Introduction for Making Sanctuary Cities

INTRODUCTION

Why Sanctuary?

Sanctuary is really about: who belongs here? Who gets to decide? And why?

Laura, migrant activist, San Francisco

It is 9 January 2019, ten days before I meet Laura, and I have just arrived in San Francisco from London. I have not yet spotted the first of many Donald Trump piñatas or eaten the fresh corn tortillas that would become one of my favourite foods here. On the news, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are holding children in cages on the US border with Mexico. In a couple of weeks, I will attend a rally outside the Ninth Circuit Appeal Court where the US Constitution will be tested by sanctuary cities.¹ The stakes of the sanctuary city never seemed so clear in their potential as bastions of safety against rising anti-migrant hostility.

Throughout 2019, I lived in San Francisco (USA), Sheffield (UK), and Toronto (Canada) because they had all self-defined as ‘sanctuary cities’. Sanctuary cities are often defined as cities that welcome or protect undocumented migrants from national immigration enforcement. These three cities were the first to specifically include this designation in their municipal government policies in each of their respective countries.² I wanted to understand why these cities had originated the term. Were there any common factors that could explain why they had become among the first cities to establish this movement? Did they really make a difference on the ground? How? I was drawn to these questions because I had previously researched welfare service providers who made discretionary decisions about whether to allow migrants access to services (often deciding based on moral judgements of deservingness). Sanctuary cities seemed to be addressing exactly these kinds of issues.³ I spent three months in each city volunteering in migrants’ rights organisations and interviewing people who were working with sanctuary city policy. I was immediately surprised by peoples’ conflicting ideas about sanctuary cities, their effects, and what they should or could be.

One of these people was Laura, the child of undocumented Nicaraguan parents. Now a mother herself, living, working, and bringing up her young daughter in the Mission District, a predominantly Latinx neighbourhood of San Francisco, Laura had been organising for migrants’ rights since she was a teenager. Her understanding of the sanctuary city, and what it could mean, stemmed from her everyday experiences living and organising alongside her family and neighbours who held many different legal migration statuses (and none). I met her by accident as I was interviewing Lena, the volunteer coordinator of a faith-based organisation in the basement of a church in the south of the Mission District. She rushed into the church on her way to a small office located at the back of the basement. Lena introduced me and Laura decided to join our conversation, sitting around a large wooden table. We discussed the sanctuary city for almost two hours before she had to rush to pick up her daughter from day care. She lucidly explained the enormous challenges to the sanctuary city but was limitless in her optimism and hope about what it could achieve. She bemoaned how sanctuary organising had lost its way because ‘we have become service providers. We aren’t a movement anymore.’ But she hadn’t dropped the term and continued to organise under the umbrella of the sanctuary city. I found myself not only inspired but also deeply moved by her stories, commitment, and aspirations.

Many others like Laura gave up large amounts of their time to explain to me in painstaking detail about their work and how they were continuing their struggles in the face of hugely difficult circumstances (which were about to get a lot harder with the outbreak of global pandemic in early 2020). However, the more people I spoke to, the more variations in the notion of sanctuary cities emerged. Some activists claimed the sanctuary city was useless and even worsened the situation. Others vowed that the sanctuary city was the most important part of their work and helped them achieve a wide range of different social justice struggles, from language classes to fighting evictions and deportations. For some the sanctuary city was used by the right-wing press to represent progressive immigrant policies in cities and fuel anti-migrant fears. Others claimed the sanctuary city was key to their decolonial agenda and fight for indigenous rights (for example the Toronto-based ‘No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land’ campaign). Some activists disavowed the term all together, stating ‘that’s the term they use’, referring to the municipal government, while others were setting up organisations foregrounding sanctuary. I found these contradictions not only in my fieldwork but also in the academic literature and policy debate about sanctuary cities.

These wide-ranging meanings and practices of the sanctuary city made researching them daunting. I was also unsure what could be gained from comparing sanctuary city policies across these three cities while retaining these different perspectives. I came to realise that this was not a problem, but the beginning of an answer. Inspired by my previous anthropological research, I thought about how I could, in the words of Susan Wright and Sue Reinhold, ‘study through’ the sanctuary city (2011).⁴ This approach not only called for a wide variety of methods but also raised different kinds of questions. I call this approach ‘comparative policy ethnography’ (see Appendix 1). It ensures that one narrative doesn’t dominate over others but foregrounds different people’s evolving and potentially contradictory perspectives.

Crucially, comparative policy ethnography allowed me to attend to how the sanctuary city played out in situated contexts. The sanctuary city was always constituted for specific reasons, and at particular moments in time, and this made it difficult to pin down. It was not a fixed status to define nor a linear process to map. It was made up of practices that required elaboration and exploration in context.

This approach led me to question why and how, across such different contexts and intense contestation in each city, the sanctuary city was so salient? Why and how, amid such contradictions and confusions, was that term still being used with such passion? Why did sanctuary cities cause these tensions? And what was really at stake in claiming to be a sanctuary city?

This book sets out to answer these questions. I describe how the sanctuary city has emerged in each of these three cities, why, and with what effects. It is only then we can understand what ‘work’ the sanctuary city is doing. The quote from Laura that opened this chapter articulates why this matters. Sanctuary cities speak to the foundational basis on which we form, in Bridget Anderson’s words, a ‘community of value’ (2013). Sanctuary cities provoke reflection on the kind of communities we want to create and the grounds on which we determine membership and belonging to those communities. The tensions sanctuary cities evoke reveal the contradictions in the values we value and, in so doing, open broader questions about how we live, organise our relations to others, and who we want to become. One reason sanctuary cities hold such ‘weight’ (Dave, Co-director of Sheffield migrant organisation) or ‘energy’ (Nicole, San Francisco District Attorney’s office) is precisely because they evoke these enduring and fundamental questions.

The first thing that struck me about San Francisco when I lived there between January and April 2019, was inequality. Homelessness and poverty were painfully evident. Inequality was also placed into stark relief by odd facts that I was told about the city such as there are more dogs than children in San Francisco. Low-income families have been evicted and higher-income families believe San Francisco is too dangerous to bring up children. The city has become the home of ‘Tech Giants’, global technology companies which dominated the downtown area (Brahinsky 2014; Hartman 2002; McElroy 2019). While this has meant that the city could raise considerable funds from its tax base (Storper et al. 2016) and therefore could offer precaritised residents⁶ access to city-funded welfare services, the growth of the technology industry has been responsible for widespread gentrification, pushing those that would benefit from these policies from the city.⁷ Maharawal argues that the new tech-boom is distinguished in its ‘total saturation of the city’s rental and real estate markets’ and has precipitated an ‘eviction epidemic’ (2017, 341).⁸

The city currently has the highest levels of income inequality (ibid.) and the most expensive rental market in the country.⁹ These dynamics dramatically shape the sanctuary city as eviction of precaritised residents blurs the boundary between internal displacement and international deportations due to the concomitant loss of services. Evicted residents are predominantly Latinx or from the Asian Pacific Islander (API) population. African Americans are also the most rapidly declining group in San Francisco due to gentrification and eviction. These residents often have family and have been living in the city for decades (Mirabal 2009; Opillard 2015; Solnit 2000). The overriding feeling I got from San Francisco was that the city was changing too quickly, and it was a victim of its own success.

I was also struck by how many sanctuary actors¹⁰ talked about their own situated positionality and ‘taking stock of their privilege’. More so than the other two cities, sanctuary actors were engaged with academic writing, mentioning Els De Graauw’s excellent book about sanctuary to me (2016). The city had a highly developed non-profit sector funded by city government and private philanthropy. San Francisco is a diverse city with 34 per cent foreign born residents¹¹ and many long-standing racialised groups such as Chinese migrants who began arriving in the city in the 1840s. In 2019, an estimated 6 per cent of residents (49,000) had no legal migration status.¹²

San Francisco designated itself as a sanctuary city in 1985. My interlocutors narrated three important stages in the development of the sanctuary city (for details see Mancina 2016 and Humphris 2021). First, the creation of the City of Refuge Ordinance in 1985 and strengthened in 1989. Crucially, much of this sanctuary organising stemmed from US military intervention in Central America. The tireless work of migrant rights activists reframed sanctuary as a city-level issue through building solidarity between Central American refugees and Mexican migrant workers. Chapters 12H and 12I of the Administrative Code imposed restrictions on all City and County of San Francisco employees not to ask, and obligations not to report, migration status to the federal government. Within two months all government applications, questionnaires, and interview forms used in relation to benefits, services or opportunities had been reviewed and all questions regarding immigration status were deleted.

The next significant moment for the sanctuary city in San Francisco came in 2008. In the wake of the 2006 Sensenbrenner Bill, a network of lawyers, advocates, and service providers, funded by the municipal government, organised against the deportation of undocumented youth. They launched the ‘Due Process for Youth’ Ordinance, which prohibited city officials from alerting federal immigration authorities when a person under eighteen was arrested on felony charges and did not have a legal migration status. Following on from the success of this policy, the ‘Due Process for All’ Ordinance was passed in 2013 as a response to the federal government’s ‘Secure Communities’ programme. The programme asked that authorities hold undocumented residents charged with any crime in custody, even if they would normally be released, so federal agents could consider deportation. Under the new ordinance, unless an individual had a prior serious conviction, San Francisco officials would be unable to keep the person in custody based solely on immigration status.

The third significant stage began when commitments to the sanctuary city deepened after the election of Donald Trump. He tried to block federal grants to the city unless it cooperated with federal immigration officers, pushing the US Constitution to its limits. San Francisco’s response included multiple municipal departmental memos to ensure adherence to sanctuary ordinances, city-level funding for a new Public Defender Immigration Unit to represent residents facing deportation, and a reinvigorated ‘Rapid Response Network’ to notify attorneys of ICE raids, among many other community responses detailed later in this book.

Moving to the UK’s first sanctuary city, Sheffield is in Yorkshire, a region in the post-industrial north of the country. In 2021, it was the fifth largest city in the UK, with 14 per cent foreign born and 19 per cent black or ‘other minority ethnic heritage’.¹³ Sheffield City Council (SCC) is historically progressive. The County Council provoked the nickname ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’. The majority of Sheffield’s residents identified with Labour and it did not take long for people in the city to voice their strongly held views against the national Conservative Government in power at the time. Sanctuary actors also proudly talked about their Muslim mayor, a Somali refugee who grew up in the infamous Burngreave area of Sheffield. Despite sanctuary actors’ left-wing proclivities and the widespread and long-standing commitment to the Labour party, there was an increasing far-right presence in the city (Grayson 2014). Similarly to San Francisco, I was shocked by the inequality in Sheffield. I was told about the film Fairness on the 83 which charts a drop in healthy life expectancy of 20 years along the 83-bus route from one end of Sheffield to the other (Millhouses to Ecclesfield).

These inequalities had been exacerbated by the severe budget cuts that Sheffield, like all local authorities in the UK, experienced since the 2010 national government policy of austerity. Over the last decade, the funding from national government reduced by 30 per cent or £856 less per resident in real terms (Sheffield City Council 2023). Sheffield had a high density of non-profit organisations who have worked tirelessly to fill in the gaps left by shrinking public services. When I lived there between May and August 2019, I was surprised by the amount of volunteering and charity donations in the city that seemed to keep many organisations afloat. However, while some areas sunk into deprivation, central areas were being regenerated and there was a large amount of construction work. The advertising around these construction sites depicted high-end private student apartments with a concierge, gym, swimming pool, and cinema. These apartments appealed to wealthy international students attending the two large universities in the city.

While Sheffield may not be considered a ‘global city’ on the same terms as San Francisco or Toronto, it was shaped by similar trends of real-estate speculation, gentrification, and the deepening of long-standing inequalities (Rousseau 2009; Madanipour 2018). Regeneration projects began in Sheffield from the 1980s following the Thatcher government’s destruction of the steel industry after the 1980s steel workers’ strike. Scholars argue SCC coordinated speculative real-estate investment without durable connections to the local economy or taking account of the city’s social capacities and needs (Clavel and Kraushaar 1998). Economic downturns revealed the limitations in these forms of urban governance as social inequalities widened. It has been argued that the Labour Government was adept at incorporating and containing radical challenges (Diamond 2021). Its long rule in Sheffield illustrates its success at absorbing these challenges.

Under a national and city-level Labour Government, Sheffield became the first city in the UK to adopt the term ‘sanctuary city’. The Sheffield City of Sanctuary declaration was a commitment by the city to welcome people in need of safety and was agreed by SCC (SCC) in June 2007. In contrast to San Francisco, there has been no formal policy or statement by SCC or the City Mayor on the issue since the original declaration. Significantly, ‘City of sanctuary’ was not only a self-designation made by the city but also the name given to a charitable non-profit organisation called City of Sanctuary Sheffield (CoSS). More widely across the UK, City of Sanctuary also became a national grassroots movement (Allen 2020). CoSS signed up to the national City of Sanctuary Birmingham Declaration in 2014. The Birmingham Declaration was drawn upon in recent discussions with SCC regarding what sanctuary means in Sheffield (City of Sanctuary 2014). It provides five principles: all asylum seekers, refugees and migrants should be treated with dignity and respect; there should be a fair and effective process to decide whether people need protection; indefinite detention should end; destitution should end; and all migrants should be integrated, including free language class provision. The Birmingham Declaration places no duties on city governments to act on these principles.

This lack of commitment is not surprising given UK municipalities’ limited power to diverge from national government policy. Unlike Canada and the USA, the UK is a unitary, not federal national government. In addition, since 2012, cities of sanctuary in the UK faced increasing pressure because the UK Government introduced a policy of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants. The UK Government has systematically created internal migration checks termed by scholars as ‘everyday bordering’ (Yuval Davis et al. 2019).

The majority of precaritised residents in Sheffield live in a downscaled area of the city called Burngreave. According to the 2021 census, 30 per cent of Burngreave’s residents self-identified as Asian, 16 per cent Black, and 8 per cent Arab.¹⁴ This area, which was already subject to saturated policing, was the target of new private housing officers who were to cooperate with the Home Office, sparking the ‘sanctuary moment’ detailed in Chapter 5. It is extremely difficult to gauge the demographic profile of precaritised residents in Sheffield. Recent estimates suggest there are between 800,000 and 1.2 million people with no legal migration status in the UK. The most significant region of origin for the UK’s undocumented population is Asia (52 per cent) followed by sub-Saharan Africa (20 per cent), the Americas and non-EU Europe (16 per cent), and the Middle East/North Africa (11 per cent). The UK’s undocumented communities are thought to be more settled than those in Europe, with over half having lived here for more than five years. Just over a quarter of undocumented people (215,000) are children, half of whom were born in the UK (Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants 2024). Similarly to San Francisco, it is likely that the undocumented population in Sheffield is increasingly long-standing with families and established lives in the city.

Finally to Toronto, which has a reputation for being one of the most diverse cities in the world. Canada is a country of migration through settler colonialism with a developed settlement strategy that is purportedly positive towards migrants, although scholars argue it is welcoming only to highly skilled migrants (Atak 2019). Since 2001, immigration to Toronto has been on the rise. In 2021, 47 per cent of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) were immigrants.¹⁵ More than half the city’s population (56 per cent) identified as belonging to a ‘racialised group’ (City of Toronto 2022). Toronto City Government embraces this identity as a home for people from all over the world. The city hosts a dizzying array of different festivals and celebrations to mark the different backgrounds of its residents. I lived in Toronto between September and December 2019 and there were festivals outside City Hall almost every weekend. Restaurants also attest to this diversity, such as ‘Rasta Pasta’, one of my favourite places to eat in the bohemian Kensington Market area. I was also struck by the land acknowledgements that were read aloud before any official event. While these have been criticised as solely symbolic and a far-cry from providing reparations to Canada’s indigenous population, they were notable because this never happened in San Francisco.

Canada has had only one Conservative premier, Stephen Harper, who served from 2004 to 2015. However, Toronto is situated in the state of Ontario which has been largely Conservative, with the Liberals forming a government for only five years out of sixty between 1943 and 2003. At the time of fieldwork, the Ontario premier, Doug Ford, was Conservative and staunchly anti-immigrant. Many sanctuary actors compared Doug Ford to Donald Trump, an association aided by their similar physical appearance. After hearing these comments, I noticed a large amount of anti-Ford graffiti in the city.

Toronto is a growing metropolis with a large amount of construction and ‘urban revitalisation’. I attended a community event in the controversial Regent’s Park social housing development in a pristine community centre surrounded by new high-rise apartment buildings. While care had been taken to ensure ‘right to return’ for those evicted, the previous residents I met believed the project had failed them in various ways (James 2010). I was also surprised by the huge amount of building work on the waterfront. Sparkling high-rise apartment blocks stood imposingly on Lake Ontario’s edge. Their private manicured gardens led directly to newly privatised parts of the waterfront, pushing pedestrians onto the highway.

My interlocutors narrated that organising for what became the sanctuary city in Toronto began in earnest in 2006 when the grassroots movement No One Is Illegal, Toronto (NOII), called for welfare services to adopt a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. After several aggressive raids by the federal immigration authority, Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), multiple campaigns emerged including ‘Education not Deportation’ (schools), ‘Shelters, Sanctuary, Status’ (shelters), Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) for all (healthcare), Food for all (food banks), and the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ coalition (police).

These campaigns provided the groundwork for the ‘Access T.O.’ policy that was passed by the City Council in February 2013. At that time, estimates of the number of undocumented residents in the GTA ranged from 200,000 to 500,000 (Gastaldo et al. 2012). Access T.O. was termed a sanctuary city policy in the media and later, in January 2017 the then Mayor, John Tory, self-designated Toronto as a sanctuary city (Fox 2017). The Access T.O. policy obliges the city to ensure all Torontonians have access to the municipal services for which they are eligible ‘without fear of reprisal with respect to status’. In practice, this means all municipal services should not make access dependent on providing legal migration status documents. These services are limited to emergency services, emergency shelter and housing support, by-law enforcement, employment help, library services, public health services, recreation programmes, garbage collection, and parks. Only library services and public health explicitly reference Access T.O. in their strategic policy. Other services that would make a material difference to Torontonians would require changes to provincial legislation (including the Education Act, the Ontario Works Act and Ontario Disability Act, the Ontario Police Services Act, and the Social Housing Act¹⁶).

Toronto can enact sanctuary city policies in practice through negotiations with federal and provincial governments. Canadian municipalities are generally considered to be ‘creatures of provinces’ but two factors allowed Toronto more room for manoeuvre. First, Metropolitan Toronto was amalgamated with its six lower-tier municipalities into a single City of Toronto in 1998, increasing its tax base. Second, Toronto has taken the lion’s share of responsibility for Canada’s settlement policy. Consequently, it has been afforded latitude in some areas of immigration governance (see Chapter 3). While Toronto has limited powers to raise its own budgets and therefore cannot offer the same level of funded welfare provision as San Francisco, federalism does provide the city with more leeway.

However, similarly to the other two cities, Toronto has undergone increasing gentrification and widening social inequalities. Toronto is a city in which the ‘inner suburbs’ became poorer and residents were racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’ while the professional classes were racialised as white and got richer. Post-amalgamation Toronto has become a highly differentiated space in which many areas are privileged while others suffer growing poverty and marginalisation, compounded by visible systemic racism.

I also noticed that precaritised residents did the same kinds of jobs in all three cities. They worked in dirty, dangerous, and devalued jobs such as construction or social care. Migration scholars have long argued that migrants do not just end up in these jobs due to a variety of factors that arise from ‘somewhere else’. Rather, migration is an internal feature of how capitalism functions at the global scale. The movement of capital relentlessly generates movement of people, which, in turn, is constitutive of the concrete forms of capitalism itself. Moreover, scholars attribute intentionality to migrants’ ascribed irregularity, which appears as a tool to perpetuate and codify their subordinate position within local and global labour markets (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Cities have been at the forefront of these developments, relying on cheap, precaritised migrant labour to make the city ‘from below’ (Sassen 2014).²⁰ A second aim of this book is to bring these insights into conversation with sanctuary cities to reveal how economic concerns and capital accumulation shape cities’ responses to precaritised residents.

In addition, in all three countries, migrants are rendered ‘useful’ well beyond their capacity to be easily exploited in labour markets. Migrants have continuously figured in the so-called ‘post-political’ stalemate in North Atlantic societies, most starkly since the 11 September terrorist attacks in New York City, and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and its associated upheavals. The figure of the racialised migrant has become an overwhelming theme of populism as seen through the political campaigns of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit debate in the UK, and Trudeau blaming immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis. Migrants carry the blame for deepening social inequality. The idea of migration as a form of attack (signified in attempts to build defensive walls, close borders, stop ‘small boats’) has been normalised. Notions such as ‘deservingness’ and the ‘good migrant’ are dominating tropes across all three countries with little reckoning of how human mobility, race, and empire have been part of the exclusionary logic of nation-building and city-making since their inception. The third aim of this book is to trace the underlying logics behind these tropes and why they are so compelling, and provide a historical reading of sanctuary cities that does not start with social movements in 1980s but is part of a longer history of governance shaping the relationship between population, territory, and wealth. The overall aim of the book is to trace sanctuary cities’ competing moral values that construct precaritised residents as more or less deserving of rights and resources. I avoid defining sanctuary cities as either resistance to, or an extension of, restrictive national policies. Rather, I emphasise how the sanctuary city can be both.

Chapter 2 builds on current sanctuary city literature, to explore the historical ramifications of ‘the city’ and its (settler-) colonial dynamics. Through historical sociology and decolonial urban political economy it traces how the rise of modern statehood and market economies occurred at the same time as the subordination of the city to the nation as the only sovereign political community. The rise of modern states, and the making of colonialism on which capitalism relied, extended pre-modern urban concerns about sanitation, plague, crime, and disorder to colonial urban governance (Goldberg 2002; Shilliam 2018). The responsibilities of modern city government became the key instrument for disciplining the poor, accompanied by moral justifications that still hold weight today. The chapter links these developments within the shared colonial history of the book’s Anglosphere three-country comparison as a shared space of law and governance.

The insights revealed in Chapter 2 help to reformulate a recurring question about sanctuary cities, explored in Chapter 3. We should not ask whether cities can act autonomously but rather what specific kinds of governing rights and obligations cities possess, for what purposes, and who is invested with these powers. The chapter places the three cities within their legal constitutions, as municipalities within three differently structured nation-states. This chapter provides the political, social, and economic contexts that shape the moral values about precaritised residents.

Chapter 4 lays out the mutable and contingent moral values that emerge in the practice of the sanctuary city that I categorise as: ‘the efficient city’, ‘the safe city’, and the ‘just city’. The chapter explores how these moral conceptions are constantly in motion and accounts for how ‘progressive’ moral orientations can end up supporting and sustaining neoliberal systems. Chapter 5 explores how these moralities are translated into practices. The chapter includes ethnographic policy analysis of a defining sanctuary moment in each city. These moments are conceived as instances when deference to dominant or official narratives that work to reinstate policy ambitions and conceal divergent and contradictory logics are disrupted. We can find meaning in these moments of tension, when there is friction, where governing systems momentarily seize up and new practices must emerge.

Overall, sanctuary cities are a strategic space where the city emerges as a ‘battleground through which groups defined their identities, staked their claims, waged their battles and articulated citizenship rights, obligations and principles’ (Isin 2002, 51). Questions of liberal citizenship are therefore at the heart of struggles over sanctuary cities.²¹ Grassroots organisers like Laura, who opened this book, rejected notions of competition, commodification, and capital accumulation. They were working with moral values that were guided by a different relationship between people, place, and resources that were localised and personalised. Laura could be said to have ‘rescaled’ citizenship from national to urban or, in her words, ‘belonging to community’. This rescaling challenges one of the essential projects of nation-building which has been to dismantle the historic primacy of urban citizenship and to displace it with the national, although it never managed to replace it entirely (Prak 2018). Crucially, this rescaling held most weight in a federalised nation-state indicating the importance of intermediary institutions such as states and provinces in restoring the urban as a site of affiliation and identification, against the nation.

The book elaborates how radical possibilities for achieving the promise of liberal citizenship (we are all equal) are translated into palatable policies for local government which, as we see in Chapter 5, can further institute inequalities.²² This analysis reveals how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in—the promise of equality. An ethnographically informed reading of sanctuary cities is crucial to tease out the potential of liberal citizenship but also the complex processes through which governing systems suffocate but never extinguish practices animated by radical potential.

To understand these processes, we must understand the moral values that underpin them. Focusing on moral values helps to explain why the notion of the sanctuary city resonates in the contemporary moment across such different people and places but also why it has not realised its promise of transformation. As the book shows, increasingly restrictive ‘international’ migration controls and ‘domestic’ border enforcement unsettled the fragile balance that had been in place between city and nation, which had allowed cities to manage, to some extent, their own legitimacy of governing. Sanctuary cities provided a short-term, partial answer to these intractable dilemmas for urban policy makers that were always already constrained by their histories and embedded contexts. However, this is not a story of foreclosed politics. Rather the tensions that sanctuary cities evoke, the actions they trigger, and alternative ways of thinking about belonging, they inspire, hold openings and possibilities. Whether the ‘sanctuary city’ is the name given to these struggles in the future remains to be seen.

Notes

1. On 25 January 2017 within five days of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President he issued ‘Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States (EO 13768)’, which was swiftly followed by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memorandum, ‘Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest’. The Executive Order specifically targets ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’. In Section 9, it states ‘jurisdictions that wilfully refuse to comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373 [addressing information-sharing regarding immigration and citizenship status between government agencies and the Immigration and Naturalization Service] are not eligible to receive federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes.’ In response, on 31 January the City and County of San Francisco filed in the US District Court (Northern District of California) asking the court to declare Section 9(a) unconstitutional. Following almost two years of legal proceedings the Ninth Circuit ruled that the federal government could not withhold the grants; however, it added that this ruling did not extend nationally. Three other regional federal appeals court have ruled against the administration, but New York’s Second Circuit allowed it to go forward and declined to reconsider its ruling.

2. There is some debate regarding whether San Francisco was the first city to self-define in the USA but it was among the first, and the first to incorporate this designation into municipal governance as the ‘City of Refuge’ Ordinance first in 1985 and in a strengthened ordinance in 1989.

3. My previous research had focused on how frontline workers seemed to be making up migration policy through their everyday decisions. I found from long-term ethnographic fieldwork with new migrant families who came to be known as ‘Romanian Roma’ that decisions about their legal residency and migration status often depended on the discretionary decisions of child welfare workers. I became increasingly interested in the occupational identity of these frontline workers and the dilemmas they experienced as they effectively ‘made-up’ migration and settlement policy on the fly. At the same time, I became aware of work done by Graham Hudson about the discretionary decisions of frontline workers in the sanctuary city of Toronto and how their decisions could affect whether a migrant was provided with access to services or reported to the immigration authorities. I began to wonder what might affect frontline workers’ decisions and whether sanctuary cities effectively provided a way to contest migration policy from the ground up. I decided that an interesting entry point would be to look at sanctuary cities across different national frameworks. I chose a pioneering city in the three countries that had actively taken up the notion of the ‘sanctuary city’ and included this designation in their municipal government policies. It is not a coincidence, but rooted in deep historical underpinnings as shown by Chapter 3, that these countries utilise the notion of the sanctuary city.

4. Studying through calls for charting how power creates webs and relations between actors, institutions, and discourses across time and space (Shore and Wright 1997, 11). The concrete method for ‘following a policy’ means ‘tracing policy-relevant actors, objects, acts and language to tease out connections and observing how policies bring together individuals, discourses and institutions and the new kinds of networks, relations and subjects this process creates’ (Wright and Reinhold 2011, 102).

5. California’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 was $3.6 trillion representing 14.3% of the total US economy. This is larger than both the UK ($2.67 trillion) and Canada ($1.64 trillion).

6. Informed by these processes of dispossession, I use the term ‘precaritised residents’ in this book rather than un(der)documented migrants. This term alludes to the blurred boundaries and contested nature of defining the people that sanctuary cities are aimed to support. Migration scholars have long argued that migrant statuses are fluid; not only do individuals repeatedly move between ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ (Calavita 2003, Kubal 2013; Anderson and Ruhs 2010), but also underlying legal categories and potential paths into and out of irregularity change over time (Cvajner and Sciortino 2010; Düvell 2011). I also use this term to allude to the longer historical complexities of exploitation, deprivation, and racialisation that will be explored further in Chapter 2.

7. Between 2010 and 2015 there was a 54.7% increase in evictions, the majority of which were in the Mission District, the historically Latinx area (San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition 2016; San Francisco Rent Board 2016). Eviction-induced displacement is not only a loss of home (including identity; memory; structures of feeling; space; scales and intensities of affiliation; and materiality), but contributes to widening urban inequalities, the reproduction of poverty (Desmond 2012), and is also a political loss. Due to the spiralling rental costs in the Bay Area, those evicted move far beyond the bounds of the city (Walker and Schafran 2015) with particular consequences for those with precarious legal status who lose social and political rights and the hard won (albeit limited) protections that many of them fought for.

8. In addition, the recent rebranding of the Mission District and Latinx culture as a commodity to be consumed can be seen as an iteration of ‘racial capitalism’ defined as ‘the development, organisation and expansion of capitalist society which has pursued essentially racial directions’ (Robinson 1983, 2). The gentrification of the Mission ‘preys upon’ and actively commodifies Mission Latinx culture to boost property value. As McElroy states, ‘the gentrification is premised upon tech speculation or practices in which future real estate value is linked to the desires of those imbricated in techno-capitalist economies’ (2019, 827).

9. There are historical continuations between the wholesale purges of African Americans in the SoMa and Fillmore district (Rothstein 2017) and Filipinx in Manilatown (Habal 2007) in the 1960s and 1970s and the current piecemeal ‘silent sorting’ of residents in the Mission (Marcuse 2015).

10. Defined as those who either voluntarily or through their employment enact sanctuary policy or perform under its force.

11. United States Census Bureau ‘Foreign born residents in San Francisco’ Available at: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocountycaliforn… accessed 30 November 2023.

12. Migration Policy Institute. 2019. ‘Profile of the Unauthorized Population: San Francisco County, CA’. Available at: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-population/… accessed 15 November 2023.

13. See Sheffield City Council ‘Population in Sheffield’ 2021 output release https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/your-city-council/population-in-sheffield accessed 14 November 2023.

14. City Population Mapper Burngreave. Available at: https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/yorkshireandthehumber/wards/sheffie… accessed 14 November 2023.

15. The Greater Toronto Area includes six local boroughs—Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, York, East York, and the City of Toronto plus the cities of Mississauga and Brampton.

16. In addition there is general confusion regarding which services are run by the City (and therefore under the jurisdiction of Access T.O.) and those run by other agencies who could freely report an undocumented resident. See Chapter 3 for further details.

17. Post-colonial scholars argue that much previous analysis has used ideas of class, poverty, social marginalisation, and stigmatisation without fully accounting for how cities act, ‘as a mechanism through which capital produces race as a socio-political category of distinction and discrimination in the first place and as a form of structural coercion that is built into capitalist structures and institutions, rather than a discrete act that may be spatially expressed’ (Danewid 2020, 296). These scholars see race as a socio-spatial relation that is ‘both constitutive of the city and produced by it’ (Pulido 2000, 12). In this reading, global cities are seen as mechanisms through which capital produces raced space (Gilmore 2007).

18. As Cedric Robinson’s (1983) Black Marxism reminds us, this is not surprising: capitalism has historically operated through racial projects that differentiate between those associated with rights, wages, and citizenship and those subject to super-exploitation and dispossession. Racial capitalism denotes, according to Bhattacharyya (2018, 5), ‘a process by which capitalist formations create by default the edge-populations that serve as the other and limit of the working class’. Shilliam similarly shows how processes of racialisation in Western societies have long operated through the shifting categorisation between ‘the deserving and undeserving poor through ever more expansive terms that have incorporated working classes, colonial “natives” and nationalities’ (2018, 6).

19. The post-war period’s massive urban renewal and public housing programmes drew on urban planning rationales developed through colonial governance, including techniques of slum clearance and racial segregation which were framed as a question of public health. Disease, criminality, alcoholism, prostitution, and other ‘dangers’ might ‘pollute’ the white body politic.

20. I agree with Doreen Massey (1993) regarding the terminology of the ‘global city’. She remarks that the global cities phenomenon also follows distinctive patterns of spatial change. However, she contends it is not necessarily the globalisation of cities such as London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo that has caused shifts in investment and population, but rather their adherence to policies of deregulation. Arguing that the economies of global cities are far more diverse than are often acknowledged, she states that the global cities hypothesis itself is a way of naturalising policy choices as a result of inevitable market forces, and also valorising the most competitive and profitable part of a city’s economy by having those represent the entire city. In other words, our analytical paradigms for describing global cities are not neutral; they play a role in encouraging these market-orientated developments. It is for this reason that I choose the term ‘globalised city’ to indicate the political and processual nature of the term.

21. In liberal theory, citizenship is theorised as universal, meaning that all members of the political community are granted equal rights. In the ideal, there are no partial citizens. This notion of citizenship has now been successfully challenged, spearheaded by Iris Marion Young (1989).

22. In addition to formal, juridical citizenship, citizenship also concerns moral and performative dimensions of membership, which define meanings and practices of belonging in society (Staeheli 1997). Scholarly work highlights the possibility of irregular migrants being included in some spheres or aspects of social life but simultaneously excluded from many others (Castles and Davidson 2000; Cvajner and Sciortino 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012; Anderson and Ruhs 2010; Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012). The notion of citizenship has been further nuanced through ideas of conditionality or continuously probationary citizenship (Anderson 2013; Watters 2007). State practices of revoking citizenship reveal how citizenship, while claiming equality, has always been a privilege based along class, gender, and racialised axes of difference (Kapoor 2018). Moreover, citizenship does not only confer rights on privileged categories but is embedded in the creation, definition and manipulation of those categories of identity. As Isin extensively explores, ‘the theories that define citizenship as a space of privilege neglect that it requires the constitution of these others to become possible’ (2002, 4). Precaritised residents are integral to the meaning of citizenship. Citizenship is not merely a status or institution but a relationship (Isin and Ruppert 2015).