Book Discussion: Making Sanctuary Cities

Join us for this book discussion!

Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship and Urban Governance in Sheffield, San Francisco and Toronto

By Rachel Humphris, Queen Mary University of London

From its development in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement—municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement—has been a powerful and controversial side of progressive migration policy reform. While some pro-migrant activists view sanctuary city policy as the most important aspect of their work, others see it as actively impairing efforts in the fight for migrant rights. In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris provides a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities and what political potentials are opened (and closed) by this designation.

Through long-term fieldwork across the sanctuary cities of San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto—three of the first municipalities to adopt this designation in their respective countries—Humphris investigates the complexity of sanctuary city policy. By capturing the wide-ranging meanings and practices of sanctuary in comparative context, Humphris uncovers how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in: the promise of equality. Attending to the tensions inherent in sanctuary policy, this book opens vital questions about the ways governing systems can extinguish political ideals, and how communities choose to live and organize to fight for a better world.

Speaker Biography:

Rachel Humphris is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary University of London. Her research and teaching engage with theories and debates in critical migration and border studies, anthropology of the state and critical urbanism. Her published research can be found in Antipode, Geopolitics, Sociology, the Sociological Review, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, among others. Her first monograph, Home-land: Romanian Roma, domestic spaces and the state is published with the University of Bristol and won the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Runner-Up Prize in 2020. Her second monograph, Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship and Urban Governance is published with Stanford University Press.