Sanctuary cities and urban struggles

Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights

Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder, Jonathan Darling, Harald Bauder

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526134912
• eBook ISBN: 9781526134936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Emigrazione e immigrazione

Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how cities are challenging the primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. It brings together cutting-edge scholars of political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies and refugee studies to explore how urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary are reshaping the governance of migration. By offering a collection of empirical cases and conceptualisations that move beyond 'seeing like a state', Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles proposes not a singular alternative but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political imagination and practice. In an era when migrant rights are under attack and nationalism is on the rise, the topic of how citizenship, rights and mobility can be recast at the urban scale is more relevant than ever.

Part I
Sanctuary cities

1
Urban sanctuary in context

Harald Bauder

Urban sanctuary policies and practices generally serve the purpose of accommodating illegalised migrants and refugees in urban communities. The ‘sanctuary city’ concept, however, is highly ambiguous. Some commentators critique it for being a ‘catch-all phrase’ (Chishti and Hipsman, 2015: n.p.) that refers to a variety of different policies and practices; others celebrate the concept and argue that ‘Sanctuary City is as much a process as a goal’ (Walia, 2014: n.p.) that necessarily responds to a diverse range of social and geopolitical conditions. In this chapter, I examine sanctuary city policies and practices in international perspective to set the stage for subsequent chapters discussing sanctuary policies, the politics of scale, and struggles of belonging.

Sanctuary city policies and practices are reactions to exclusionary national policies and practices. In countries with different national legal and administrative frameworks, sanctuary city policies and practices take on different forms. In addition, historical, geopolitical, and geographical conditions vary between cities. Sanctuary city policies and practices are therefore particular to national context. For example, while sanctuary cities in Canada and the USA seek specifically to protect illegalised migrants from the consequences of lacking national status, in the UK, cities of sanctuary involve a general commitment to welcoming asylum seekers and refugees. In addition, as the following chapters illustrate, sanctuary encompasses complex dimensions and diverse actors (Kuge and Bagelman, this volume), sanctuary city policy intentions and their implementation can differ from each other (Atak, this volume), and urban sanctuary policies and practices respond to policy discourses that permeate various scales of governance (Graham, this volume). Below, I uncover various strategic aspects of sanctuary cities that cut across national contexts. These aspects engage in contextualised ways with the underlying national structures of the social, political, and legal exclusion of migrants and refugees. In this way, this chapter provides an opportunity to discuss the role of the urban scale in mitigating exclusionary national migrant, refugee, residency, and citizenship laws, policies, and practices. One must be mindful, however, as Visser and Simpson demonstrate in their chapter, that the urban scale can also be mobilised to exclude rather than accommodate illegalised migrants.

My use of the term ‘illegalised’ migrant – rather than undocumented, unauthorised, irregular, or non-status migrant – is intended to draw attention to national laws, policies, and practices that deny migrants full status or legal residency at the national scale (Bauder, 2014b). The use of this term seems particularly appropriate for a discussion of sanctuary cities that focuses attention on the politics of scale. In this case, local authorities, civic society organisations, and activists advocating for the inclusion of illegalised inhabitants in the urban community, as well as illegalised inhabitants themselves who are making claims of belonging, challenge national immigration laws, policies, and practices that deny rights (including the right to belong) to some inhabitants. The tensions between urban and national scales in the way migrants and refugees are treated and claim belonging are a central theme throughout this book.

In what follows, I explore the policies and practices involved in the concept of ‘sanctuary city’ and investigate how these policies and practices differ between countries. I further examine whether different aspects of sanctuary policies and practices describe a coherent approach towards illegalised migrants and refugees. Addressing these issues is important for several reasons. First, although the concept of the sanctuary city is widely applied in policy debate, planning practice, and activism, its meaning varies between countries. Commentators do not always distinguish clearly between the different urban sanctuary practices in Europe and North America (e.g. Cities of Migration, 2009). This lack of clarity can conceal the variability and contextualised nature of sanctuary city policies and practices. Second, the concept ‘sanctuary city’ has been critiqued based on policies and practices that are highly context-particular (e.g. American Immigration Council, 2015). Such a critique can lose sight of the structural exclusion at the national scale that migrants and refugees experience and to which urban sanctuary is a contextualised local response. Third, urban sanctuary policies and practices tend to challenge national policies and practices regulating migration and belonging; they reflect a strategy of scale-shifting to mitigate the disenfranchisement of populations in a practical way. Uncovering various aspects of urban sanctuary and how they are applied across national contexts can help overcome what Darling and I called the ‘limits of imagination’ in the Introduction, associated with national approaches towards migration and belonging.

In the next section, I review the literature on the kinds of policies and practices that the idea of urban sanctuary involves. I focus in particular on how the term ‘sanctuary’ emerged in the USA, the UK, and Canada in relation to urban practices that mitigate migrant and refugee exclusion at the national scale. Then, I distil this information into several aspects of urban sanctuary. By excavating multiple aspects of urban sanctuary policies and practices, I present the ‘sanctuary city’ as a concept that can be observed across national contexts. In the discussion, I apply sanctuary city aspects to other, non-English-language national contexts and discuss wider social and political implications, many of which are developed further in later chapters.

Urban sanctuary in the literature

A brief history

The origin of sanctuary is complex. Its history can be associated with various religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Sikhism (Bagelman, 2016: 20). The Bible (Numbers 35) mentions six ‘cities of refuge’ that offered protection to people who had accidentally killed another person, thus articulating sanctuary at the urban scale. Sanctuary, however, is not necessarily a spatially fixed practice of offering protection within a territorial jurisdiction, but can also be understood as a relational and mobile practice (Darling, 2010). Ancient Roman law dating back to 392 CE granted sanctuary privileges to churches rather than gated cities (Lippert, 2005). The practice of church sanctuary continued in medieval Europe, granting protection from worldly authorities to murderers, thieves, and other criminals (Shoemaker, 2012).

Although the term sanctuary was typically not associated with migration or the urban scale in medieval Europe, many European cities at that time did offer the prospect of freedom from serfdom to people who fled from the land to which they were bonded. The medieval saying ‘city air makes you free’ describes this practice (Schwarz, 2008). This medieval urban practice indeed resonates with the aim of today's sanctuary cities to provide refuge to non-citizens (Bauder, 2016).

With the increasing illegalisation of migrants and refugees through exclusionary national immigration policies in Western countries in the second half of the twentieth century, churches in Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United States, and other countries began to offer sanctuary to rejected refugee claimants, asylum seekers, and illegalised migrants (e.g. Caminero-Santangelo, 2012; Loga et al., 2012; Millner, 2012). In 2012 Randy Lippert and Sean Rehaag observed that ‘at the centre of contemporary sanctuary activities has been – almost exclusively – immigrants (often asylum-seekers) living without legal status in Western countries’ (2012: 3, parentheses in original). Thus, the focus population of sanctuary practices has shifted from criminals to illegalised migrants and refugees – although there continues to be a connection between these two groups in that illegalised migrants have been criminalised in public and political debate and through immigration law. My use of the term ‘illegalised’ migrant signifies this connection (Bauder, 2014b).

Roughly around the same time as the focus population changed, a shift occurred in the scale of sanctuary practices. The city of Berkeley in the USA is often cited as the birthplace of contemporary sanctuary cities: in 1971 it offered protection on-board the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea to soldiers who resisted the Vietnam War. This urban scale symbolically linked the sanctuary city with the biblical city of refuge, protecting people who kill, i.e. soldiers (Ridgley, 2012).

Today's sanctuary cities offer protection to illegalised migrants and typically follow secular motivations and arguments (Lippert and Rehaag, 2012). Despite their common label, however, sanctuary cities involve a wide range of different policies and practices. Below, I review sanctuary city practices in the USA, the UK, and Canada, where the terms ‘sanctuary city’ and ‘city of sanctuary’ have been applied in concrete policy contexts.

United States

An important milestone for the development of sanctuary cities in the USA occurred in San Francisco (Mancina, 2012). In 1985 this city passed the largely symbolic ‘City of Refuge’ resolution, which was followed in 1989 by the more concrete ‘City of Refuge’ ordinance. The latter specifically prohibited the use of city funds and resources to assist in federal immigration enforcement, to cooperate with investigations by or surveillance requests from foreign governments (in response to an incident in which a police office...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights – Jonathan Darling and Harald Bauder
• Part I: Sanctuary cities
• Part II: Urban struggles
• Index