Making Sanctuary Cities
From its development in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement—municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement—has been a powerful and controversial side of progressive migration policy reform. While some migration activists view sanctuary city policy as the most important aspect of their work, others see it as actively impairing efforts in the fight for migrant rights. In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris provides a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities and what political potentials are opened (and closed) by this designation.
Through long-term fieldwork across the sanctuary cities of San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto—three of the first municipalities to adopt this designation in their respective countries—Humphris investigates the complexity of sanctuary city policy. By capturing the wide-ranging meanings and practices of sanctuary in comparative context, Humphris uncovers how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in: the promise of equality. Attending to the tensions inherent in sanctuary policy, this book opens vital questions about the ways governing systems can extinguish political ideals, and how communities choose to live and organize to fight for a better world.
—Sarah Spencer, University of Oxford
"Not all sanctuary cities are the same, and Rachel Humphris offers an insightful comparative ethnography of what it means to be a sanctuary city from the perspectives of government officials and activists in San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto.She convincingly shows that sanctuary is not fixed, with local actors continuously working and reworking sanctuary meanings, narratives, policies, and governance. Highly recommended."
—Els de Graauw, Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco
"Rachel Humphris' comparative policy ethnography of three sanctuary cities – San Francisco, Toronto, and Sheffield – explores how municipalities grapple with fundamental questions about what it means to be a community. Making Sanctuary Cities details the many ways that context matters in how sanctuary policies are constructed, such as the differing legal frameworks within which cities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada operate. This vivid account provides insight into the conversations and perspectives that undergird sanctuary in these three cities, the ways that moral values take shape within bureaucracies, and how sanctuary is shaped over time through dynamic relationships between activism and governance."
—Susan Bibler Coutin, University of California, Irvine
