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.
Nele Thomann (Thu,) studied this question.