SB4, 2017; Schragger, 2021). Contrary to Texas, California put forward migrant-welcoming policies (SB54), highlighting fundamentally different state-level policies that might restrain or enable city engagement in migration governance. Additionally, San Diego encompasses the country’s busiest land port of entry, San Ysidro (BTS, 2025), primarily serving as a migrant reception hub and point of transit (Martín Gil, 2024). Drawing on these cases, this article examines where these cities are positioned within the field of global migration governance (GMG), how and why they assert themselves on the international stage, and teases out larger implications of city engagement in this field.

To do so, this article relies on the concept of relationality as a hinge between urban studies, international relations (IR)—as laid out in the framing paper of this special issue—and migration studies, viewing city-actorness as inherently relational in a field that is inherently multilevel and transnational. Within urban studies, a relational approach views cities as nodes not only embedded in global flows of human and economic capital (Sassen, 2005) and governance structures but as actively shaping and shaped by social, economic, and institutional relations (McCann and Ward, 2011). Drawing on Massey’s (2011) conceptions of relationality and territoriality, this article views places as relationally constructed, constantly evolving (over time), and open to contestation and re-definition. Her argument highlights the dual positioning of cities at the local and trans-local levels, which implies an urgency to understand their spatial, political, and social entanglements that, in a globalized world, stretch across national borders.

Similarly, with growing rates of urbanization and a “global trend of decentralization” (Grandi, 2020: 8), IR scholarship has developed influential approaches to better reflect actor plurality, such as multilevel governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2001; on migration: Panizzon and Van Riemsdijk, 2019) and the rescaling debate (Swyngedouw, 2004). These approaches remain valuable as migration remains “one of the most striking contemporary manifestations of globalization” (Betts, 2011: 7). Since migration governance scholarship has traditionally focused on geographical borders and border control, resulting in a fixation on (a tension between) national security and economic interests (see Hollifield’s, 2004: “liberal paradox”), conceptualizing city agency and actorness as relationally constructed helps capture how cities navigate, contest, and leverage the transnational character of migration governance.

Building on this complexity of migration governance and the positioning of cities within it, I will subsequently theorize how and through which strategies city actorness is created within this policy domain. Moving into the empirical part, this paper follows a three-level comparative analysis of Dallas and San Diego. First, I will discuss the cities’ strategies in migration governance at the local level, including immigrant affairs offices, strategic plans, national network engagement, and narrative framing. Second, I will discuss their engagement at the transnational level, including the institutionalization of city diplomacy and cross-border collaboration. Third, I will analyze Dallas’s and San Diego’s engagement at the global stage, primarily through global city networks. At each level, I will highlight the strategies most prominently employed by both cities and discuss parallels as well as potential differences and the factors that might explain them.

Conceptualizing actorness and introducing the cases

This section bridges the literature and the empirical analysis by conceptually detangling relational actorness and placing it within the framework of the Dallas-San Diego case study design. Building on Hocking’s (1999) call to reconceptualize international actorness beyond traditional state-centric criteria “sovereignty, territory, population, and recognition,” toward a focus on “the capacity to pursue a ‘foreign policy’” (p.21), this article frames city-actorness as relational rather than purely constitutional. Cities derive their agency not only from legal constitutional frameworks, but also through meaningful interaction with other actors (Stürner-Siovitz, 2022; Quin, 2016).

Traditional approaches to para- and city diplomacy emphasize strategic diplomatic behavior, suggesting that local governments engage internationally for various strategic, and problem-solving oriented/pragmatic reasons, oftentimes to fill governance gaps left by national governments and to secure strategic partnerships or even political leverage when domestic environments are hostile (Smith, 2019; Zepeda, 2018). These works thus conceptualize city diplomacy as “not an end in itself but a means to strengthen local competences and local programs […] by having an arm outside” (Tavares, 2016: 31), that is, as an instrumental, intentional action, oriented toward pragmatic governance needs, goals, and political objectives.

However, such strategic engagement is analytically distinct from what I conceptualize as relational positioning, that is, the recognitional processes through which cities acquire actorness. Cities become meaningful actors not simply by way of pursuing specific diplomatic strategies, but because those very strategies (both diplomatic and local) generate recognition, role expectations, and identity politics (Gordon and Ljungqvist, 2021) of cities embedded within multilevel governance structures. Actorness is thus co-produced through interactions with other cities, states, international organizations (IOs), and city networks.

Merging these two concepts, relational city actorness, then, refers to the ways in which agency and actorness emerge from mutual engagement, recognition, discursive positioning, and a relational production of authority. Especially in the realm of migration governance, cities’ dual positioning as top-down implementors and bottom-up innovators underscores a dynamic whereby city actorness is relationally produced, and whereby cities are simultaneously active shapers and shaped by multilevel governance processes.

On the international level, scholarship maps various ways in which city agency is operationalized, all of which presuppose a certain amount of human and economic capital: opening international or trade offices, signing interinstitutional agreements (e.g., Memoranda of Understanding [MoUs]), hosting international events (and city-branding), or participating in transnational networks (Grandi, 2020; Tavares, 2016; Zepeda, 2018). Among these, the most consequential tend to be city-to-city and, especially, network engagement (Lecavalier and Gordon, 2020), as they enable cities to pursue “collective representation” and advocate for formal “institutional participation” (Stürner-Siovitz, 2022: 142–143). As particularly issue-specific city networks generate a certain amount of expert authority (Lecavalier and Gordon, 2020), cities generate legitimate claims to a voice in GMG.

On the local/national level, following the “dual” positioning’ of cities inherently ascribes some agency to cities as they are on the frontlines of addressing migration-related challenges. As this article views city actorness as relationally established from the local to the global level, it considers “local public engagement and communication strateg[ies],” (Grandi, 2020: 24) given that a city’s “source of authority to join international society does not emanate from the State […],” but from its constituency (Manfredi-Sánchez, 2021: 66). Here, narrative framing becomes a central mechanism through which city actorness is produced. Framing processes—how issues are named, interpreted, and linked to broader values—shape whether and how migration “problems” gain salience and legitimacy in the multilevel systems cities are embedded in (Flusberg et al., 2024; Stürner-Siovitz and Heimann, 2023). Moreover, cities act as norm entrepreneurs, drawing on human rights and refugee protection standards while rearticulating them in locally resonant terms (e.g., inclusion as an economic development strategy), oftentimes divergent from national level policies and narratives (Oomen, 2019; Stürner and Bendel, 2019; Zapata-Barrero, 2024). Following Zimmermann’s (2025) account of circular localization, these local reinterpretations of international norms do not necessarily present a dead-end but can travel laterally to other local contexts and upward into international fora, reshaping broader normative frameworks.

Against this conceptual backdrop, I ask whether Dallas and San Diego have exerted meaningful influence within migration governance across three levels of analysis: local/domestic, transnational, and global. Meaningful influence is ascribed if at least one of the following questions can be answered in the affirmative:

(a) Agenda-setting and issue-framing: Did the city help move a migration-related issue onto a higher-level agenda, or alter the issue’s framing? (Thouez, 2020; Stürner and Bendel, 2019).

(b) Policy content: Did the city shape the content of a formal law, policy or agreement? (Oomen, 2019).

(c) Institutional arrangements: Did the city’s actions change who “sits at the table” or how governance is structured? (Gordon and Ljungkvist, 2021).

(d) Normative influence: Did the city act as a norm entrepreneur, that is, have its framings or localized interpretations of international norms been taken up by higher-level actors? (Manfredi-Sánchez, 2021; Stürner-Siovitz, 2022; Zapata-Barrero, 2024; Zimmermann, 2025).

Methodologically, this study combines structured, focused comparison and within-case process tracing (Beach and Pedersen, 2017; Jankauskas et al., 2023). The cases were chosen according to a most similar systems design that enables comparison across two cities that share important structural characteristics yet diverge in key political and geographical dimensions: border versus interior hub, blue city in a blue state versus blue city in a red state, and form of city government (strong mayor vs council manager). Beyond their comparable economic strength, population size, and shares of immigrant population, San Diego and Dallas are similar in their institutional positioning within the US federal system where migration is formally a national competence. Yet, both cities have developed city-level infrastructures to address local migration challenges beyond federal mandates.

The study ranges from the implementation of SB54 (or the California Values Act (SB54, 2017)) in 2017 to 2024. The California state law essentially bans the use of state and local resources for cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and was enacted as a response to the Trump administration’s array of executive orders (EOs) that intended to restrict migration and withhold federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions (EO, 2017a, 2017b). Concurrently, the Texas legislature passed SB4, a highly (legally) contested law banning sanctuary cities in the state. The law illustrates a broader trend of state preemption in response to local policy innovation (Riverstone-Newell, 2017) and a wider ideological divide in state-level approaches to migration policy and enforcement. Moreover, it highlights the strategic geographic importance of these cities within the US, exemplified by San Diego’s proximity to the border, and its enduring humanitarian crisis (Solano and Massey, 2022) and Dallas’s functioning as an interior migration node within the state that shares the longest stretch of border with Mexico (Martín Gil, 2024).

To capture the dynamic, embedded, and relational nature of cities’ agency and actorness in migration governance, I employ comparative document analysis and within-case process tracing. Documents were selected in two steps, combining systematic Google searches (2017–2024) and targeted searches on official city, state, city-network, and to a lesser extent, federal websites. Searches combined migration-related terms (e.g., migration, asylum, border) with geographical/institutional policy keywords (e.g., Dallas, San Diego, Texas, California, agreement, MoU). I included documents that were produced in the set timeframe, produced by governmental actors or city networks, and substantively addressed migration or responses to it. The resulting document corpus includes city policy frameworks, strategic plans, contestations of federal or state-level migration policies, and official statements concerning migration. It also considers cities’ migration-related participation in national and international networks. The corpus is inevitably partial as it is limited to public, web-accessible documents, potentially shaped by uneven web archiving (e.g., irregular publishing of strategic plans), and keyword choices. The documents should therefore be understood as a partial and politically structured snapshot of official discourse and policies/strategies. Nonetheless, this combination will help shed light on how governance is enacted not only through formal but also informal/extra-institutional relations. The case study also contributes to the larger debate of how cities’ embeddedness in domestic structures might restrict or enable a relationally shaped global actorness.

Global-local entanglements: Dallas and San Diego as actors in global migration governance

The bottom-up legitimization of actorness

In a federal system where (im)migration is formally a national competence and deeply politicized along partisan lines, Dallas and San Diego illustrate how blue cities in divergent state contexts position themselves as bottom-up migration actors. After taking office in 2017, Donald Trump passed several EOs restricting immigration and initiated his border-wall project. While Texas adopted additional restrictive policies, Dallas mayor Michael Rawlings (2011–2019) created the Office of Welcoming Communities and Immigrant Affairs (WCIA), that strategically worked to identify and address barriers migrants are facing in Dallas, established its Welcoming Plan Task Force, and developed a “comprehensive welcoming plan” (Broadnax, 2018). The memorandum on this matter explicitly links federal and state policies to local harms:

The passage of state legislation and federal immigration enforcement policy changes creates new challenges to community policing, public safety, human and social needs, as well as a direct and deleterious economic impact on Dallas’ economy. […] Absent progressive and comprehensive immigration reform on the horizon, the need for community-driven leadership to address longer-term solutions and policies that foster inclusion and diversity become even more important. (Broadnax, 2018: 3, emphasis added)

Analytically, this event marks an institutionalization of local migration governance capacity and relational positioning. Dallas strategically responds to a presumably hostile federal and state environment and explicitly positions itself as a community-driven actor, addressing gaps left by federal and state governments, thus claiming a role beyond mere implementation.

Situating these moves within broader debates on immigration federalism, contesting federal and state-level migration policies, while focusing on “humanitarian issues” (Schnurman, 2018) and localizing globally set standards on human rights, Dallas functions as an intermediary between the local and the global while not only circumventing (Acuto, 2013) but actively rejecting the state/national.

In this vein, both Dallas and San Diego have used their state-granted autonomy to legally and symbolically challenge state and federal law. Dallas supported litigation against SB4 (El Cenizo v. Texas, 2018) and opposed federal law in public statements while San Diego backed legal action against EO 13769 (“travel ban”; Smolens, 2017). After fifty detentions at DFW airport under EO 13,769 that suspended refugee admissions for 120 days, and travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Rawlings responded by saying: “This is just not good for our city […] This is a welcoming place. We want you here.” He further rejected President Trump’s national security justification, stating that refugees “are going to be good members of our community” (Sheppard, 2017). Similarly, San Diego mayor Faulconer justified the city council’s decision to file suit against Trump’s EO, arguing it “has a direct effect on San Diegans, and I believe it is appropriate in this case for our city to weigh in” (Smolens, 2017). Later, in a response to the federal administrations plans to dismantle the DACA program, he wrote: “The young men and women here under DACA […] enrich our country and contribute to our economy and our culture” (Faulconer, 2017).

Regarding the framework developed in the second section of this article, these events resemble agenda-setting and normative-narrative influence rather than direct policy change. Both mayors recast national debates around security or “(il)legality” into locally resonant narratives of safety, rights, and community. While they position their cities as norm entrepreneurs that uphold human-rights based understandings of migration against restrictive national and state law, policy and discourses, they remain constrained by the legal structure of US federalism: Dallas cannot adopt a full “sanctuary” stance under SB4, and San Diego’s (and others’) legal contestation ultimately does not overturn federal policy (see: Trump et al. v. Hawaii et al., 2018).

However, this framing impact contributes to a broader legitimization process of cities’ actorness once they venture out into the international arena (Stürner and Bendel, 2019) as they adhere to this value system at all tiers of engagement. At the level of both symbolic and legal contestation, the mayor becomes the face of the city and maintains visibility through local and (trans)national multi-platform media presence, including interviews, social media posts, and public speeches.

This narrative framing is further institutionalized by strategic plans and reports. In 2018, Rawlings and the Dallas City Council released a strategic “Resilient Dallas” plan that addresses (im)migration across policy fields, defines responsible offices and partners, includes timelines and introduces process tracking mechanisms. Specifically, Goal 2 of the plan–embrace diversity and make Dallas welcoming to all—frames immigration as a positive and economically enriching phenomenon: “immigrants revive neighborhoods and drive economic growth” and “play a critical role in several key industries in the city.” Further, the report contests theories oftentimes instrumentalized at the national level, stating that, with authorization, immigrants have low unemployment rates, and make “social, and cultural contributions” (City of Dallas, 2018a: 26–27). WCIA’s biannual reports (2018–2024) reinforce this framing through data and immigrant stories (City of Dallas, 2018b). Three of the four reports contain personal stories of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, and Tanzania. The 2022 report focused primarily on Dallas’s involvement in the Safety and Fairness for Everyone (SAFE) Network, a collaborative effort launched at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide legal representation to immigrants (Vera Institute of Justice, 2022). The 2020 report offers an in-depth assessment of the quality of Dallas’s immigration policies in relation to both US cities with similar preconditions and to nationwide indices (Wasem, 2020).

San Diego’s 2019 Strategic Plan on Immigrant and Refugee Integration, aiming to bolster immigrant rights at all government levels mirrors Dallas’s in highlighting the importance of immigrants’ contributions to the city (San Diego & Gateways, 2019: II), and collaboration with other cities and stakeholders, and explicitly recommends narrative-shaping through sharing “stories of immigrants” (San Diego & Gateways, 2019). Additionally, Faulconer announced the creation of the position of Immigrant Affairs Manager (Morrissey, 2019). More recently, Mayor Todd Gloria (2020-present) created the city’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (OIA), an initiative that offered (predominantly legal) workshops to immigrants, as well as key points of information regarding basic human services (San Diego Mayor, Todd Gloria, 2022). The effort was short-lived: in June 2024, the city decided to defund the office due to lack of federal, state, and local resources and shifted programs to nonprofits and legal aid (Solis, 2024). These instances demonstrate how institutional structures and resources underpin relational actorness. Dallas’s WCIA, nested in the Office of Equity and Inclusion, has consistently produced plans and reports while San Diego’s OIA, although more politically exposed and short-lived, signaled mayoral commitment and created a focal point for city-community/network interaction. Especially in the Dallas case, offices provide organizational capacity for sustained engagement and plans and reports are key mediums for norm localization and framing.

This consistent framing of migration as positive is crucial to understanding how these cities relationally establish agency from the bottom up. Further, both cities make data and reports about migration in their cities available to the public, contributing to government transparency which has been defined as crucial for increasing trust in government (Alessandro et al., 2021). Both cities have also repeatedly hosted community engagement events (City of Dallas, 2021, 2024; Inside San Diego, 2023, 2024) that offer points of contact and an opportunity to build an atmosphere of tolerance and solidarity between immigrant and non-immigrant citizens. In this relational account, government transparency and a mayor’s visible, authoritative role not only foster solidarity but are also part of a trust-building process which functions to reinforce legitimacy to act and discursively construct agency.

National network engagement further enables collective agency. The most prominent example of both cities’ aims to shape the national migration governance system from within is the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). The bipartisan network facilitates institutionalized multilevel dialogue and brings local interests directly to federal policymakers. In 2019, in a letter to Congressmembers, 22 mayors in proximity of the US-Mexico border, including Faulconer and Rawlings, requested funds for “those at the local level who are expending resources to deal with the ramifications of federal policy,” while explicitly referring to “the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border” (Durr, 2019, emphasis added). In a critique of federal policy, these cities not only address the local impacts of transnational mobility that they are shaped and affected by but are also actively trying to shape this very context while referencing global norms and standards.

In 2020, San Diego’s Todd Gloria was appointed USCM Vice Chair for Border Policy and currently serves as its Second Vice President, symbolically relevant for the city’s relational status. In March 2021, mayors Gloria, Johnson, and others, again, urged the federal government to address their insufficient financial resources to adequately support incoming migrants (Durr, 2021). Since 2017, USMC has issued over forty migration-related resolutions, explicitly referring to the creation of legal pathways for immigration, the support and protection of immigrant communities, and resources for humanitarian aid. All resolutions portray immigrants as valuable to their communities and the country (USCM, n.d.). These examples illustrate how cities generate collective agency through networking, assuming responsibility beyond their local jurisdictions while being solution-oriented and actively working to co-shape and/or (re)direct the policy-agenda, a strong instance of collective agenda-setting and normative influence.

Both cities’ membership in Welcoming America (WA) deepens issue-specific engagement. WA is a non-partisan network specifically focused on (im)migration, including city representatives as well as civil society organizations (CSOs) and NGOs. Like other issue-specific networks, WA derives its legitimacy from its mission, “impartiality, technocratic expertise, and networks of social relationships” (Lecavalier and Gordon, 2020: 21). In 2019, Dallas was the first Texan city to be Certified Welcoming (Clark et al., 2023) and established its annual Welcoming Week to promote community engagement. In 2024, this included events on language exchange, culture, and traditions, a citizenship preparation class, educational events, and vocational training (City of Dallas, 2024). Earlier that year, Dallas hosted the annual WA Welcoming Interactive Conference. With 800 attendees from across the globe (WA, 2024), Dallas operated at the frontlines of a collectively networked effort to comprehensively address migration. Hosting large-scale events also increases international visibility (Tavares, 2016) and contributes to a stronger “city brand” of Dallas as “welcoming” through networked, multi-stakeholder interaction (Vallaster et al., 2018).

These national efforts are accompanied by greater transparency about the local realities of transnational migration. Coupled with legal and symbolic contestation of state/federal-level policy, Dallas and San Diego generally (and collectively) practice what they preach, further legitimizing city-agency. Meaningful influence, thus, has been generated primarily on agenda-setting and normative/narrative change, while only weakly affecting policy content and institutional design beyond the local level. Both cities not only consistently recast restrictive federal and state measures as local public-safety and community issues and, through strategic plans, reports, and litigation, keep migration on the municipal and national agenda but also act as norm entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, direct changes to higher-level law or formal venues remain limited and mostly confined to city offices and task forces. Thus, under partisan preemption and a tightly bound federal division of powers, cities’ strongest leverage lies in narrating problems and claiming moral authority, and this collective adherence to and localization of international law, norms, and standards in the national context both enhances their credibility on the international stage (Nijman, 2016), and actively consolidates their base for further international, collective norm-entrepreneurship (Curtis and Acuto, 2018).

Venturing out: International offices and cross-border collaboration

Moving to the international level, para-/city diplomacy scholarship has often stressed the importance of international offices, that is, a formal institutionalization of city diplomacy (Tavares, 2016). While such offices primarily serve economic and city-branding functions (Grandi, 2020), they still shape opportunity structures and channels through which migration-related actorness can be projected.

In 2019, Dallas mayor Eric Johnson established the Mayor’s International Advisory Council (MIAC; Johnson, n.d.). With all members experienced in international relations or business, MIAC generally focuses on trade and the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI), and, to a lesser extent, on attracting high-skilled immigrants (Hallman, 2017, 2023; Madrazo, 2023), rendering the office nearly irrelevant to Dallas’s engagement in GMG. San Diego has its own International Affairs Board (IAB, n.d.). Established in 1966, the publication of reports, though inconsistent, only started in 2013. The board remains active, holding regular, public meetings, with 17 permanent resident members serving two-year terms, thus exemplifying a more citizen-based approach to the institutionalization of city diplomacy. Unlike Dallas, the IAB has a Global Cities Program that explicitly mentions “border management” and “partnerships and sharing of best practices on common challenges including […] refugees” (IAB/Global Cities, n.d.). From an analytical perspective, while Dallas’s MIAC proves nearly irrelevant for the city’s engagement in GMG, San Diego’s IAB provides institutional capacity for both strategic behavior (e.g., advising on cross-border projects or MoUs) and relational positioning (e.g., articulating San Diego’s role as a border city with humanitarian responsibilities).

Divergent state-level political contexts and geographies help explain these differences. In a red state under SB4, Dallas is more likely to pursue its actorness through “lower-profile,” integration-focused channels (WCIA/WA) less likely to trigger critical state response or even legal pushback. In a blue state and border context, San Diego’s IAB can more openly address migration, reflecting embeddedness in a transnational border infrastructure where cross-border mobility is inevitably salient. Following structured, focused comparison, these contrasts support the argument that similar cities assemble different diplomatic strategies when embedded in different federal-state-city/multilevel configurations.

Understanding borders as “the products of public political processes at domestic and international levels” (Liikanen, 2010: 18), that is, as relationally constructed, proves particularly valuable in the case of San Diego. The city has assumed the role of the nexus of various cross-border initiatives and has consistently dominated the agenda-setting process.

San Diego and Tijuana are not only neighboring but also sister cities. In May 2022, the mayors of both cities signed a MoU that explicitly references “Immigrant Affairs” (SD-CoC, 2022). Gloria additionally stressed the importance of local voices being heard at higher levels of government (Coronel, 2022). San Diego’s IAB’s Vice Chair also welcomed the MoU, “motivated to continue strengthening economic, cultural, and diplomatic ties” between the two cities (Zamarripa, 2022).

A dense border governance ecosystem also explains a relatively high number of political and civil-society actors with cross-border ties (Sabet, 2005), such as the Committee on Binational Regional Opportunities (COBRO) and The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). The latter represents “each of the region’s 19 local governments,” with the DoD and Mexico’s Consulate General among its advisory members (SANDAG, n.d.c.). Importantly, SANDAG has a policy advisory committee on borders of which San Diego is a member. The committee holds annual meetings with COBRO, a multi-stakeholder committee that “serves as a taskforce […] and facilitates better understanding of binational border-related issues” (SANDAG, n.d.a). Nine of its meetings between 2018 and 2024 explicitly addressed migration (SANDAG, n.d.b). The regularity of these meetings underlines San Diego’s and the entire border region’s commitment to a bilateral, inter- and trans-governmental approach to shaping policy.

Another example of San Diego’s involvement is the CaliBaja Working Group. Launched in 2020 with various governmental and non-governmental members, its reports advocate for border cities’ expertise to be taken seriously (CaliBaja, 2021), urge for an expansion of legal pathways to migration, and “a change to a more humane rhetoric” around migration (CaliBaja, 2022), something both Dallas and San Diego, as shown in the previous section, have long been pursuing.

This continuous challenge to the current apparatus of migration policymaking, and highly specialized forms of knowledge production, legitimize San Diego’s actorness in cross-border relations. As indicated, this section has shown that meaningful influence on institutional arrangements at this level is strongly conditioned by geography and state-level context. Contrary to Dallas, San Diego is part of cross-border collaboration initiatives that embed the city in recurrent, formalized regional governance settings. Meanwhile, cases of regional collaboration beyond San Diego’s border ecosystem–such as the Border Mayor’s Association that has been established in 2011 (UCSD, n.d.), the Dallas-Guatemala City partnership, or the Cities Summit of the Americas in 2023 (DoS, 2022)—reflect federal facilitation and recognition rather than independent, collective regional assertion of city agency.

Going global: Networked and collective city agency in global migration governance

So far, the case study has shown that international offices only palpably matter in the case of San Diego while Dallas’s primarily focuses on economic aspects and only secondarily on attracting high-skilled immigrants. In both cities, immigrant affairs offices serve as welcoming infrastructures that refrain from the word “sanctuary,” likely due to potential repercussions by federal and/or state governments. I have elaborated on USCM as a network generating agenda-setting power and collective national city agency, and WA as a network for best-practices and resource-sharing.

At the global level, city networks play a pivotal role in processes of agenda-setting, generating expertise, sharing best-practices, lobbying IOs, and national governments, generating collective agency while referring to international norms and standards. The most relevant and influential, albeit tightly interwoven, networks for the two cases include Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), Resilient Cities, the National League of Cities (NLC), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), and the Mayors Migration Council (MMC). Both Dallas and San Diego are members of ICLEI, a global network focused on knowledge production, innovation, policy advocacy, multilevel dialogue, and standard setting. Though sustainability-focused, it touches upon migration, especially with regards to equity, homelessness, and climate-driven migration (ICLEI-Library, n.d.).

Dallas is also part of the Resilient Cities Network. Though not specialized in migration, its 2021 speaker series addressed migration (Resilient Cities, 2021), and so did a 2020 Report, titled “Global Migration: Resilient Cities at the Forefront,” with concrete plans “to adapt and transform [our] cities in an age of migration” (Resilient Cities, 2020). Dallas is also on the board of NLC, a US network similar to USCM (National League of Cities, n.d.) both of which form the US member base of the global organization United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG; City Mayors Archive, 2003). This complex web of city networks reflects a “rapidly emerging ‘bottom-up’ global migration governance framework,” in the absence of a binding top-down framework (Betts, 2011: 2), underscoring the complexity of city engagement at the international stage that state-centric accounts struggle to capture.

Process tracing further highlights how global recognition and access expand through specific sequences. While already launched in 2013, 2017 marked a key moment for the annual Mayoral Forum on Mobility, Migration and Development, when a UN General Assembly report recommended to “[e]mpower cities and local governments,” recognizing cities as actors in migration governance:

(a) To enable local leaders to play their part, I call for continued support for the Mayoral Forum on Mobility, Migration and Development as a venue where local leaders can be informed of, and influence, global intergovernmental discussions with a bearing on migration and refugee policy. (UN, 2017: 27, emphasis added)

That same year, Dallas Mayor Rawlings and 16 other mayors, leveraged collective city-agency by writing a letter to the UNHCR that referenced the Assembly’s recognition of cities and requested that cities be included in the negotiations of future international migration compacts (Brandt and Katz, 2017):

In particular, city leaders should be invited to contribute to, and give feedback on, the program of action of the Global Compact on Refugees […]. UNHCR can become a powerful sourcing and distribution mechanism for good integration practices. In order to do so, it should optimize its existing database to meet the needs of local practitioners and draw upon localities’ expertise. (Brandt, 2017: 2–3, emphasis added)

While the Trump administration withdrew from the 2018 Global Compact on Migration negotiations on sovereignty grounds (UN, 2018), US cities stepped up and petitioned “for formal inclusion” (Allen, 2017). “[I]n May 2018, a delegation of forty-one cities sent detailed recommendations on the wording and content of the GCM,” highlighting the importance of a multilevel dialogue on migration and the role cities play in implementing policy outcomes (Thouez, 2020: 659). Several cities, including Dallas, signed the Marrakech Mayors Declaration, affirming their commitment to being a part of the GCM. Conceptualizing global actorness as relational helps explain this shift toward cities being positioned “in a collaborative process of shared governance” (Gordon and Ljungkvist, 2021: 72).

A central objective that cities pursued during the GCM negotiations related to the concept of the “right to the city,” which advocates for migrants’ access to basic services regardless of legal status (Manfredi-Sánchez, 2020), aligning with both cities’ consistent rights- and inclusion-based framing. Cities also advocated to participate in monitoring processes of the GCM (Thouez, 2020). USCM’s (2019) subsequent resolution in support of the Compact, criticizing “the unacceptable realities of the nation’s immigration policies,” and calling for “a cooperative approach,” further institutionalizes this stance.

These GCM-events are primarily instances of collective agenda-setting and norm entrepreneurship at the global level as cities co-define issues and how they should be framed even if they ultimately did neither control the final text nor compel the US government to participate. Importantly, this networked agency hinges not only on collective resources and a diverse constituency but also on trust and legitimacy: When cities’ actions align with local policy ideas perceived as legitimate, collective agency not only “increases compliance with governance,” but also “drives institutional change” (Minatti, 2024: 662).

Regarding review processes/monitoring, San Diego demonstrates a strong commitment to both the GCM and the Global Compact for Refugees (GCR), explicitly placing them on the IAB’s agenda (IAB, 2022a, 2022b). Similarly, Dallas is actively involved in the GFMD Mayors Mechanism, an institutional multi-actor structure which reports on “localizing the global compacts,” and the exchange of innovative practices with the UN Network on Migration (Global Forum on Migration and Development (GMFD), 2018; Local Coalition, n.d.). Both cities are part of MMC which focuses on (climate-driven) migration-related best-practice and information sharing and monitoring the compacts’ implementation (MMC, 2022, 2023). Furthermore, MMC has established a city diplomacy program “to influence policy decisions at the national and international level” (MMC, 2025). In 2023, San Diego participated in the World Assembly of Local and Regional Governments (WALRG), a forum “officially acknowledged by the United Nations General Assembly in recognition of the role that local and regional governments play in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda,” to highlight the importance of safe, inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities to make “human rights tangible for all inhabitants and communities” (United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), 2023). These engagements illustrate how localized framings of migration travel laterally and upward. Dallas’s and San Diego’s “welcoming,” humanitarian narratives become embedded in network reports, monitoring practices, and UN-adjacent platforms.

Though the Biden administration committed to the GCM in January 2021 (UN, 2021), it has struggled to meet these standards (Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS), 2024). How federal migration policy will evolve remains uncertain, but cities, including Dallas and San Diego, continue to localize the compact individually and collectively through network engagement, with a mayor as a key representative. Within these global networks which derive their authority from expertise and perceived legitimacy, cities seek to (re)shape migration governance from the ground-up while supporting a global top-down framework. At this level, too, relationality is key as cities’ ability to act and to exert meaningful influence depends on how convincingly their local practices and narratives are recognized, echoed and institutionalized by other cities, states, and IOs.

Conclusion

This case study has shown that the infrastructure of GMG spills into various other policy fields, rendering the policy venue complex, characterized by its entanglements that cut across traditional levels of government and policy domains, and involve a multitude of state and non-state actors. The cases reveal that San Diego and Dallas actively engage in GMG, despite lacking formal legal status as international actors. Importantly, city actorness is fluid and relationally established, through different strategies and platforms, beginning at the local level and remaining open to change and contestation. Based on these findings, defining city actorness as relational adds immense value. It captures how cities become meaningful actors not primarily through formal competences, but through strategies and relational positioning that generate recognition and legitimacy across multilevel systems. As elaborated in sections ‘The bottom-up legitimization of actorness’ and ‘Going global: Networked and collective city agency in global migration governance’, such recognition emanated from both the US federal government as well as the UN General Assembly.

Methodologically, combining structured, focused comparison and process tracing clarifies where and how this matters: comparison isolates how similar mid-sized cities adopt different strategies under contrasting state contexts and geographies, while process tracing links city action to observable outcomes and enables grounded assessments of meaningful influence, most consistently in agenda-setting, issue-framing, narrative legitimacy, and (incremental) institutional inclusion rather than direct control over policy content beyond the local level.

City actorness is established through (a) a solution-oriented local infrastructure, including transparency and community engagement, (b) symbolic and legal contestation of top-down policies considered inconsistent with international norms and standards (especially human rights) and in moral opposition to the cities’ values, coupled with strategic (local and networked) discourse framing that builds trust, legitimacy and credibility (Manfredi-Sánchez, 2021; Stürner-Siovitz, 2022), and (c) consistent transnational network engagement that generates collective agency through expert authority, while co-shaping international norms through relational engagement. Lastly (d), the prioritization of mayoral engagement remains crucial (Grandi, 2020) as cities need “a face” to exhibit a certain degree of recognizability. Regularly issuing statements and engaging locally, nationally and internationally is, for the most part, vested in the institution of mayor. Noticeably, though often referred to as pillars of city diplomacy (Grandi, 2020), international offices in these cases are not necessarily of pivotal importance to city engagement in migration governance. Dallas’s MIAC serves primarily to attract capital, while San Diego’s IAB serves as a form for formalized engagement to address the localized impacts of the city’s geographic positioning.

Consequently, the cases reveal that participation in (global) migration governance through both institutionalized and extra-institutional, multistakeholder engagement is not merely a pragmatic move. In these cases, multilevel engagement also reflects a deeper sense of moral obligation to promote inclusivity, solidarity, and the protection of human rights. This dual motivation and multilevel engagement positions both cities not merely as marginal actors in GMG but as active norm entrepreneurs and agenda-setters.

Though focused on the United States and necessarily based on a partial corpus of public, web-accessible documents, the analysis offers a transferable template for tracing how cities build actorness and exert meaningful influence in an entangled governance field. It also invites scaling this design to additional cities and extending it to interconnected policy fields, such as climate-driven migration, to examine how cities interact with and potentially reshape governance structures within the national and global political orders they are embedded in.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Nele Thomann

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability statement

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

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