The City-national Nexus: Negotiating Sanctuary in a Hostile Environment in Sheffield

This paper presents the case of Sheffield as the UK’s first and pioneering sanctuary city. Taking a historical perspective, the analysis places current debates about ‘firewalls’ into a context of increasing domestication of immigration policy which is diffused and devolved throughout society. I take up the call of feminist scholars to look through the lenses of the most marginalised to reveal the wide-ranging sites where policing and order maintenance takes place. Criminal admissibility, stop and searches, traffic stops, accessing public benefits, accessing healthcare, domestic violence services, taking public transport, taking children to school, and now accessing C-19 tests or being involved in track and trace mechanisms are sites of surveillance and disciplining. They are all potential places of policing and pathways into the deportation pipeline. Feminist scholar Andrea Ritchie (2020) has labelled these processes part of a global ordering mechanism to reproduce racialized and gendered hierarchies. Nevertheless, sanctuary cities in the UK have been largely silent on all of these issues. This paper will trace where the ‘sanctuary city’ is leveraged and highlight the divergence between the practices and policies on the ground. The paper reviews these developments to consider how sanctuary cities have developed, how they adapt to their hostile national environment, and what effects they produce.