Cat-and-mouse: A Case Study on the Conflict around US-Sanctuary City Policies

Keywords: sanctuary city, citizenship, legal geography, undocumented migration, nation state, empirical study
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

When Trump passed the Exec Order 13768 in January 2017, he tried to ban “sanctuary jurisdiction”. Since the 1980s a rising amount of subnational entities have passed policies, sometimes dubbed as “sanctuary policies”, limiting the local entanglement with the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Other entities have passed policies that enable the local-federal entanglement or explicitly forbid from passing sanctuary legislation. These policies take on many shapes and are settled in various political, economic and demographic contexts, weaving a “multijurisdictional patchwork of enforcement” (Varsanyi). But they all point out politically charged questions on citizenship and belonging: How shall undocumented migration be dealt with? What role should formal citizenship play in everyday lives? Who can and who should decide about that?
In my presentation, based on my PhD project, I am going to elaborate on these questions, drawing on three contrasting “cases of sanctuary” in Alameda/California, Tucson/Arizona and Austin/Texas. I analyze local policy and legal documents, also referencing corresponding policies on the state and federal level, as well as interviews with actors from local institutions. Through that, I will argue, that the conflict around belonging and citizenship is not one that can or will be solved within the realm of the nation state. Instead, it is an expression of nation-statehood itself, of its functioning as an ever-balancing power-relation (Poulantzas) like a cat-and-mouse game.