Border Struggles, Political Unity, and the Transformative Power of the Local: US Sanctuary Cities and Spain’s Cities of Refuge

Abstract

This article draws on theoretical insights about bordering and citizenship as strategies for socially constructing difference and the scholarship on scalar challenges underlying contemporary bordering to analyze sanctuary cities in the United States and cities of refuge in Spain. We argue that these initiatives challenge and resist restrictive national migration policies from below, at the local level, with attention to their implications at the global scale. Such policies have the potential to create meaningful social change by 1) amplifying and producing political unity across socially constructed differences and 2) “scaling down” migration politics from the national to the local level and, simultaneously, “jumping scale” via reliance on human rights framings. We conclude that sanctuary city and city-of-refuge designations are not merely symbolic; instead, these designations can be conceived of as locally based, global repertoires of action that make positive contributions in pursuit of social justice.

Untitled

“…This movement of people that is characterized by immigration and the seeking of refuge and associated with the predisposition of municipalities to adopt policies to protect undocumented immigrants and refugees suggests that the evolutionary process of socalled sanctuary cities has contributed to the formation of a new construct. Specially, a sanctuary city is not merely a symbol; rather, its presence represents a question of social justice (Wonders and Fernández-Bessa, 2021).…”