Countering illiberal geographies through local policy? The political effects of sanctuary cities

ABSTRACT

Sanctuary cities in the United States pass policies to restrict cooperation with immigration police and are pivotal in the heated debate about current national immigration politics, especially since the Donald Trump administration tried to ban them. While the sanctuary movement institutionalizes struggles of pro-immigration activists and pragmatically helps to govern the mixed-status population, it also spreads by being labelled as a ‘liberal’ counter-movement to the ‘illiberal’ politics of the Trump administration. However, an ossified dichotomy of liberalism/illiberalism is not helpful towards an understanding of neither the current conflict between the Trump administration and sanctuary jurisdictions nor the phenomenon of a steadily growing sanctuary movement in the United States and in other countries. Analyzing three fields of tension of the phenomenon, this paper offers a more complex approach towards the political effects of the sanctuary phenomenon. The first field describes the pragmatism of sanctuary policy but also shows how it is not necessarily progressive or inclusive. The second field points out how sanctuary policy creates a meritocratic system that fails to establish actionable rights for migrants. Yet, the third field of tension substantiates that the sanctuary concept still has inclusive and liberal potential if it is practised as a dynamic modus vivendi.

KEYWORDS:

• immigration politics
• sanctuary cities
• devolution
• illiberalism
• population
• illegalized immigrants
• liberalism

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was written within a PhD project on the political effects of sanctuary cities and was first presented at the AAG 2018 in New Orleans. For commenting and correcting on further drafts, the author thanks supervisors Annika Mattissek and Harald Bauder. Furthermore, the author is also grateful for all the help given by Thilo Wiertz, Tobias Schopper, Robert John, Simon Schaupp and Tearney McDermott.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Still, the situation for the local institution is becoming more difficult under the Trump administration. The restrictive national politics against undocumented migration and their social supporters has many ramifications. For further discussion, see McHugh (2018).

2 Although the term ‘illegalized’ is rarely used in this context, many scholars, among them Bauder (2013) and Goldring and Landolt (2013), use it to point out the precariousness of the status. This term is sensitive to legal and political processes and stresses their vulnerability in institutional treatment by the nation-state.

3 The policy is widely known by the name ‘access without fear’, respectively ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. Ideally, this is valid for all city services, but in reality only some are actually accessible for all residents regardless of their status. Additionally, the policy requires intensive training of city service workers. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Atak et al. (2017).

4 In February 2018, Mayor Libby Schaaf from Oakland, California, warned residents of a planned raid by the immigration enforcement police (Fuller, 2018). The mayor actively and openly hindered the work of federal authorities with this tip-off, indicating that she was morally motivated to do so.

5 In a similar way, over 100 jurisdictions in the United States passed illegal immigration relief act ordinances (IIRAOs) that made use of the same claim to municipal sovereignty. The aim of the IIRAOs is different from the sanctuary city idea, because every hiring within the city premises would require checking immigration papers and ‘landlords similarly had to check all tenants immigration papers, again with loss of operating privileges for failure to comply’ (ACLU Pennsylvania, 2014). Nearly all ordinances were declared unconstitutional (Esbenshade et al., 2010). However, the base to this is the same claim for local autonomy. Thus, passing local by-laws is not always inclusive.

6 This is true for the undocumented in the United States, but similar in other Western democracies.

7 Translation by the author.

8 Translation by the author.