In this book, I investigate the ruptures created and experienced by undocumented immigrants in the United States (US) and their attempts at overcoming some of the barriers created by these ruptures. By ruptures, I refer to the disruptions in both normal day-to-day lives of migrants and in the political structures that have led certain immigrants to leave their home country as well as the structures that make it difficult to seek permanent legal status in the United States. I focus on this concept of ruptures and disruption because irregular migrants (including refugees, stateless people and undocumented immigrants) push the boundaries of what is considered normal and redefine the realm of politics by their presence and the movements that they create in demand of justice, recognition and belonging. They also push the boundaries of scholarship as their status leads us to rethink conceptions of agency, citizenship and power. Irregular migrants push the boundaries of belonging and redefine terms of inclusion into a political community—a right that has been traditionally the purview of the state.

Understanding the way in which the undocumented immigrant rights movement challenges state authority on borders and migration as well as notions of state-based citizenship is well demonstrated with an analysis of the sanctuary movements in the United States. This sanctuary movement can be defined as a movement that seeks to create inclusive and safe spaces for undocumented immigrants to live freely as participant members of the community. Traditionally, the sanctuary movement began by encouraging sacred spaces, particularly churches, to offer protections to undocumented immigrants and others facing deportation. This trend has expanded into a more secular form that seeks to promote sanctuary policies in local governments, institutions and organizations. In this book, I argue that sanctuary movements in the United States and the creation of sanctuary regions poses significant challenges for conventional understanding on state borders, sovereignty and state-based citizenship.

When I refer to sanctuary regions, I not only refer to cities and states that have passed sanctuary ordinances. I use the term more broadly to refer to regions that include various municipalities, districts, states and areas that extend beyond federal state boundaries and provide sanctuary and access to rights and services to undocumented immigrants. In many cases, activists and organizers shape policies that affect more than one city while others may shape policies that affect only certain sites within these cities. For this, I use the concept of sanctuary regions to identify spaces that might have cities with sanctuary ordinances, but it also includes colleges, universities, school boards, hospitals and neighbourhoods that have openly welcomed undocumented immigrants into their communities. These regions encompass multiple institutions that provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants by creating open spaces that do not discriminate based on legal residency status. Sanctuary regions are also local forces that form domestic activist initiatives that challenge state authority on immigration, citizenship and borders. In essence, there are multiple kinds of governance bodies that can establish (but also resist) sanctuary policy and become interconnected and coordinated in a decentralized fashion that can be difficult for state authority to disrupt or undo.

My concept of sanctuary regions builds upon the notions of sanctuary cities. Sanctuary cities refer to city governments and municipalities that have passed a sanctuary ordinance—turning the city into a relative ‘safety zone’ and a ‘zone of rights’ for undocumented immigrants. Typically, law enforcement, health care providers and city staff are involved in the sanctuary movement—they do not report undocumented immigrants to federal officials. There are also cities that offer ‘access without fear policies’. These policies are more focused on particular issues and do not turn the city as a whole into a sanctuary. These types of policies grant access to undocumented immigrants to specific services (library, transit etc.), with the guarantee that they will not be asked about their status; and that federal officials will not be contacted, should their status be revealed in these particularly instances. Here, it is also important to distinguish the way in which these sanctuaries provide a relative ‘safety zone’ for undocumented immigrants and the way in which they facilitate human rights claims and acquisition.

The notion of sanctuary regions is also developed from an understanding of regionalism in the field of International Relations (IR), which is defined by early scholars of regionalism as ‘the growth of societal integration within a region and to the, often undirected, processes of social and economic interaction’ (Hurrell, 1996, p. 39). These sanctuary regions provide an avenue in which refugees, stateless people and undocumented residents can and do make claims to rights outside of the avenue of the state. Sanctuary regions are regions that normatively accept undocumented immigrants by granting them access to basic services related to education, health, local voting rights and a voice. Many of these go beyond the acquisition of basic services and incorporate undocumented immigrants as part of the political community with access to the rights and privileges of other members of the community. I will elaborate further in the following chapters on how this concept can be applied to regions within states, since the concept of regionalism within International Relations is aptly reserved for states and international order. However, in order to understand the impact and power of these regions, it is also important to develop a clear understanding of the history of sanctuary practices and of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

My focus in this book is twofold: to understand the challenges that undocumented immigrants face within the United States with regard to recognition, how those challenges are overcome within sanctuary regions and how those same challenges redefine our traditional conceptions of sate-based citizenship, territoriality, and state sovereignty. The large population of undocumented immigrants in the United States (US) exists as a product of a political system that continues to deny legal residency or recognition to a group of immigrants that have been living in the United States for a number of years. Many of them have been denied refugee status or any other pathway to legal residency status. The existence of over 11 million undocumented immigrants (Zong & Batalova, 2017) living in the country creates classes among residents that strives to gain recognition and legal residency status.

Undocumented immigrants in the United States have made strides since the 1980s by acquiring fundamental human rights that are historically only accorded to citizens from within the state. The movement originated primarily through grassroots organizing and expanded to a national scale. In some areas, undocumented immigrants gained the right to vote in local politics, access public health care, education and transportation services. While undocumented immigrants in the US continue to live under the threat of deportation throughout the country, there is something to be said about the ways in which communities gain access to public services and recognition as contributing members of a society in cities, states and their broader local communities.

How can the gap of inequality between undocumented residents and citizens be reduced? How have undocumented immigrants been able to acquire political grounds for making human rights claims? How can citizen rights be achieved by non-citizens? What strategies enable these individuals to gain recognition by the community, and by actors invested with various kinds of authority? How do non-citizens acquire human rights? How do experiences of undocumented immigrants across the US challenge state-centric understandings of citizenship? These are all questions that drive this research and are addressed in this book.

Some scholars argue for a more cosmopolitan worldview, one that makes borders less stringent where individuals belong to a greater global entity—a form of cosmopolitan citizenship (Benhabib, 2004; Carens, 1987; Pogge, 1992). Others argue that the United Nations (UN) and particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are organizations that, for certain individuals, can potentially replace the state by virtue of their ability to guarantee human rights to populations that do not belong to a nation-state. These organizations can also serve to create norms that ensure that states comply with international human rights policies (Barnett, 2001; Finnemore & Barnett, 2004; Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998). Yet, in both of these cases, states remain as some of the most powerful actors in global politics. Actors that, despite the presence of global institutions, continue to ‘house’ non-citizens and irregular migrants. Individuals continue to live within these states as stateless, undocumented, refugees, or as migrants with very precarious status. Furthermore, within the literature in the field of international relations, this means that scholarship is void of discussions on how those local politics challenge state institutions and their ability to grant or withhold human rights to their residents. It also omits any discussion on the ‘power of the people’ and of these actors’ agency within the wider global realm.