What Drives the Development of City Sanctuary Policies and Practices? Lessons from American and European Gateway Cities

In times of rising nativism and increasingly restrictive national immigration policy making, cities are increasingly on the frontlines of defending and expanding the rights of immigrants residing in their jurisdictions. Sanctuary cities, at times also referred to as freedom or refuge cities, are among the most visible cities that have challenged the national monopoly over immigration and citizenship issues by building a grassroots-type of urban citizenship that is inclusive also of undocumented immigrants. Cities on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, for example, have developed policies and practices that include undocumented immigrants in public service provision, formal rights protections, and democratic participation modes. While such diverse sanctuary policies and practices can be found in cities worldwide, we still miss a thorough understanding of the drivers of, and the barriers to, their development across cities of the Global North. This paper draws on evidence from four American and European cities—San Francisco, Houston, Barcelona, and Milan—to develop a comparatively-driven, empirically-grounded framework for explaining the emergence and types of city sanctuary policies and practices. We chose these four gateway cities to be able to observe a range of policies and practices, ranging from more symbolic “welcoming” initiatives benefitting all immigrants to more substantive programs that specifically support residents considered “illegal” by national governments. While all four cities are sizeable immigrant gateways, they also vary with regard to the national contexts in which they operate as well as their own local economic, demographic, political, and civic contexts in which sanctuary policies need to be negotiated, developed, and implemented. For each city, we trace the development of sanctuary policies and practices over time and categorize what types of sanctuary policies and practices are in place. To do so, we draw on assorted qualitative data, including interviews with key governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders, policy documents and government files, media reporting, and secondary literature. In analyzing what sanctuary policies and practices there are, how they came about, and what they do, we strive to develop a succinct framework that highlights the structural determinants of such policies and practices. In doing so, we draw on insights from urban politics and migration scholars who have studied the local turn in immigration and whose research suggests the importance of both the national context as well as the local economic, civic, political, and civic contexts in explaining policy variation across cities. While U.S. scholars have focused more on the local determinants of local immigration policies, European scholars have focused more on the importance of national context and how city policies relate to national policies targeting immigrants. Our goal is to expand on prior work in this area by developing a more robust explanatory framework that builds on the experiences of multiple immigrant gateway cities in different country contexts and that integrates the localist U.S. perspective with the more national or relational European perspective.