Abstract
We live in a time that offers many of us a level of security our distant ancestors could hardly have imagined. Yet this same era often feels increasingly unstable and unsafe, especially for marginalized people. The belief that safe places exist, and that we might escape to them when our own environments feel threatening, is fundamental to human well-being and has deep historical roots. After World War II, the establishment of the United Nations and the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees enshrined in international law the importance of designating places of refuge where people could seek safety from danger and instability. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, perhaps no word has become more closely tied to this idea, and more criticized because of it, than “sanctuary.”
Sanctuary is a multifaceted concept with a range of meanings. Its historical expressions are diverse and continually evolving, making it both a compelling and complex subject to study, as well as a challenging strategy to implement. In the new book Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship, and Urban Governance, Rachel Humphris takes on this complexity by focusing on one of the most prominent and contentious incarnations of sanctuary in the twenty-first century: the political and legal phenomenon of cities declaring themselves “Sanctuary Cities” for immigrants. These cities typically adopt a variety of practices aimed at fostering an environment of welcome and safety for immigrants who might be received in very different ways in other locales.
Humphris captures some of sanctuary’s diversity of meaning and practice by presenting fieldwork conducted in three locations—San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto. Some of the earliest municipalities to adopt the designation of “sanctuary city” in their respective countries, these cities offer an opportunity to trace the development of sanctuary over time and to examine its role in the negotiation and contestation of citizenship in varied political contexts. The book presents these developments, and its analyses of them, in an introduction, conclusion, and five chapters, each exploring a different facet of sanctuary. The book also includes two helpful appendices. The first provides a detailed account of the author’s methods. The other contains a table summarizing differences in key elements of border control in the three cities, such as how health care operates for immigrants and whether child services routinely report undocumented immigrants to immigration enforcement offices.
The book highlights how sanctuary’s long history, which Chapter Two of the book both chronicles and problematizes, has resulted in a concept that is flexible and adaptable to many different contexts. On the one hand, that makes “sanctuary” highly useful as a political tool that can be implemented to address a variety of needs and problems. On the other hand, its lack of clear meaning can make it confusing as a strategy for mobilizing activists, or a relatively toothless way for politicians to virtue signal without taking concrete risks to protect immigrants in their midst. Prior accounts of sanctuary have often focused on those elements of sanctuary—
its usefulness to immigrant rights battles, as well as its potential for misuse in ways that ultimately harm immigrants. Humphris agrees that these criticisms of sanctuary matter as topics of debate, but that is not her focus. Rather, she is interested in how “the differences and tensions among and between sanctuary cities” are “not a problem to be solved, but a source of meaning to be elaborated” (p. 115).
In that vein, Humphris identifies how sanctuary actors in each city perform, trace, emplace, negotiate, and broker sanctuary. In Chapter Four, Humphris describes the ways “emergent moral values” around sanctuary are perceived and practiced by sanctuary actors. Narratives of sanctuary cities as “efficient,” “healthy,” and “just” crop up in all three cities but with different contextual underpinnings, and they are mobilized in distinct forms. For instance, in all three cities, activists utilizing the narrative that sanctuary cities are “just” typically referenced immigrants’ contributions to the city, but these contributions were understood differently in each location. In San Francisco, a city supervisor explained how much immigrants contribute to the local economy despite not having the same political rights as local citizens, emphasizing immigrants’ rights to both economic success and political participation. In Toronto, a city vendor of refugee services framed immigrant contributions and associated visions of justice in solely economic terms: immigrants contribute economically, so they should have the right to pursue better economic lives for themselves.
Like in this example, variations in the practice of sanctuary that emerge in the book often appear small on the surface. They are differences that might not show up at all on a survey. But this reveals the real strength and contribution of Humphris’s work. Her careful and detailed fieldwork captures nuances both small and large, demonstrating that seemingly small differences can have largely divergent consequences for immigrants’ safety and lives. As a reader, I sometimes found myself wishing for more discussion of the latter—for more elucidation of how these differences matter in concrete ways for immigrants in each city. Perhaps future research, either by Humphris or another scholar, can pick up that mantle.
Still, the book’s conclusion makes a persuasive case for its relevance to policy debates, noting that the book “challenges the notion that sanctuary cities are inherently antagonistic to national policies towards migration, settlement, and citizenship” (p. 115). When localities declare themselves “sanctuary cities,” that does not always mean they are challenging national policy or positioning themselves as the political enemies of whichever party or politicians hold national power at that point in time. Rather, the “sanctuary city” designation performs different functions in different contexts. Making Sanctuary Cities demonstrates how these functions might, in fact, align with national policy or the perspectives of national leaders in surprising ways. In doing so, it indicates that national leaders should proceed with caution rather than assuming that sanctuary cities will be their political adversaries.
Humphris ends the book by providing an example of another incarnation of sanctuary: San Francisco’s declaration of itself as a “Transgender Sanctuary City” in 2024. While we typically might jump to certain conclusions about this designation, the book’s central contribution comes in its insistence and warning that we cannot assume we know what this designation means just by reading the words “sanctuary city.” Instead, what it means to provide refuge to people seeking safety—what it means to practice sanctuary—can only be fully understood through careful examination of the concrete struggles over meaning and values that occur in nonprofit boardrooms, activist gatherings, and local town council meetings every day.