City Government Activists and the Rights of Undocumented Immigrants: Fostering Urban Citizenship within the Confines of US Federalism

Abstract

With the US federal government more aggressive in its efforts to find, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants, certain government officials in American cities have promoted urban citizenship for undocumented immigrants in their jurisdictions. Often acting on demands from community organisations, these activist city officials have developed policies and practices that include undocumented immigrants in public service provision, formal rights protections, and democratic participation modes. Drawing on scholarship on urban citizenship, urban politics, and multi‐level governance, this article analyses how we can understand these officials’ actions in a system where the federal government has monopoly power over immigration and citizenship matters. Based on the recent experiences of New York City and San Francisco, this article shows that government activists in these cities have promoted urban citizenship for undocumented immigrants by pushing against the confines of US federalism while also reaffirming traditional understandings of national citizenship, thus practicing disruption and conformity simultaneously.

Undocumented Immigrant Activism and the Political: Disrupting the Order or Reproducing the Status Quo?

“…The case of the Solidarity March described by Swerts (2020) further illustrates this point, as the marchers’ effort to scale up their network and connect to grassroots organisations in different locales was hampered by the uneven presence of politicised autonomous groups across Belgium. The importance of urban, liberally leaning environments for fostering disruptive politics also speaks to de Graauw’s (2020) analysis of inclusive immigrant rights policies in New York and San Francisco.…”

“…A crucial aspect of this transformation entails what Swerts (2020) calls the crafting of collective intentionality, referring to the joint commitment that activists need to express and uphold towards disrupting and provoking the order. Finally, challenging the thesis that disruptive subjects always need to be situated in the margins (see Dikeç 2017), de Graauw (2020) argues that local “institutional activists” operating from within rather than outside the institutional apparatus can help realise and implement the immigrant rights movement’s long‐standing demands for equal rights.…”

“…For better or for worse, existing scholarship tends to frame successful outcomes of disruptive politics in terms of the changes that institutions were forced to make to existing practices in response. For example, de Graauw’s (2020) piece in this symposium emphasises how local institutional transformations in New York City and San Francisco ensure that political disruption outlasts momentary events. Likewise, preventing the deportation of vulnerable undocumented immigrants in the US is interpreted by Kocher and Stuesse (2020) and Escudero and Pallares (2020) as signs of a deportation machine running on fumes.…”

Urbanising migration policy-making: Urban policies in support of irregular migrants in Geneva and Zürich

“…At the same time, national states adhere to their sovereignty over immigration and citizenship by trying to manage and control migration. These different logics often create conflicting policy priorities between the regulatory policies of the national state and the more inclusive policy-making of cities (Ataç et al, 2020; De Graauw, 2014, 2020; Kaufmann, 2019; Varsanyi, 2006), especially as the city is ‘a space that challenges the exclusion perpetrated at the level of the nation-state’ (Darling and Bauder, 2019: 4). This urban–national tension in migration policy-making is especially evident in policies that target irregular migrants.…”

From Disruption to Transformation: Politicisation at a Distance from the State

“…Sharing a common concern with interruptive or disruptive moments and events that characterise much of undocumented migrants’ and their allies’ allegedly politicising actions, the papers explore the possibilities for politicising change, the constraints of localised actions that mark such interruptive performances, and the theoretical framings that permit situating such mobilisations within the repertoires of political action. Most of the papers, implicitly or explicitly, engage with a post‐foundational political theoretical perspective that insists on the politicising possibilities—albeit with significant constraints—that can be nurtured by forms of action and intervention that operate, as Michael Abensour (2011) would call it, at a distance from the state, even if such actions are undertaken by actors working within the state apparatus as Els de Graauw (2020) documents in her paper. Such actions interrupt the given ordering of things and functions, but are nevertheless focused on forcing a deflection of the state’s institutional and legal organisation of the “migrant” question.…”