The Role of the City for Labour Market Integration of Young Immigrants on Both Sides of the Atlantic.

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways of managing immigrant integration and integration policies in advanced industrial societies, with a special focus on labor market integration of young immigrants and the role of local initiatives for this process in the cities of two neighboring EU countries: Germany and Poland and in two USA neighboring states: Arizona and California The paper examines and compares the local integration initiatives and integration policies in four case studies in the cities of Munich, Warsaw, San Diego and Phoenix. The thesis about Affirmative Integration Management (AIM), which is proposed in the paper, considers immigrant integration not only as a two-way process (involving the receiving society and immigrants) but also as a multi-dimensional one, dependent on mutual relations between institutions in society (either obstructive or cooperative). In order to provide young immigrants with good future perspectives on the local labor market, one needs to aim toward a comprehensive policy, removing barriers between the sectors and key integration stakeholders. The results of theoretical and empirical analyses provide the answers to the following questions: 1) Which factors influence the development of local labor market integration initiatives for young immigrants into the labor market? 2) How integration capacities of the cities are intertwined with regional, national, supranational scale of integration policy making in Germany, Poland and the USA? 3) How can the exchange of European and transatlantic local practices be useful and transferable?