The Sanctuary City

The term “sanctuary city” has become a fraught and politically charged one in recent years. Often understood as municipalities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities, these sites have become locations where communities, social movements, and elected officials can issue challenges, albeit limited ones, against a growingly punitive and invasive immigration enforcement system. Debates over sanctuary cities often stand in for larger contests over detention and deportation policies, the welcome and services that local and national communities offer newcomers, and the tensions between social movements and the state. In The Sanctuary City, Domenic Vitiello, an Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, takes on these contentious issues in the case study of Philadelphia.Across five engaging chapters, Vitiello explores the many complicated paths that led to the passage of a robust sanctuary city policy in 2014. He takes the reader through the worlds of Central Americans, Mexicans, Southeast Asians, Liberians, Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians who over the last four decades have come to make Philadelphia home. He analyzes how civic organizations, faith communities, social movements, and city governments have responded to these newcomers. As each group of migrants, immigrants, and refugees made particular claims of belonging in their new homes, they fostered distinct relationships with Philadelphians, the state, and the federal immigration enforcement system. Vitiello notes that the variety of those associations demonstrates the “consequences, ironies, and injustices” of how and why both local and federal governments “treat different newcomers so differently from one another.” Philadelphians new and old contested deportation, racial discrimination, and social isolation in the city by invoking different forms of sanctuary. Vitiello offers that activists and communities have understood the concept of sanctuary as a capacious one over the last four decades, deploying a variety of faith- and municipal-based tactics to provide “refuge for vulnerable foreigners” (p. 3).The Sanctuary City begins this history in the 1980s, a decade in which thousands of churches and synagogues across the nation opened their houses of worship as places of safe harbor for Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing violence in their home countries. The national sanctuary movement that fostered these efforts in faith spaces, Vitiello shows, inspired local municipalities to pass legislation to serve as a bulwark against deportation efforts led by the federal immigration officials. Philadelphia activists initiated their own municipal efforts in 1986, following the lead of San Francisco and its “City of Refuge” resolution passed in the wake of federal prosecutions of sanctuary activists in Tucson, Arizona. While sanctuary activists were ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the city to add Philadelphia to the growing number of municipal governments joining the movement, Vitiello shows how the process of public education—what liberation theologians refer to conscientización—could still serve an important role in raising awareness and growing support for refugees across the city.This process of consciousness raising was important and worthwhile, but even in the 1980s the limits of municipal sanctuary policies were clear: only formal asylum or temporary legal protections offered true safety for those fearing detention and deportation back to places from which they had fled. As Vitiello moves into the final decade of the twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first, he demonstrates that immigrants and refugees arriving from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East would continue to need to be inventive, just as sanctuary activists had been in the 1980s, as they sought to stretch the boundaries of belonging in their new homes in Philadelphia. In a chapter detailing Mexican and new Latin American migration in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Vitiello draws on interviews with activists who restarted the New Sanctuary Movement in 2007, recounting how, in the words of one organizer, Philadelphians “started to create a culture of sanctuary” through the deployment of social services and rapid response networks (p. 199). Philadelphia's renewed interfaith movement quickly expanded beyond the humanitarian aid of offering safe harbor to those fearing detention and deportation from the Obama-era immigration enforcement through to the election of Donald Trump. Here, Vitiello provides persuasive analysis of sanctuary activism in both its old and new forms, especially in discussing the intersections between sanctuary activism and urban policy, how sanctuary activists pressed city leaders to strengthen sanctuary protections, and how activists confronted the limits of sanctuary city practices. Other chapters, meanwhile, move beyond sanctuary understood only as a form of social activism. Liberians, who made Philadelphia a central location for a new American diaspora, developed social service nonprofits that served a growing pan-African community, while Iraqis, Syrians, and Palestinians navigated a complex resettlement process to help create “Arab Philadelphia.”Vitiello describes in the preface his deep and longstanding connections to Philadelphia's diverse panoply of communities. He notes that these are relationships that date back to his childhood growing up in the city and which grew deeper through both academic research and community advocacy. Those connections ring out throughout the text, helping the author produce an enthralling history of immigrant settlement, community formation, and activism. Strong in its use of ethnographic methods and with a compelling narrative, The Sanctuary City opens new windows into the lives of those who have built spaces of safe harbor in the City of Brotherly Love

Immigration · Political science · Post-industrial society · Refugee · Sociology · Law · Medicine · Race, History, and American Society · Gerontology