LIST OF PANELS

In times of rising nativism and increasingly restrictive national immigration policy making, cities are often on the frontlines of defending and expanding the rights of immigrants residing in their jurisdictions. Sanctuary cities, also referred to as freedom and refuge cities, are among the most visible cities that have challenged the national monopoly over immigration and citizenship issues by building a grassroots type of urban citizenship that is inclusive even of undocumented or unauthorized immigrants. Cities on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, for example, have developed policies and practices that include undocumented immigrants in public service provision, formal rights protections, and democratic participation modes. While such diverse sanctuary policies and practices can be found in cities worldwide, we do not yet have a good comparative framework for understanding them.

The aim of this panel is precisely to conceptualize, analyze, and compare sanctuary policies and practices across space and time. What are the actors, drivers, barriers, and outcomes of such city sanctuary policies and practices? How do they vary depending on national, local, and temporal contexts? What lessons do these varied sanctuary policies and practices hold for understanding the multi-level and multi-actor political dynamics of immigration and citizenship?

These research questions are important to ask from a theoretical point of view. Policy studies point out that vocal civil society organizations and sympathetic local government officials are crucial drivers of sanctuary policies and practices. These findings resonate with sociological, geographical, and anthropological research on “urban citizenship,” which emphasizes that cities are strategic sites for the mobilization of marginalized actors such as undocumented immigrants. In the context of the United States, political science scholarship on “immigration federalism” also highlights that partisanship is a key driving force of both anti- and pro-immigrant policies at various levels of government. Scholarship on European sanctuary policies and practices is more recent, and scholars have tended to use different theoretical lenses to study them. The “multi-level governance” perspective has promise for conceptualizing and explaining divergencies between national and local migration policy making and the subsequent conflicts across government tiers. By intersecting these and other strands of literature, this panel seeks to build a more coherent, comparatively-driven, and empirically-grounded framework to study sanctuary policies and practices across different geographical and temporal contexts.

Finally, this panel offers an excellent opportunity to discuss sanctuary policies and practices in the conference site city of Barcelona, where support for undocumented immigrants has become a top priority of local officials and activists alike. We hope to engage local stakeholders as guest speakers or commentators on the panel.

This panel seeks to conceptualize, analyze, and compare sanctuary city policies and practices across space and time. It seeks to promote meaningful cross-disciplinary dialogue among public policy scholars, political scientists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and other scholars interested in city policies and practices that support undocumented immigrants. Theoretically-informed and empirically-supported analyses adopting a comparative research design are welcomed, as are contributions highlighting sanctuary policies and practices from the Global North and Global South, as well as those highlighting contemporary and more historical city sanctuary policies and practices.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics that this panel seeks to address:

·   Theoretical perspectives on sanctuary policies and practices: What are the strengths and the limits of extant theories on sanctuary policies and practices? How can different theoretical perspectives be coherently combined?

·   Drivers of, and barriers to, sanctuary policies and practices: What structural factors enable and/or hinder sanctuary policies and practices? Are federal systems more or less favorable than unitary ones for developing sanctuary policies and practices? How does local context matter for the development of sanctuary policies and practices?

·   Actors and strategies behind sanctuary policies and practices: What are the main actors driving the framing, adoption, implementation, and dismantling of sanctuary policies and practices? How do institutional actors at different spatial scales cooperate, bargain, and struggle to enact and implement sanctuary policies and practices? How do non-government actors collaborate with government actors, and what challenges do they face along the way?

·   Sanctuary vs. anti-sanctuary policies and practices: What are notable examples of anti-sanctuary policy making? How can and do sanctuary and anti-sanctuary policies and practices co-exist in the same political jurisdiction?

·   Outcomes of sanctuary policies and practices: What are the main outcomes of sanctuary policies and practices, in terms of immigrant integration (or lack thereof), institutional collaboration (or lack thereof), etc.