Sanctuary City Organizing in Canada

Abstract

In recent years, migrant justice organizers in Canada have developed campaigns aimed at building, legislating, and enforcing municipal commitments to alleviating and resisting the harms done by federal immigration enforcement, and ensuring migrant access to municipal services. As a result of these efforts, some cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Hamilton, have declared themselves “sanctuary cities,” and campaigns centered around this concept have emerged in other localities across the country. In this article, the authors—who are themselves involved in sanctuary city organizing—reflect on the concept, and offer a critical assessment of these organizing efforts. We provide a brief history of these campaigns in Canada, discuss the impact of these policies in cities where they have been adopted, reflect on the types of politics that inform notions of sanctuary, hospitality, solidarity, and resistance, and offer some lessons for moving forward.

Canadian sanctuary policies in context

“…A first body of literature is concerned with making the normative case for sanctuary cities. Based on the experience of undocumented migrants and work on immigration enforcement, these authors state the importance of urban belonging and citizenship for global justice (e.g., Moffette & Ridgley, 2018). A second category of literature documents the processes that led cities to implement sanctuary policies.…”

“…While this overview cannot capture the depth of existing comparative research on municipal sanctuary, a central trend is that it mostly focuses on the United States and, to a lesser extent, European cities. Canadian research on the topic has documented the history of civil and religious organizing towards the provision of sanctuary in churches and other spaces, and current scholarship focuses on new mobilization towards the public provision of sanctuary (Macdonald, 2012; Moffette & Ridgley, 2018). These movements criticize the rise of temporary immigration programs and the associated development of precarious immigration trajectories, the tightening of asylum procedures, and the ever‐expanding criminalization of immigrants in Canada (Atak & Simeon, 2018; Hudson et al, 2017).…”

“…The absence of central political parties in Canadian municipal politics, the limited impact of partisan division on municipal councils' behaviors, as well as the diversity of political contexts of cities with sanctuary policies also give little power to explanations making systematic links between left‐leaning local governments and the enactment of sanctuary‐type policies. Finally, while factors such as the strength of the sanctuary movement or the influence of immigrant‐serving associations in local politics might have contributed to municipal enactment in some cases, this is far from the case in all Canadian cities and cannot explain converging policy design trends (Collingwood & O'Brien, 2019; Moffette & Ridgley, 2018; Spencer & Delvino, 2019).…”

“Nous sommes de retour !” : Justin Trudeau et la gestion de l’immigration

“…Dans cette optique de la compassion, devant l'afflux de migrants en Occident, des discours et des initiatives ont souhaité venir en aide aux personnes réfugiées et aux personnes vulnérables (MAESTRI et MONFORTE 2020). Un peu partout, au Canada comme ailleurs, se sont développées des initiatives comme les villes sanctuaires (BAUDER 2017 ;MOFFETTE et RIDGLEY 2018) et autres refuges (BONTEMPS et al 2018) ou encore des actions citoyennes 9. Par sa pratique de l'acte de l'hospitalité, la compassion veut dépasser la logique du « eux » et du « nous ».…”

Creating hospitable urban spaces: A multicultural city for refugees and asylum seekers

“…Against this background, we examine the possibilities of micropolitical acts of hospitality at the urban scale. Our analysis is informed by the burgeoning literature on ‘affect and emotion’ (Ahmed, 2014; Zembylas, 2020), ‘urban hospitality’ (Bulley, 2013; Darling, 2011, 2013 ; Vrasti and Dayal, 2016), ‘urban citizenship’ (Idriss, 2022; Isin, 2004) and ‘sanctuary cities’ (Darling, 2010; Lambert and Swerts, 2019; Moffette and Ridgley, 2018).…”