‘From Sanctuary to Welcoming Cities’: Negotiating the Social Inclusion of Undocumented Migrants in Liège, Belgium

Abstract

Cities have become important sites of sanctuary for migrants with a precarious legal status. While many national governments in Europe have adopted restrictive immigration policies, urban governments have undertaken measures to safeguard undocumented residents’ rights. Existing scholarship on sanctuary cities has mostly focused on how cities’ stance against federal immigration policies can be interpreted as urban citizenship. What is largely missing in these debates, however, is a better insight into the role that local civil society actors play in pushing for sanctuary and negotiating the terms of social in- and exclusion. In this article, we rely on a qualitative study of the 2017 Sanctuary City campaign in Liège, Belgium, to argue that power relations between (and among) civil society actors and city officials help to explain why the meaning and inclusiveness of ‘sanctuary’ shifted over time. Initially, radical activists were able to politicize the issue by demanding the social inclusion of the ‘sans-papiers’ through grassroots mobilization. However, the cooptation of the campaign by immigrant rights organizations led to the adoption of a motion wherein the local government depicted the city as a ‘welcoming’ instead of a ‘sanctuary’ city. By showing how immigrant rights professionals sidelined radical activists during the campaign, we highlight the risk of depoliticization when civil society actors decide to cooperate with local governments to extend immigrant rights. We also underline the potential representational gap that emerges when those who are directly implicated, namely undocumented migrants, are not actively involved in campaigns that aim to improve their inclusion.

Politics Disrupted? Collective Intentionality, Inaugural Performativity, and Institutional Receptivity in Undocumented Migrant Struggles

“…Empirically, I rely on an activist ethnography of the March, which I consider to be a “critical case” (Flyvbjerg 2006:229–232), to explore and examine the propositions of the POP thesis. I subsequently argue and empirically demonstrate that specific spatial (see Nicholls et al 2013; Darling 2017; Karaliotas 2017; Swerts 2017a) and relational (Enriquez 2014; Nicholls 2013a; Swerts 2018; Lambert and Swerts 2019; Swerts and Oosterlynck 2020) conditions affect the disruptive character of UMS. First, undocumented activists need to craft shared, collective intentions to challenge the institutional order through joint action.…”

“…On the one hand, scholarship on the spatiality of solidarity movements and local immigrant rights politics has shown that space and place‐making play a crucial role in the formation of disruptive political subjects (see Darling 2017; Featherstone 2012; Karaliotas 2017; Nicholls et al 2013; Swerts 2017a). On the other hand, the literature on immigrant rights mobilisation and coalition formation (Enriquez 2014; Lambert and Swerts 2019; Nicholls and Uitermark 2017; Swerts 2018; Swerts and Oosterlynck 2020) demonstrates that unequal power relations between (and among) activists and organisations affect mobilisation processes and outcomes. Moving forward, I integrate insights from both strands of literature to delineate a research agenda centred around three socio‐spatial conditions of disruptive politics 3…”

“We are here to stay” vs. “Europe’s best hotel”: Hamburg and Athens as Geographies of Solidarity

“…While the former has been associated with "top-down" policies on the legal level, the latter term denotes a relational, "bottom-up" approach, emphasising the politicising and transformative potential of municipal solidarity policies. These question the exclusionary premises of legal citizenship and the nation state's primacy in allocating statutes and rights (Lambert and Swerts 2019), thus converging with ideas of urban citizenship discussed previously. Solidarity here is grounded in certain "infrastructures" (Schilliger 2020), consisting of four elements: solidarity work and alliance building, the creation of (counter)spaces on different scales, the production and sharing of (counter)knowledge, and social relations based on solidarity and mutual care.…”

In search of recognition: the political ambiguities of undocumented migrants’ active citizenship

“…Bourdieu emphasises that these rules and standards structure who gets perceived as having authority to speak and act. Scholarship on immigrant rights movements has previously indicated how the relationships between CSOs and undocumented migrants tend to be brittle and rife with struggles over representation (Nicholls 2013;Lambert and Swerts 2019). The formal and informal rules that govern the field of civil society are important to explain these often conflictual relationships.…”