Sanctuary Cities in Europe

Sanctuary cities are a US phenomenon. But can they also be found in Europe? This blog post synthesizes the insights of three studies examining the variety of urban policies in support of irregular migrants in Europe. Only about 37 percent of the major European cities have formulated such a policy. The policy design depends on the national regulatory framework, while social movements and NGOs are often the strategic actors initiating and implementing such policies.

Cities worldwide are experiencing a growing population of irregular migrants who tend to live in dense urban areas because of the higher likelihood of finding jobs and suitable accommodations; better access to relational, ethnic, social, or cultural networks; and greater anonymity. About 12 million people in the US, 1.9 to 3.8 million people in Europe and 76,000 people in Switzerland do not have regulated residency status. City governments feel a certain immediacy to support, protect, and regularize irregular migrants because they are de facto members of the community – they work in the city, pay local taxes, are homeowners, tenants, or landlords, send their children to local schools, attend city churches, shop in the city, etc.” (de Graauw 2014, 312). Thus, cities are prone to seeing themselves as an alternative locus for membership for all residents and the urban arena has become an important site for the defense of the rights of irregular migrants. Even though the majority of cities formulate inclusive policies, some cities or municipalities adopt rather restrictive policies towards irregular migrants (Bauder and Landau 2018).

Variety of Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants

By comparing current types of urban policies in support of irregular migrants (Kaufmann 2019), I found that “urban citizenship” often serves as the normative foundation and legitimization of these policies, as it argues for an alternative locus of membership, regardless of residency status.“Regularization programs” provide irregular migrants with residency status within the legal immigration and citizenship framework of the nation-state. Even though such programs lay within the responsibility of the national government, cities can lobby relevant national governmental actors to establish regularization programs and take an active role in the implementation of such programs.

As another way of supporting irregular migrants, “sanctuary cities” are a phenomenon that first emerged in the US and is defined as, “a city or police department that has passed a resolution or ordinance expressly forbidding city or law enforcement officials from inquiring into immigration status and/or cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement” (O’Brien et al. 2019, 4).“Local bureaucratic membership” aims to facilitate irregular migrants’ access to city services. A crucial feature of local bureaucratic membership is the issuing of urban or municipal ID cards that allow irregular migrants to identify themselves to relevant local actors, such as front-line city officials, police, schools, hospitals, libraries, or local businesses (de Graauw 2014).

Sanctuary Cities in Europe

The existing literature on these urban policies has been rather U.S.-centric so far, however, the ideas and policies are likely to travel to cities worldwide. My current research focuses on the development of urban policies supporting irregular migrants in Europe and Switzerland. To this end, and in an ongoing study (Kaufmann et al. 2020), we collected data about such urban policies in 95 of the biggest European cities in OECD countries (with over 350,000 inhabitants). We only looked at policies that are specifically supporting irregular migrants and implemented or financed by the city government. We found that only 37% of the biggest European cities (35 out of 95 cities) formulate policies in support of irregular migrants. The specific design of these urban policies depends on national regulatory frameworks and other institutional contexts in which each city is embedded.

This finding is supported by another one of our research projects (Kaufmann and Strebel 2020), which examines urban policy developments in the cities of Zurich and Geneva. In the case of Geneva, the regularization program called “Opération Papyrus” was established after lengthy negotiations and cooperation across different governmental levels with local NGOs and labor unions. In the city of Zurich, the situation was very different. As the canton of Zurich had blocked similar regularization policy proposals, social movements within the city of Zurich successfully pushed forward a motion in the city parliament for drafting a local bureaucratic membership solution in the form of an urban ID card.

City governments and local societal actors play a crucial role in the development of urban policies in support of irregular migrants. Especially social movements and NGOs are often strategic actors that can promote or even prevent an urban policy from being implemented in a multi-level governance setting (see also Bazurli 2019). Yet, all these local actors are embedded in institutional contexts that enable and restrict the formulation of certain types of urban policies. It is thus central to look at institutions as well as actors when examining urban migration policy-making.

David Kaufmann is an Assistant Professor in Spatial Development and Urban Policy at ETH Zürich. He is a public policy scholar with a focus on urban studies, spatial governance and migration studies.

References:

– Bauder, Harald and Loren Landau (2018). Why Cities Hold the Key to Safe, Orderly Migration. Cologny/Geneva: World Economic Forum.
– Bazurli, Raffaele (2019). Local Governments and Social Movements in the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Milan and Barcelona as ‘Cities of Welcome’. South European Society and Politics 24(3), 343–370.
– De Graauw, Els (2014). Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants: Local Bureaucratic Membership in a Federal System. Politics & Society 42(3), 309-330.
– Kaufmann, David 2019). Comparing Urban Citizenship, Sanctuary Cities, Local Bureaucratic Membership, and Regularizations. Public Administration Review 79(3), 443-446.
– Kaufmann, David, and Dominique Strebel (2020). Regularizing Irregular Migrants: Urban Immigration and Citizenship Policies in Geneva and Zürich. Unpublished Working Paper.
– Kaufmann, David, Nora Räss, Dominique Strebel, and Fritz Sager (2020). Sanctuary Cities in Europe? A Policy Survey of Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants in Europe. Unpublished Working Paper.
– O’Brien, Benjamin Gonzalez, Loren Collingwood, and Stephen Omar El-Khatib (2019). The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration. Urban Affairs Review 55(1), 3–40.