Sanctuary Cities in Europe?

• In Event: Defining Communities: The Politics of Immigration in Cities

Abstract

Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Thus, cities are important sites in the fights for irregular migrants’ basic rights and irregular migrants have become an urban policy target group. Cities engage in the formulation and implementation of a variety of migration and citizenship policies in support of irregular migrants such as urban citizenship, sanctuary city practices, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations. The study of these policies has been rather US-centric so far.

This paper surveys the variety of urban immigration and citizenship policies towards irregular migrants in 95 European cities (all European cities with over 350’000 inhabitants). We find that only a few of the examined European cities engage in the formulation of urban immigration and citizenship policies towards irregular migrants. These policies are highly dependent on the institutional settings in which cities are embedded in. High discretionary power in policy formulation and implementation for cities in the national immigration framework as well as well as the high general local autonomy for cities that are city-states best explain these policies in European cities. This implies that urban immigration and citizenship policy-making is depended on a favorable institutional setting that is exogenous to urban policy makers.

Authors

• David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich

• Nora Räss