Sanctuary Cities

Cities worldwide operate on the frontlines to support forced migrants. Some of these cities even overstep their formal prerogatives by refusing to comply with, and at times overtly subverting, the prescriptions of national authorities. This article builds a conceptual framework to understand such forms of insurgent urban asylum policy-making. We argue that insurgency depends on how city governments mediate the constraints and opportunities that emanate from the horizontal and vertical dimensions of multi-level governance, which capture city-level political dynamics as well as intergovernmental interactions. To illustrate our framework, we compare asylum policy-making in Barcelona, Milan, and Munich during the 2010s “refugee crisis.” While Munich invested in rather uncontroversial integration programs, Milan and Barcelona overstepped their jurisdictional boundaries and supported migrants considered “illegal” by national governments. These insurgent responses were enacted as a “remedy from below,” stemming from a sense of urgency that was not as pressing for Munich’s policy-makers because of the greater capacity of Germany’s asylum system.

Section: Horizontal Multi-level Governance: the Urban Politics Of Asylummentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurgent Asylum Policies in European Cities: A Multi-Level Governance Perspective

Bazurli

Kaufmann

2022

“…Cities may revoke their sanctuary status for a number of reasons. For example, the Los Angeles city council changed the city's sanctuary status in 1986, less than a year after it was passed, due to political pressure from the local INS Commissioner (Collingwood and Gonzalez O'Brien 2019a). Miami revoked their status in 2017 based on fears that federal funding could be pulled, which the Trump administration had threatened (Schmidt 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cities like Berkeley, Madison, and Seattle were, in many cases, passing these resolutions not as a result of a sizable Central American or Latinx population, but instead as a reflection of ideological opposition to the Reagan administration's actions in Central America and the denial of asylum claims from Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees. This would become such a popular position for Democrats that support for the movement was included in the party's platform in 1984 (Collingwood and Gonzalez O'Brien 2019a).…”

Section: Sanctuary Cities: a (Somewhat) Brief Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Just days after taking office, Trump signed Executive Order 13768, which ordered then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to find a way of defunding sanctuary localities for their defiance. Past presidents had for the most part chosen to ignore these policies, as had Congress, though conservative media outlets had begun to criticize them in the second half of the 2000s (Collingwood and Gonzalez O'Brien 2019a;Collingwood, O'Brien and Tafoya 2020;. Opposition to sanctuary policies was part of Trump's broader anti-immigrant platform, which helped to further polarize the issue of sanctuary along partisan dimensions (Collingwood and Gonzalez O'Brien 2019a;Collingwood, O'Brien and Tafoya 2020;Collingwood and O'Brien Gonzalez 2019b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Sanctuary Policies and the Influence of Local Demographics and Partisanship

O’Brien

Collingwood

Paarlberg

2023

Despite the increased scholarship on sanctuary localities in the United States, there is little research analyzing the factors that lead to the adoption of sanctuary resolutions at the municipal level. Drawing on a new dataset of sanctuary and nonsanctuary cities, we theorize that policy adoption is driven primarily by two factors and their interaction: the size of the foreign-born population and local partisanship. We examine cities that passed sanctuary policies between 2000 and 2018 and compare these localities to nonsanctuaries. Using a novel time series cross-section dataset (TSCS) of all cities and designated places and a Cox proportional hazard model, we find that Democratic-leaning cities with high foreign-born populations predict sanctuary passage, whereas Republican-leaning cities with larger foreign-born populations are unlikely to adopt these policies. We thus find that while partisanship motivates sanctuary policy adoption, at the same time, the size of the foreign-born population also increases the likelihood of passage.

“…Further, criminal deterrence theory suggests that active enforcement of policies against undocumented immigrants will affect their location choices (Houston and Richardson 2004). Yet, research has found either no correlation between immigration levels, sanctuary city status and crime or that communities with more immigrants have less crime (Chavez and Provine 2009;Hummel 2016;Martínez, Martínez-Schuldt, and Cantor 2018;Collingwood and O'Brien 2019).…”

Section: Resource Constraint Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Local Contexts Matter for Local Immigrant Policies

Khan-Welsh

Reese

2022

There is a dearth of studies comparing the relative explanatory power of several major theories related to policy support for immigrants specifically in the context of local policies (as opposed to those at the state and national levels) and related to immigrant settlement and attraction (as opposed to welfare or legal benefits). By testing alternate explanations of local immigration policy, the analysis contributes to the development of theory related to policymaking in this area. Based on a national survey of municipalities across the US there is little evidence that racial threat theory limits local immigrant supportive policies. However, the policy determinants differ by the type of immigrant attraction and support policy examined.