The Association of Polish Cities, in cooperation with the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities, organised a seminar as part of the Local Development Forum entitled: ‘Inclusion and Integration of Migrants that Strengthen the City Society’.

The topic of the seminar was chosen to be extremely relevant and has been present in the media space. It is the subject of heated debate at the state and local level. Managing diversity is becoming an important task in every municipality today. As late as before 1990, Poland was a mono-ethnic country. Today, we are not only hosting migrants in our country, but also refugees are arriving. And it is clear that their numbers will increase. 'We are looking for ideas and ways to support local governments in this particularly important function of skilfully managing diversity, integration, and inclusion of migrants in the life of the local community,’ says Tomasz Kayser, coordinator of the APC Local Development Forum.

To organise a seminar on the issue of migrants, the Association of Polish Cities also sought positive experiences abroad and benefited from a good cooperation with the Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities (KS). Norwegians shared their knowledge and experience in dealing with the growing wave of refugees and migrants with Polish local government officials.

During the seminar, Agnieszka Narożniak from the Migrant Info Point Foundation in Poznań and Marta Majchrzak, Deputy Director of the Wrocław Social Development Centre, outlined the scale of experience that residents and authorities in these cities have gained through living together with migrants and integrating them into the local community. Wrocław is the second city in Poland (after Warsaw) with the largest number of migrants from Ukraine. This currently amounts to more than 13,000 people out of the total of around 24,000 migrants overall living in the city. At the start of the war in Ukraine, refugees made up 28% of the total population of Wrocław. This gives an idea of the extent of the challenges associated with their presence for the city authorities.

Karina Anett Bjørnbakk from Dramen, Norway, presented a ‘how to act’ perspective showing how residents of the local community as a whole contribute to giving migrants a chance to integrate.

Audun Kwale, describing the Norwegian model of refugee settlement and integration, showed that the entire system is based on great research and reality measurement. Every migrant arriving in Norway is registered and assigned to a specific place of residence. The legal system stipulates that if they actually live there, they will receive specific financial assistance for five years. The whole system is based on knowledge and on data. Kristian Rose Tronstad from NIBR spoke more about that, emphasising that within Norway and in cooperation with Denmark and Sweden, a total of 220,000 migrants have already been continuously surveyed for 11 years, which provides knowledge about their individual life and career trajectories, their motivations, successes and failures along these paths.

The presentation showed that in both large and small cities, the local government has no chance to deal with issues of migrant integration on its own. The example of Wrocław showed that this can and should be done in cooperation with NGOs. It also seems crucial to strengthen the competences of public services, local government officials, teachers, as they are in short supply in a society that until recently was monoethnic. The standards of intercultural assistants also need to be looked at. What is also worth exploring, is the exchange of experiences between schools, even within one city.

'Integration must work in two directions - towards migrants, but also towards residents. Only then there is a chance for it to be successful, as the inhabitants of Poland, Norway and other EU countries are looking more and more critically at the problem of migration ,' stressed Tomasz Potkański, Deputy Director of the APC Office. 'Citizens' fears are real, the problems are also real, disinformation from Russia is effective, so we have to counter all this through inter-institutional cooperation. Neither local government, nor individual NGOs on their own, nor even the government can tackle this. Only by working together do we have a chance to face these challenges'.

The current cycle of the LDF is implemented within the framework of a project to continue bilateral cooperation between Polish, Norwegian and Icelandic local governments as an example of developing sustainable relations after local development projects and expanding cooperation in preparation for the next perspective. The ‘Bilateral Initiative 2024-2025’ project is implemented with funding from the Bilateral Cooperation Fund, the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism and the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021.