Sanctuary Cities and Urban Citizenship

Sanctuary cities, mainly in the US and Canada, are cities that host unauthorized immigrants, and in some cases attempt to shield them from state prosecution. Sanctuary policies widely differ from case to case, but generally they aim at protecting the most basic rights of hosted immigrants as well as to some extent integrate them into the urban community, enabling them to lead autonomous lives and pursue various projects and goals despite their unauthorized status. This raises the question: what obligations should sanctuary cities assume towards hosted immigrants? It seems that determining the range of these obligations should not be at the discretion of the city; sanctuary cities should not be free to create sanctuary policies in any way they please. Such a principle would open up possibilities for abuse and exploitation, for example, it would allow the city to offer protection to unauthorized immigrants only if they accept unfair working conditions, thus benefitting the local economy. Immigrants, even if they are unauthorized, should be protected against these forms of abuse. But while sanctuary cities presumably have a duty to enable hosted immigrants to find accommodation and work in the city under fair terms, should they also allow them to vote in local elections, or pursue employment in other cities? In modern societies citizenship is the institution that allocates these types of duties to various political entities and determines their range. Thus sanctuary practice necessitates the development of a concept of citizenship that determines the duties of sanctuary cities and the rights of hosted immigrants. I argue that this concept would be based on the notion of urban citizenship, but would also diverge from it significantly; theorists of urban citizenship usually assume that urban citizens are at the same time either national citizens or authorized residents. For this reason, under the standard conception urban citizens are entitled to certain benefits and protections not only from the city, but also from the host state. Unauthorized immigrants cannot expect the same from the state. While the state has some duties to unauthorized immigrants as well, their range is much narrower than the range of duties to authorized residents. Sanctuary cities thus have to assume some of the duties the state would have towards hosted immigrants if they were authorized. In sum, sanctuary practice necessitates the establishment of a novel type of urban citizenship, i.e. sanctuary citizenship. Upon making a commitment to function as a sanctuary, the city ought to endow hosted immigrants with this type of membership status and thereby assume a range of duties more demanding than those of standard urban citizenship. Naturally, for the institution of sanctuary citizenship to be fully functional, it needs to be integrated into the overall citizenship regime within the state. I conclude by arguing that the state should not prosecute hosted immigrants in sanctuary cities, but rather acknowledge sanctuary citizenship as an intermediate status between ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ and aid sanctuary cities in establishing a framework of rights protection centred on the idea of sanctuary citizenship.