A warm welcome to highly‐skilled migrants: how can municipal administrations play their part?

The global competition for highly‐skilled professionals and their knowledge has grown over the past decades. Cities have increasingly become aware of the importance of highly‐skilled labour for their future development. The aim of our paper is to analyse urban policies towards highly‐skilled migrants. Our paper is based on empirical research in three G erman university cities, A achen, B onn and C ologne. Our results emphasize that there is a growing awareness of local policy‐makers concerning this topic. We found that the cities made efforts to create a welcoming culture in order to attract and retain highly‐skilled migrants. However, there are differences between our cities regarding their approaches to attract highly‐skilled migrants.