“…The emergence of sanctuary policies in Canada was the result of years of activism, of social learning by city governments, and of strategic engagement with policy windows (Jeffries & Ridgley, 2020;Moffette & Ridgley, 2018). The large-scale social, political, and economic impacts of Covid-19 will generate new opportunities for Canadian cities' involvement in immigration-related matters while also potentially eroding the foundations of sanctuary policies.…”
Section: Canadian Sanctuary Cities After Covid-19mentioning
In Canada, urban centres have been especially hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and this public health crisis has generated particular risks for non-status and precarious migrants. Using official data and published research, this chapter explores how city sanctuary policies in Canada have addressed these pandemic risks and, more broadly, the future for Canadian sanctuary policies in the post-Covid-19 recovery. We highlight the specificities of sanctuary policies in the Canadian context and document that while cities have not rescinded these interventions during the pandemic, they also have not built on them when developing COVID-19 responses for urban residents. We propose that this demonstrates the need to maintain pressure for reforms that increase the resources and capacities of cities in Canada so that they can be in a better position to implement and institutionalise policies for non-status and precarious migrants.
“…The emergence of sanctuary policies in Canada was the result of years of activism, of social learning by city governments, and of strategic engagement with policy windows (Jeffries & Ridgley, 2020;Moffette & Ridgley, 2018). The large-scale social, political, and economic impacts of Covid-19 will generate new opportunities for Canadian cities' involvement in immigration-related matters while also potentially eroding the foundations of sanctuary policies.…”
Section: Canadian Sanctuary Cities After Covid-19mentioning
In Canada, urban centres have been especially hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and this public health crisis has generated particular risks for non-status and precarious migrants. Using official data and published research, this chapter explores how city sanctuary policies in Canada have addressed these pandemic risks and, more broadly, the future for Canadian sanctuary policies in the post-Covid-19 recovery. We highlight the specificities of sanctuary policies in the Canadian context and document that while cities have not rescinded these interventions during the pandemic, they also have not built on them when developing COVID-19 responses for urban residents. We propose that this demonstrates the need to maintain pressure for reforms that increase the resources and capacities of cities in Canada so that they can be in a better position to implement and institutionalise policies for non-status and precarious migrants.
“…The prefigurative political vision reimagines immigrant justice along axes of equality, redistribution, and true community safety. Local movements such as Sanctuary Cities and mutual aid societies redistribute and democratize access to power, wealth, and resources, including when the police are called and who can go to school freely (Abji 2013;Abji and Larrios this issue;Bauder 2016;Brown this issue;Jeffries and Ridgley 2020;McLeod 2019;Moffette this issue). We highlight below the central themes of each contribution.…”
This special issue focuses on what a standpoint of carceral abolitionism brings to citizenship studies, with immigration detention as the key case study. The nine articles and editorial introduction probe the intersections of detention with current and potential forms of citizenship. The contributions collectively emphasize what citizenship studies also documents: similar to how the prison is a site of social control, immigration control is a nation-building site where access to permanent status and citizenship is closely filtered along racial, gender, class, ableist, and other lines of discrimination. Employing a plurality of case studies spanning North America, Europe, and Asia, and coming to the subject from a spectrum of interdisciplinary backgrounds, all contributors nonetheless foreground the recognition that deprivation of liberty is one of the most serious harms that someone can experience. Like the activists protesting police brutality around the world, the special issue contributors are thinking across the spectrum of de-funding policing, overhauling the 'criminal justice' system, eradicating prisons (penal abolitionism), and doing away with all forms of containment (carceral abolitionism). The collective findings reaffirm that neither the prison nor the detention centre are inevitable in the modern, democratic order. Abolishing all forms of immigration detention would open the door for the emergence of new visions of justice.
“…An interesting feature of sanctuary cities, solidarity cities and cities of refuge is that top-down approaches to governance converge with local grassroots efforts (Bauder and Gonzalez, 2018). Although grassroots activists are often sceptical of local governments and are mindful of ‘reformist drift’ (Jeffries and Ridgley, 2020: 4), they strategically arrange collaborations with municipal councils and administrations (Walia, 2013). Agustín and Jørgensen (2018) call this arrangement ‘institutional solidarity’, which ‘is not limited to the institutional realm as such but expanded to civic groups and activists.…”
Cities known around the world as sanctuary, solidarity or refuge cities are resisting restrictive national migration and refugee policies and are seeking ways to accommodate migrants and refugees who lack support from the nation state. In this paper I examine urban solidarity approaches in Berlin and Freiburg in Germany, and Zurich in Switzerland. Interviews with key informants reveal that urban solidarity in these cities is not limited to including migrants and refugees living within the city’s boundaries. Rather, urban solidarity reaches beyond municipal boundaries to connect different places and scales in the form of inter-urban solidarity networks and initiatives that aim to enable migrants and refugees who are still abroad to arrive in the city. The complex geographies of urban migrant and refugee solidarity reach far beyond city limits.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.