Sanctuary Policies and the Influence of Local Demographics and Partisanship

• In Event: Causes and Consequences of Contemporary Immigration Policy

Abstract

In the United States, sanctuary policies became a political flashpoint after the campaign, and election, of President Donald Trump. Proponents of sanctuary policies argue that they encourage cooperation between local law enforcement and immigrant communities. Their opponents, particularly in the post-Trump period, argue that sanctuary policies pose a burden or threat to the local population, and that they amount to purely partisan virtue-signaling for liberal officeholders. Yet there has been little research to date examining whether these policies become law based on local need, or because of partisan divisions on the issue of immigration policy.

Drawing on a national data set of sanctuary and non-sanctuary localities, we analyze the role of two factors in the adoption of these policies: the size of the foreign-born population and the ideological leaning of the city or county. If sanctuary policies are passed in the interest of encouraging cooperation between law enforcement and immigrant communities, we would expect that sanctuary localities would have larger foreign-born populations, or demonstrate a growth in the size of these groups prior to the resolution's passage (H1, functional). If these policies are passed for largely symbolic partisan reasons, we would expect to see little or no effect for the size or growth of the foreign-born population, but a large effect for the ideological leanings of the locality, as measured by its vote for the Democratic candidate in the last presidential election (H2, partisan).

To test these hypotheses, we examine sanctuary policies passed between 2001 and 2020 and compare these localities to non-sanctuaries to identify whether these policies are passed for functional or ideological reasons. Using a cox proportional hazard model, we find that ideological factors do play the largest role in predicting passage, with the percent Democrat increasing the expected hazard of a locality becoming a sanctuary by 76.7 times. The percent foreign-born is significant, but has a lesser effect, only increasing the hazard by 5.15 times. Thus, it does seem safe to say that many policies passed in the post-Trump period are ideological in nature, but at the same time, nearly all sanctuary policies had a sizable foreign-born population, suggesting these two things may work in tandem. Implications are discussed.

Authors

• Benjamin Fontaine Gonzalez O'Brien, San Diego State University

• Loren Collingwood, UC Riverside

• Michael Ahn Paarlberg, Virginia Commonwealth University