Due to its position as a crossroads of multiple migration routes, Marseilles, France’s second largest city has been deeply marked by successive waves of migration. Furthermore, local residential dynamics reinforce this impact: migrants’ concentration in the central districts of Marseilles contributes to a high visibility of this population. This paper asks: How do policy-makers both at the local and national levels respond to the settlement and needs of a significant immigrant population? Recently, the local dimension of migration governance has been at the core of an increasing amount of empirical research. These works have demonstrated the role of local authorities, institutions and the variety of actors involved in such policies. Still, local policy-making processes regarding the conditions provided to resident immigrants have been scarcely explored. The study of policy-making processes at the local level offers a useful framework to analyse concretely immigrants’ practices of citizenship. We argue that specific legal provisions regarding nationality are not sufficient to account for migrants’ experiences of citizenship and must be combined with a study of the conditions wherein rights are implemented in particular contexts. This paper thus pays special attention to specific configurations of actors both at national and local level in order to understand how immigrant policies are shaped. In particular, I focus on changes in local social spaces structure local responses to migrants' needs. In Marseilles, while elected officials progressively created in the 1960s a complex territorial network of social and cultural facilities, migrants were left aside from these policies. From management of migration flows to the control of residential mobility, immigrant settlement was historically handled by specific structures partly disconnected from local social networks. The paper then sets out to understand how changes in the configuration of actors and social networks that occurred in the 1980s, in particular the growing involvement of new actors, resulted in a progressive conversion of how local elites dealt with immigrant issues. These changes would imply that the introduction of networks of actors with dissimilar social trajectories and social practices alters how policy-making is conducted with regard to new waves of immigration. I then analyse the more recent changes after 2003.
