1 Introduction

Living in limbo, existing under the radar, working under the table, watching over your shoulder, fearing encounters, avoiding arrest, not having access, circumventing services, wrestling precarity, deferring dreams, not being able to stay nor return, having no home … nobody chooses to live without status. Yet, each of these uncertainties become an act of resisting and disrupting the pain of personal experiences and the violence of global geopolitical and economic forces rendering people without status. Since 2020, uncertainties have been exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond fears of detention and deportation by the state, the upsurge of white supremacy movements, right-wing nationalisms, and state violence against Black and other racialized people further threatens the life and integrity of illegalized migrants.Footnote ¹ Illegalized migrants experience and negotiate these uncertainties and risks ‘in place,’ in cities and suburbs, setting the conditions by which migrants are afforded a chance to live, work, play, and move in their everyday – in short, the conditions by which their lives are made livable.Footnote ²

As discussed throughout this book, in the past two decades, local jurisdictions have become central to migration law and politics, with urban policies incorporating a range of perspectives on the policing and settlement of illegalized migrants. The ‘local turn’ in migration research has shed light on the often disparate and contradictory ways in which localized migration governance approaches have unfolded, with both vertical and horizontal dimensions and progressive and regressive element.Footnote ³ On the reformist side, some cities have responded to solidarity demands to disentangle themselves from federal immigration law enforcement mechanisms by declaring themselves ‘sanctuary’ or ‘safe cities,’ vertically decoupling from national policy to offer migrants a first line of protection against detention.Footnote ⁴ In turn, the horizontal dimension of sanctuary city governance, which is the focus of this chapter, refers to the integration of illegalized migrants to city life and how the local challenges of livability, service accessibility, and inclusivity for everyone regardless of status may be addressed on the ground. Taken seriously, horizontality would go beyond common ‘soft policies’ in the educational and cultural realms and call for the inclusion of migrants’ interests in planning and other instances where the ‘public interest’ is collectively defined.Footnote ⁵ At a practical level, planning is one of the few areas of control for municipalities and thus offers openings for migrant justice in the sanctuary city. Thus, an equity planning approach coupled with access to the city spaces ‘without fear’ would also help cultivating a sense belonging, becoming, and urban citizenship.

Despite the opening of some spaces in various services, municipal governments and urban planners have yet to fully address the ‘local turn’ of migration politics at a time when they are increasingly confronted with anti-austerity, anti-racism, and anti-colonial movements. Urban planners have long been complicit in ignoring particular populations and invisibilizing tactics through the production of uneven urban environments where those ‘out of sight’ are also excluded from adequate urban, social, and material services and infrastructures.Footnote ⁶ In response, nonstatus migrants and precarious status citizens have joined many racialized and marginalized groups affected by everyday violence of state/planning practices of dispossession and neoliberal capitalism.Footnote ⁷ In Canada, this solidarity sought to denounce the cumulative effects of urban practices where vulnerable people have often been rendered invisible to legal authorities, but city officials did very little in challenging national immigration regimes that are rendering many people ‘illegal’ in the first place. Acts of solidarity in resisting the exclusionary logic of citizenship by imposing everyday contingencies on undocumented noncitizens have instead come more predictably from churches, nonprofit organizations, and pro-immigration advocacy groups. Defending these claims and rights of nonjudicial status to alleviate the barriers of access and equity is slowly extending to various institutions and sectors, such as healthcare and education, but the challenges persist particularly amidst a growing global inequality gap.

Our normative inquiry aims to recenter the limits and possibilities of creating an urban fabric where different sectors and service providers within and beyond the state may resist “irregularity” to “circumvent non-juridical status” and where illegalized migrants are increasingly included and afforded housing, labor, and mobility justice, in short, substantive urban citizenship.Footnote ⁸ As a social practice with redistributive capacity, we see equity planningFootnote ⁹ and decolonial planning practicesFootnote ¹⁰ at the crux of such efforts. Reclaiming the collective project of planning for migrant solidarity may activate new openings to disrupt exclusionary discontinuities in access to services and infrastructure. Furthermore, planning processes that make space for noncitizens through collaborative and democratic spaces have the potential to yield more just outcomes for all groups while giving noncitizens more control over their destiny.Footnote ¹¹ In its more radical stance as a form of collective action, planning may afford noncitizens and other marginalized groups opportunities to enact a politics of possibility beyond the bureaucracy of the state and the logics of the market.Footnote ¹²

Although much has been said about the City of Toronto’s sanctuary policy,Footnote ¹³ in this chapter, we revisit it in the juncture of COVID-19 and the prolonged protests that since May 26 of 2020 took place in North America following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto – among other victims of structural anti-Black racism. Since the 1990s, organizing for ‘undocumented’ migrants in Toronto has been primarily located with anti-Black racism, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and other noninstitutionalized solidarity movements, which makes this moment of particular significance for solidarity activists also claiming that ‘no one is illegal’ and less so, ‘on stolen land’. In most large Canadian cities, such solidarity movements mobilized sanctuary or solidarity policies enabling access to some municipal services for a growing undocumented population.

Toronto’s sanctuary city declaration Access TO (motion CD 18.5 passed on February 20, 2013) has been frequently cited by city officials to demonstrate how Toronto welcomes and accommodates difference. Often presented as a ‘model city’ of diversity and progressive politics,Footnote ¹⁴ the case of Toronto invites scrutiny on the gaps between aspirational discourse and the governance and implementation of sanctuary policy. The case also invites reflection on the role and complexity of solidarity claims underpinning institutional pledges to ‘sanctuary’ and the extent to which equity planning practice could support a more serious commitment to livability, solidarity, inclusivity, and recognition for illegalized residents so that illegalization could be consistently resisted.Footnote ¹⁵

In this chapter, we propose an inquiry of how solidarity – in the current moment of COVID-19 pandemic and anti-racism mobilizations – has been manifested and hindered in the processes of municipal governance and planning in Toronto. For nonstatus migrants and precarious status citizens, everyday violence has intensified through state/planning practices of dispossession and racial capitalism, offering an opportunity to expand solidarity in the face of neoliberal competition or devolution of resources. While Access TO is timidly opening a space for undocumented people to regularize some aspects of everyday lives in Toronto, such spaces need to be extended far more broadly to many other sectors in order to break the discontinuities of exclusion.

We first propose a review of sanctuary/solidarity city policy, followed by the tensions on immigration policy and local livability in the context of COVID-19. Despite its best intentions, such policy has so far been insufficient to address the needs and vulnerabilities of illegalized migrants. After considering how the ‘local turn’ in migration politics plays out in Toronto’s urban governance context, we examine the limits of solidarity discourses particularly when attempts are made to institutionalize solidarity and translate it to municipal orders of government. We then discuss how municipalities and planners may engage more productively with the claims of current solidarity movements by redressing socio-economic vulnerabilities, arguing that sanctuary principles and practice need to go beyond social service agencies and municipal access to services and extend across new institutional and physical spaces in the city. If a city can better achieve inclusion in practice through the expansion of “free spaces”Footnote ¹⁶ and freedom of mobility, what are the opportunities for urban planning to support the realization of such effort? How to move from planning for, to planning with those rendered invisible? How can we reimagine planning’s normative commitments to transform through a praxis of solidarity? We conclude the chapter by stressing that a wider institutional commitment from municipal authorities would better strategize and advocate to effectuate changes at upper levels of government and a potential reform to immigration regime. In the failure of the state to provide such commitment to people excluded from immigration law, however, practices of solidarity might still be the most inclusive albeit vulnerable form of belonging.

2 Sanctuary Does Not Exist without Solidarity

In February 2013, Toronto City Council became the first ‘sanctuary city’ in Canada by adopting an Access TO policy presented by a solidarity coalition of organizations.Footnote ¹⁷ The policy sought to ensure access to municipal and public services for all residents, regardless of the immigration status. Based on a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” principle, city officials were expected to not inquire about nor share immigration status with federal authorities (notably the Canada Border Services Agency) when providing particular services. Access TO has been described as “symbolically ambitious but practically cautious.”Footnote ¹⁸ Yet, for pro-immigration organizations, community organizations, and advocacy groups, the sanctuary city policy demonstrably affirms pro-immigration politics and gesture toward social justice.

Sanctuary policy and solidarity claims point however to the tension between the legal and political recognition of migrants and national citizenship regimes – as well as to welfare state deficits and distribution of services across governmental levels. It is therefore not surprising that despite its narratives of inclusion, the main shortcomings of Toronto’s sanctuary city policy are caught between the discordance of political traditions and economic imperatives in national immigration policy, which at the local level complicates institutional commitment and service delivery. We expand on the challenges of Access TO later but for now, suffice to say that these limitations are exacerbated by the lack of appropriate municipal human and administrative resources, uneven institutional awareness and discretionary power, jurisdictional and constitutional constraints, pejorative discourses of migrants as threats to national boundaries and identity, and at the very core of the sanctuary policy, people’s invisibility and absence of demographic data on nonstatus migrants inhibiting services.Footnote ¹⁹

Sanctuary city policies are generally considered oppositional practice to nation state authority by providing partial and limited suspension of immigration law and enacting a temporary ‘relief’ space or solution to exclusionary politics, but such policy does not change immigration law and regime, does not provide regularization, nor does it repeal the vulnerability of undocumented people. Expanding the practice of temporary granting sanctuary into a particular circumscribed site (historically a church) outside the bounds of authority, detention, and deportation, to the more complex urban scale certainly brings far more unpredictability but nevertheless rests on similar traditions of charity and their asymmetrical power emphasizing a host-guest relation.Footnote ²⁰ As Derrida reminds us, “[i]t must be remembered that the stakes of ‘immigration’ do not in all rigour coincide with those of hospitality which reach beyond the civic or properly political space.”Footnote ²¹ Nevertheless, such unpredictability and asymmetrical power relations have become highly visible with the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic, as nonstatus migrants and other socially vulnerable groups have been left out of maistream programs and planning responses, while the immigration system resorts to exceptionalities and temporal accommodations without suspending deportations and other practices of illegalization altogether.

3 ‘We’re (Not) All in This Together’: COVID-19 in the Sanctuary City

On August 14, 2020, as part of Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government announced that some “asylum claimants working in the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic would be offered a new pathway to permanent residency.”Footnote ²² Called the ‘Guardian Angels’ pathway, the conditions for refugee claimants to access this route to permanent status involved “providing direct patient care as part of their job,” among other eligibility requirements.Footnote ²³ While the UN Refugee AgencyFootnote ²⁴ and other organizations celebrated this action as a commendable step, migrants rights activists demanded that such pathway be extended to all migrants in recognition of the inordinate burden they have carried during the pandemic.

The use of the ‘Guardian Angels’ tag to differentiate ‘deserving’ refugee claimants from others during the pandemic is exemplary of the Government of Canada’s practice of illegalization of those with precarious status, whereas the explicit requirement to access the pathway is for refugee claimants to literally risk their lives once more. Similar to narratives of the ‘good’ or ‘deserving’ immigrant that set some before the rest, the ‘Guardian Angels’ pathway stratifies a large majority of vulnerable migrants. The sorting of lives through temporal exceptionalities in legal migration regimes has been criticized for reproducing the criminalizing nature of the system through “the disavowal, disenfranchisement, and effective de-naturalisation or de-nationalisation of distinct categories of minoritised citizens.”Footnote ²⁵ The governmental response also neglects the excessive impacts of the pandemic in the general migrant population. On August 23, 2020, under the coordination of the Migrants Rights Network,Footnote ²⁶ migrants and activists took their demands for full and permanent immigration status for all to the streets in Toronto as a response to the excruciating circumstances caused by the pandemic.

The current context of the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly exposed how problems of access and resources for particular people affect life chances. Neighborhoods in the inner suburbs where the large majority of low-income, racialized, and new immigrants reside had infection and morbidity rates three times higher than the rates in the least ethnically diverse neighborhoods of the city.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, the rate of hospitalization in the poorest and racialized neighborhoods was four times as high than the city’s average, with 83 percent of reported cases in the city affecting Black and other people of color and 71 percent of those hospitalized were also racialized persons.Footnote ²⁸ Like racialized communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, immigrants, refugees, and other newcomers accounted for 43.5 percent of total COVID-19 infections in Ontario while representing only 25 percent of the province’s population.Footnote ²⁹ Unsurprisingly, rates of testing were lower with immigrant groups as many of them face communication barriers, have no healthcare access, and live with the fear detention or deportation. For example, about 2,000 undocumented workers in Ontario farms that had experienced ongoing outbreaks showed reluctance to go for testing assuming ineligibility for testing and treatment and fear of both losing income and being deported as a result.Footnote ³⁰ Limited access to testing is further exacerbated by the fear of being deported if indeed tested positive as COVID data are reported to public health authorities. People without status have long been excluded from any safety net and fear interactions with institutions. Poor health outcomes and vulnerability to COVID-19 are exacerbated by poor housing conditions and lower incomes, and a series of no access to health benefits, to regular or emergency pandemic-related governmental programs, to childcare benefits, or any other assistance.Footnote ³¹ Lockdown measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus have generally increased the control of residents and the need to constantly produce identification or risk arrest.

Undocumented people are evidently ineligible to relief assistance like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) program, which provided financial support ($2,000 CAD for a 4-week period) to employed and self-employed Canadians directly affected by COVID-19.Footnote ³² While no data exist on income losses for illegalized migrants, it can be assumed that many of them were already working in low-paid, unaccounted for, exploitative or precarious conditions. With reduced opportunities for saving or moving outside the so-called sanctuary city, many illegalized migrants were left with few options to cope with the hardships. Migrants who faced employment termination or whose jobs involve risk of infection may have had no option but to maintain or take any available jobs despite health risks.Footnote ³³ According to the International Organization for Migration,Footnote ³⁴ many migrants around the globe are overrepresented in occupations where the risk of infection is high (domestic work, food services, nonessential retail) and excluded from opportunities to work remotely. They may face few transportation options and be forced to work in physical proximity with co-workers and customers without protective equipment or proper hygiene measures. These working conditions make them especially vulnerable to COVID-19. Due to their vulnerabilities and constraints, they may even be forced to work despite showing symptoms.

Similar to other low-income racialized groups, migrants with precarious status often share multigenerational households where the exposure of seniors and others with fragile health conditions may be heightened.Footnote ³⁵ Migrants’ invisibility to local government has also meant that their access to private space for proper isolation, such as hotel space during quarantine has not been made equally available or affordable to them. Undocumented migrants find themselves relegated to shelter services such as Toronto’s Exhibition Place ‘Better Living’ center, which during the COVID-19 emergency of the congregated shelter model offered undignified individual rooms made of clear plexiglass divisions with no privacy, which advocates referred to as “glass cages for people.”Footnote ³⁶

Reporting on the impacts of the pandemic on the delivery of settlement services, the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI)Footnote ³⁷ noted that services that could have been otherwise accessed by nonstatus migrants under conditions of confidentiality were significantly affected by the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, with digital exclusion being a critical barrier to access services for nonstatus migrants. Virtual service delivery for settlement services was deemed inadequate to address the needs of all clients and to protect confidentiality. Service agencies brought attention to the growing isolation of service clients – many of them already isolated pre-COVID – and most critically, to heightened experiences of poverty, food insecurity, and risk of eviction due to unemployment and lost income in typical sectors such as domestic services and construction work due to the pandemic. OCASI advocates called for the federal and provincial governments to adopt a series of measures including a universal basic income program to be implemented regardless of status, a rent relief fund for tenants, and legislation that protect undocumented migrants from eviction, among others. Arguing that COVID-19 “policy responses by different orders of government have failed to redress structural and systemic disadvantages along racial lines,” the racial justice education and advocacy network of Ontario, Colour of Poverty Colour of Change has urged for a regularization program to “provide a pathway to permanent residence status for all people with precarious immigration status, including all migrant workers.”Footnote ³⁸

COVID-19 thus exposed more bluntly Toronto’s existing socio-spatial inequalities and the extent to which borders of ‘life and death’ recreate themselves in the neoliberal city. While shutdowns and activity restrictions were implemented in the name of safety for a large better-off population who were able to retreat to their bubbles, not everyone was afforded the same level of protection.

4 Toronto’s ‘Local Turn’ in Migration Governance and Politics

Toronto’s sanctuary city policy as a claim to the city remains timid, discursive, performative, and perhaps at time a misleading reification of the idea of urban belonging or urban citizenship though access and hope.Footnote ³⁹ Although the urban emerges as “a terrain through which political claims to rights are being articulated”Footnote ⁴⁰ and as the privileged scale of “direct interactions” and service delivery, often perceived as inherently progressive,Footnote ⁴¹ sanctuary policy is limited by jurisdictional mismatch between governments and neoliberal competition for services. The violence of exploitative labor conditions for illegalized migrants, coupled with ongoing gentrification, dispossession, evictions, and displacement from well-served and centrally accessible locations further complicates everyday survival in the sanctuary city.

One of the key challenges of the Canadian ‘local turn’ in migration governance and politics is the fact that municipalities have a minor status in law and politics. With reduced delegated power and authority, cities lack administrative capacity and adequate resources, which leave them with few legal tools to formulate and implement policies. Municipalities must then rely substantially on local planning, which is one of their few legal capacities to address emerging problems. As a result, “matters that might be better suited to other types of legal solutions, if brought before municipalities, end up funnelled into zoning and planning mechanisms.”Footnote ⁴² This is particularly the case with urban problems concerning social justice claims and affecting the interests of migrants with precarious status, such as poverty, food insecurity, or homelessness, among others. Due to this limitation, services covered by Access TO were already hardly inclusive of undocumented immigrants before the pandemic. Immigration regularization, (un)employment, childcare benefits, or healthcare, all under federal jurisdictions, stand unaffected by urban-level sanctuary policy. Housing as a provincial responsibility, although much needed by ‘undocumented’ people who have no access to social housing waiting lists, remains outside city-level capacity to provide.Footnote ⁴³

The local turn of migration has long found itself at unease with upper level of governments. While the implementation of sanctuary policy has been based on a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ approach (adopted in 2004), the ‘Don’t Tell’ position has not always been fully observed as local authorities have often communicated information to immigration officials.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 2017, an independent and comprehensive analysis of Toronto’s sanctuary policy revealed concerns over the lack of consistency in the implementation, lack of trust on police services, and the unintended impacts of the policy’s variability on vulnerable populations.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is due mostly to the expansion of enforcement measures of border control to local institutions and the expansion of border policing.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ has limited institutional commitment and its negative formulation normalizes inaction, passivity, or status quo (such as reporting) rather than progressive action defending immigration rights and claims.

Given Canadian municipalities’ lack of autonomy in the governance structure, local jurisdictions have little to no power or competence to respond to activists’ poignant demands or to even alleviate temporarily the economic burden on illegalized migrants, many of them now experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness. Despite the Access TO policy, being invisible to the system barely guarantees the protection of life under dire economic circumstances. For Bagelman, a ‘gentler face’ of sanctuary policy seemingly provides a temporary relief from exclusionary policies and the threat of detention and deportation, but such policy “in fact contribute(s) to a hostile asylum regime by indefinitely deferring and even extending a temporarility of waiting” as vulnerability is never fully alleviated.Footnote ⁴⁷

Neoliberal economic violence is thus another factor limiting livability for migrants and other vulnerable groups in Toronto and other aspiring global cities. If our main argument is that under current circumstances Toronto can hardly offer undocumented migrants genuine sanctuary conditions, it also holds true that the city’s violent urban development processes and entrepreneurial urbanism have constrained access to the city for an ever-larger number of low-income and racialized households.Footnote ⁴⁸ Adding to the legal and practical complexities of implementing sanctuary policy is the fact that over the past two decades, Toronto has experienced a profound housing affordability crisis and a crisis of tenant rights resulting on ongoing displacement and evictions. Rapid processes of gentrification and financialization of housing markets, including multi-family rentals and other previously decommodified niche markets, have accelerated the displacement of socio-economically vulnerable residents from downtown and other residential neighborhoods to the inner or outer suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area.Footnote ⁴⁹

Such urban transformations have been accompanied by a growing income inequality gap that over the past three decades has also deepened globally.Footnote ⁵⁰ A city once characterized by a relatively homogenous middle-income publics, Toronto has been reconfigured through rising global investments in real estate, ongoing projects of gentrification and downtown renewal altering dramatically its socio-economic and racial landscape. Such urban divide has been the focus of a number of studies that document rising poverty rates in neighborhoods where racialized immigrants reside.Footnote ⁵¹ Studies showed that racialized income gaps persist in Canada between racialized and nonracialized workers, with earning gaps for new immigrants who identify as Black, Filipino, or Latin American had also being particular steep.Footnote ⁵² In 2019, 87 percent of 122,250 low-income households in the rental market were paying over 30 percent of their income on rent, with at least half of these households facing severe unaffordability and allocating over 50 percent of their income to rent.Footnote ⁵³ Such households were highly vulnerable of failing to meet rental agreements even before the pandemic, but when COVID-19 hit, vulnerabilities to tenant evictions amplified due to their limited ability to buffer income loses.

Neoliberal violence and socio-spatial relegation thus negate the right to the city for larger groups at the intersections of urban disadvantage, regardless of legal status. Such exclusions problematize the assumption that sanctuary can effectively extend protections for noncitizens in the neoliberal city. It also brings into question right to the city claims as a unified call by solidarity groups for access and inclusion. As Mayer argues, perhaps what social movements need to reclaim is not the right to the existent city, but the right to a different city, one that is more open and democratic.Footnote ⁵⁴ An open city, foregrounded on solidarity, would recognize the right to the city as the right to participation and the right to appropriation based on inhabitation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such interpretation of the right to the city, which also involves a contributor right, is based on the recognition that “those who make the city have a claim to it.”Footnote ⁵⁶

5 The Limits of Solidarity in the Local State

In times of crisis when governments and institutions of power show their limits, people have come together to demand and to forge alternatives grounded in daily life and collective action. Wilde defines solidarity as “the feeling of reciprocal sympathy and responsibility among members of a group which promotes mutual support.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Solidarity is generally understood as the foundation of political relations, and it is often invoked antagonistically when justice or institutional structure fails.Footnote ⁵⁸ Solidarity is a highly malleable concept: Solidarity can be emancipatory or redemptive in the face of deficits of freedom, equality, and justice, but it can just as easily fall into intolerance on a less progressive side of the political spectrum. Both the strength and limits of solidarity rest on its “relational constitution” and the fact that it is not bounded by a particular scale.Footnote ⁵⁹ Solidarity is expressed just as well through a call for universal human rightsFootnote ⁶⁰ or the democratization of everyday life – as in the case of local claims for sanctuary. In such case, solidarity acts as a normative framework for securing local rights for migrants and refugees excluded by the ‘legalities’ of national immigration regimes and global capitalism. Yet, the realization of solidarity also depends on its level of support – a reality complicated in times of pandemic and isolation.

The success of solidarity network securing nonstatus migrants rights show limitations. Its complete success would demand not only a greater capacity for migrants to disrupt their structural positions of vulnerabilityFootnote ⁶¹ but also a broader solidarity of organizations and residents, but also solidarity amongst municipal politicians and departments personnel as well as solidarity between multi-level governmental instances that would ultimately politically grant recognition to nonstatus migrants. This ideal remains unattainable despite the best efforts of solidarity networks and progressive municipal politics and politicians. This is in part due, as DeGraauw explains, to the fact that immigrant policies at the municipal level are often framed “as developmental rather than redistributive policies.”Footnote ⁶²

Sanctuary policy nevertheless gives some political “presence” to the claims of “non-status” people.Footnote ⁶⁸ Solidarity networks in the defense of immigrant rights attempt to unsettle the conventional understanding of national citizenship by reasserting the urban as a terrain where rights can be articulated.Footnote ⁶⁹ Writing about pro-immigration policies and practices of city governments in the United States (despite a different context than Toronto), De Graauw sees urban citizenship advances for undocumented migrants being fostered through access of public service provision, creation of negative (‘Don’t Tell’) and positive (especially labor-related) rights protection policies, and modes of democratic participation (e.g., voting rights in local elections or decisions).Footnote ⁷⁰ For De Grauuw, such urban citizenship advances bring “a greater sense of local belonging, recognition, and voice” as well as a “modicum of dignity and safety,” but “they do not immediately disrupt traditional understandings of national citizenship or undermine the federal monopoly over immigration and citizenship.”Footnote ⁷¹ The normative recognition of urban citizenship practices remains highly promising as nonstatus migrants raise their family, work and pay taxes, study, shop, or simply attempt to recreate a life but the protection from deportation remains always discretionary to authorities’ powers.

Although central in the history of immigration politics, solidarity and sanctuary whether motivated through religious or anti-austerity position translates an unequal relationship. This unequal relationship not only potentially frames solidarity efforts, but it also frames the reception of such claims. The municipal state can only support sanctuary claim to some limits, being themselves limited by national immigration regimes or other services jurisdictions to fully embrace the protection of nonstatus residents. The expansion of a progressive local (municipalist) agenda in which “city councils act institutionally, in cooperation with civil society”Footnote ⁷² is also urgently required to monitor and broaden the climate at city hall for pro-immigration support beyond the solidarity network made of community organizations who often already operate at the seams of their social, political, and financial capacities – especially in a neoliberal context. For Melissaris,Footnote ⁷³ reconciling solidarity with institutionalization is complicated, but it does not mean that is not worthwhile. The first challenge is to conceive of an institutional structure that espouses the normative interrelations of solidarity. Here, the different discourses and practices of criminalization and securitization deployed by the state against nonstatus individuals render solidarity and membership into the solidary and legally constituted community difficult.Footnote ⁷⁴ Exclusion is a practical and political barrier of solidarity.

Despite the best intentions of the sanctuary policy to accommodate access to some services, many of these services might not be the most essential to insure inclusiveness – especially in the absence of dedicated portfolios across municipal divisions. In March 2017, a staff report by the Executive Director of Social Development, Finance and Administration (CD19.9) affirms that targeted efforts are still needed to ensure that refugees, refugee claimants, and undocumented Torontonians “are able to access programs and services and improve their quality of life in Toronto.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The challenge emerges also from the concomitant invisibility of nonstatus migrants and the lack of commitment to data collection and protection.Footnote ⁷⁶

In Section 6, we point to the fact that nonstatus immigrants do not participate in the larger process of planning – and are therefore not afforded the right to live freely and to imagine their communities. We then center on the question of how can planning be reimagined beyond the false dualism of “compassion and racism” framing othering practices.Footnote ⁷⁷ How to move from planning for to planning with those rendered invisible? We thus discuss approaches to reimagine planning’s normative commitments to transform through a praxis of solidarity and the opportunities for a transformative planning practice that may serve the needs of illegalized migrants.

6 Extending Solidarity and Urban Belonging: Planning for the Inclusive City (Yet to Come)

Despite the many limitations, Access TO has undoubtedly unlocked a space – albeit imperfect and incomplete – for undocumented people to momentarily regularize some aspects of their everyday lives in the city. This opening to undocumented migrants may be improved in the future through a deepening of the policy, higher coordination, better staff training and reallocation of functions (starting with the police and other emergency response services) and dedicated services and budgets. There have been some examples of success and innovation to redress access barriers for nonstatus clients worth highlighting among municipal divisions. For instance, the Toronto Public Library system has been praised for showing flexibility with clients through a mail back process as a system that enables nonstatus residents to confirm proof of address when signing up for a library card. Proof of name is still required, but it may be accepted from documents other than government-issued photo identification.Footnote ⁷⁸ Given the range of services (including access to classes, workshops, computers/Internet, and books), locational advantages across the city, and access to public spaces provided within the public libraries themselves, Toronto Public Libraries can be rightly considered sanctuary spaces in the city. Similarly, a pilot initiative called “On Board” was developed in 2017 by Toronto Public Health involving Community Health Centres and the public shelters system to improve safe referrals to primary care for uninsured clients, particularly those with precarious status.Footnote ⁷⁹ Despite inadequate institutional and financial support, these examples demonstrate some openness by staff of municipal agencies to reduce the barriers to access services for undocumented migrants. Yet, these efforts are still uneven and insufficient.Footnote ⁸⁰

Outside the municipal sphere, key selected public institutions within the education and health sectors, including the Toronto District School Board, have adopted ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policies although with slow and inconsistent implementation.Footnote ⁸¹ More recently, York University adopted a pilot program aimed to expand access to nonstatus applicants. Through a pilot initiative allowing part-time study and offering a bridging curriculum and transitional support, York University extended domestic tuition fees to a small group of nonstatus students, which otherwise would have been changed prohibitive international student fees.Footnote ⁸²

More comprehensive immigration reform has long been demanded by pro-migration advocates to provide a critical relief to systematic marginalization, but such legal solution has been seen as politically untenable. Current spaces of solidarity with undocumented residents however need to be extended far more broadly to many other sectors and institutions in order to break exclusion. Creating an urban fabric where different sectors and service providers resist ‘irregularity’ to circumvent nonjuridical status may enable a more comprehensive realization of access by extending to both, physical places and institutional spheres, across society and state.Footnote ⁸³ An alternative has been to provide access to undocumented people despite timid and inconsistent implementation. Yet, other spaces could emerge for those who are “unaccounted for” and may forge relationships of trust, organize, politicize, and disrupt illegalizing state orders by publicizing their claims to equality and to a more open city.Footnote ⁸⁴ Writing on politicization of undocumented immigrant youth movement in the United States (and in reference to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program),Footnote ⁸⁵ Nicholls defines “free spaces” as “frontline sites that allow marginalized and risk-averse groups like undocumented immigrants to meet with others, forge emotional bonds, and construct transgressive collective identities.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Accommodating not only institutional but also physical spaces in the city is thus equally important in nurturing the politicization process of marginalized people through inclusive spaces. While solidarity across difference cannot be forced or forged, it can be nurtured. Conversely, hostile geographies and uneven socio-spatial planning may prevent those at the urban margins from developing close relations with others and raising their voices to advocate for themselves.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic evinced how low-income and other economically vulnerable groups are particularly reliant on public facilities and infrastructures. During the pandemic, public spaces constitute the only access to outdoor recreational space for socially vulnerable groups, providing respite to those living in small apartments or confined in overcrowded housing arrangements.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, most low-income communities have smaller, undermaintained, or less numerous public spaces than affluent communities. Open public spaces, for instance, should be considered fundamental in an inclusive city. Yet, much is needed for racialized residents and migrants with precarious status to feel safe from policing occurring in so-called public spaces as fear of detention and deportation have long deterred or restricted the use of such spaces.

A city of ‘free spaces’ would similarly require ‘free mobilities.’ In arguing for mobility justice, Sheller contends that the recognition of freedom of mobility as a universal human right “exists in relation to class, race, sexuality, gender, and ability exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Undocumented people are subjected to multiple spatial scales and “mobility regimes, including legal regimes … govern[ing] who and what can move (or stay put), when, where, how and under what conditions.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The “violence of mobility”Footnote ⁹⁰ is a daily reality for people having to constantly remain invisible in order to avoid detention and deportation. For people with no status, uneven mobilities precondition their access to migration legal regimes just as well as their daily access to services while significantly curbing any claims to ‘right to the city’ or resistance. The interconnections between the different regimes of mobility show that mobility justice – “from the scale of the racialized body, to the detention of migrants, to the ease of travel for global elites” is not only about documentation or temporary relief of movement but also that justice itself is “an unstable configuration that moves across scales and realms.”Footnote ⁹¹

If a city can better achieve inclusion in practice through the expansion of free spaces and freedom of mobility, what are the opportunities for urban planning – typically a responsibility of local jurisdictions and within the realm of urban governance – to support the realization of such effort? As a key dimension of urban governance and city management, planning is generally concerned with the disposition of land, infrastructures, facilities, and services and how the overall organization of the built environment may improve or limit the interests and circumstances of individuals and groups. It also involves the development of social, cultural, and economic policies that may change the characteristics of places.Footnote ⁹² Beyond its more technocratic aspects, planning as a social practice is one of a few arenas that entertain a collective capacity to aspire,Footnote ⁹³ “insofar as [planning] does not just analyze and predict, but also develops criteria for judgment and advocates change.”Footnote ⁹⁴

In extending solidarity and urban belonging for migrants with precarious status, the project of disrupting planning’s entanglements with neoliberal violence, regimes of illegalization, and settler colonialism seems crucial.Footnote ⁹⁹ For this, it is necessary to break away with current practice and reclaim new forms of planning. In discussing how planning may be “imagined otherwise” to redress exclusions and anti-Black racism in the built environment, Bates calls for envisioning ‘new blueprints’ from spaces of community organizing and artistic expression.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A planning project aimed to redress the violence of exclusion for illegalized migrants can similarly benefit from covert forms of ‘planning otherwise’ where the often-hidden collective action and placemaking practices of illegalized migrants and other vulnerable groups are considered in determining the public interest.

This planning for solidarity should start by recognizing differences (in status, income, identity, etc.) that characterize urban life, and supporting goals of redistribution, recognition, and encounter.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thus, the pursuit of urban justice through planning involves inclusion of marginalized identities without essentializing or fixing them to a targeted category of social policy. Urban practitioners should work under a recognition that places are relational and thus dynamic – constantly being built and used in relation to people and events. Progressive urban practitioners can embrace conceptualizations of urban space as an open and dynamic process that breaks away with white, nationalist, and colonial spatial imaginaries. Such space reflects multiple forms and sources of knowledge; a space that everyone regardless of status is invited to shape. Such politics of place also implies “a consciousness of its links with the wider world”Footnote ¹⁰² evincing the power relations people are enmeshed into. Furthermore, such a politics of place may enable different groups of residents (whatever their status) to contest and claim, even if partially, their right to the city: the possibility of changing and be changed by the city.

A new planning for solidarity can also lead to new ethical commitments; in particular, an “ethics of accountability”Footnote ¹⁰³ to those excluded or rendered invisible in the planning process. Rather than declaring liberal benevolence, altruism, or compassion for migrants, the focus can then turn to an “otherwise planning” where migrants can safely participate (through anonymous involvement, artistic methods, or community organizing) in reimagining, along with others, the cities they inhabit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In turn, municipal planners and other urban practitioners can inform, convene, facilitate, and politicize the implications of the process.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Different “layers” of possibilities of urban belonging can be imagined for illegalized migrants in the city, whether through a reshuffling of current orders, political constructs, and existing material configurations or by a radical reimagination of an “open and unfixed” urban reality where all of the city’s inhabitants and their politics belong.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Based on ideas of presence in the city and a territorial polity, a “domicile principle” enabling residents to develop and affirm their belonging would start recognizing their membership in urban polities.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As the primary and formal scale of everyday belonging, the urban would be the basis of citizenship enabling other scales of citizenship.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As Holston reminds us “the domain of the political … is the city itself and specifically the city-making activities of its residents, in which they produce the city through their lives and works as a collective social and material product; in effect, a commons” made of practiced solidarities.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

7 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have examined the challenges faced by illegalized migrants while living invisibly in Toronto, a self-declared sanctuary city. In doing so, we meant to address some of the emerging normative questions raised by researchers studying the ‘local turn’ in migration politics from the perspectives of solidarity movements, municipal governance, power asymmetries, and the opportunities to redress exclusions through broadly defined equity planning practices.

Writing about sanctuary and solidarity in the current moment of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-racism mobilizations to assess how solidarity has been manifested and hindered in the processes of municipal governance and planning in Toronto has made more salient some of the contradictions and tensions of localized approaches to immigration policy. As we have argued, behind the façade of progressive municipal politics,Footnote ¹¹⁰ Toronto’s sanctuary policy remains limited by the lack of institutional capacity and attention to ensure consistency and monitor results in access to services. Furthermore, the legal structure of governance in Canada, which subordinates municipalities to provincial and federal levels of authority, makes Toronto’s claim to ‘access without fear’ a weak one as the municipal services provided may not be the most important to migrants or may not be delivered in a way that guarantees inclusivity. These limitations are aggravated by several factors, including a jurisdictional mismatch between the borders of the sanctuary city and the expansive and lived city-region where most recent migrants and low-income groups reside at the margins, and where protection from detention may no longer hold. Similarly, the violence of gentrification and neoliberal urbanisms that excludes low-income groups from accessing the city defeats the purpose of proclaiming sanctuary when precarious migrants cannot even afford to access it. In the longer term, more than sanctuary in the neoliberal city, what solidarity movements should call for is the right to a different, more open, and democratic city to be shaped and appropriated collectively.

Given than planning is one of a few responsibilities of municipal authorities in Canada, we see some potential for reclaiming the project of planning as a collective social practice with an opportunity to expand and strengthen migrant justice and sanctuary commitments. Planning processes, for instance, can provide a sphere of safe engagement for migrants to contribute imagining the city, and in doing so, disrupt exclusionary spatial imaginaries. Planning can also redress more gradually some of the housing and mobility injustices faced by illegalized migrants, shaping a quality of place where solidarity may be cultivated, and migrants’ activism and political subjectivities may flourish.

Although addressing the settlement and service needs of illegalized migrants is crucial to redress exclusions and enable a dignified quality of life, the uncertainties and fear of detention will remain unchanged until immigration regimes open new channels for regularization. Given the unmet immigration targets due to COVID-19, the Government of Canada may feel compelled to offer a path for nonstatus migrants who are already in the country. Unexpectedly, in February of 2021, the Colombian Government did just that, offering Temporary Protected Status and a path to citizenship to over one million ‘undocumented’ Venezuelan migrants in the country.Footnote ¹¹¹

A stronger commitment from municipal authorities to advocate and mobilize changes at upper levels of government for a potential reform to immigration regime would of course more effectively redress most of the current challenges of ‘living invisibly’ in the city. Yet, in the failure of the state to provide such commitment to people excluded from immigration law, practices of solidarity might still be the most inclusive albeit vulnerable form of belonging. This critical perspective on the limits of sanctuary cities is not aimed to imply, nonetheless, that solutions, including legal ones, could be exclusively found at the nation state level, which could basically stop “illegalizing” migrants. Instead, decentralization and multiple scales of intervention and openings are needed to advance migrant justice and begin to redress pressing economic, social, and labor exclusions.

1 Introduction

Nationalism is on the march and immigrants are in the crosshairs. The reaction had been a long time coming. In 1964, the United States traded in its expressly white supremacistFootnote ¹ immigration policies for a new vision: to build a global creedal people – of every race, religion, and nationality – between the two great, North American coasts.Footnote ² By 2020, thanks to the persistence of Donald Trump’s immigration guru, Stephen Miller, the old racist impulses recaptured the migration control structures they invented (border patrol, the immigration agency, and plenary immigration power) doing lasting damage to the globalized, creedal project.

In Germany, Angela Merkel tried to meet the moment of the Syrian refugee crisis by harnessing her country’s postwar reckoning with fascism to the new end of welcoming strangers in need. “Wir schaffen das” (we can do this), she said: Germany is strong enough to meet its obligations to those who seek refuge, no matter how sizable. Merkel was proved right, in a sense, Germany has not fallen apart in the face of an unprecedented influx of largely Muslim refugees from Syria, but the project was not without cost. It imperiled her own chancellorship and resurrected the remnants of fascistic impulses she wrongly believed Germany’s post-holocaust, “never again,” cultural re-fashioning had vanquished.Footnote ³ The rest of the EU is, to varying degrees, in thrall to the same anti-immigrant forces that plague Germany. The Global South is riding the zeitgeist too. India, the world’s largest, most culturally and religiously diverse democracy is engaged in a radical and violent homogenizing project to make Hindu belief the sine qua non of Indian legal and social membership.Footnote ⁴ The stripping of citizenship from Muslim Indians has played an outsize role in executing this vision.

These nationalist shifts signal, among other things, the desire of a plurality of people across the globe to return to a mythical, unitary cultural past free of the messiness of difference, a never-realized time when unity was, nonetheless, emphasized and actively constructed,Footnote ⁵ rather than difference celebrated and centered. And while the homogeneity of nation-states has always been overstated, the relative social and political consensus that prevailed after the second world war – within living memory – is a touchstone for many who are dissatisfied with the pluralism, diversity, dissensus, and agonism of the present.Footnote ⁶

Immigration law is one important and potent part of the way in which nations understand and produce their identities and manage cultural difference, and so immigration law has come in for reassessment in country after country during the nationalist resurgence. What isn’t clear, however, is if the old – relativeFootnote ⁷ – national unity that this global plurality seeks can be recovered after seven decades of postwar globalization; much less, whether stanching immigration or selecting different kinds of immigrants can do the job.

In this chapter, I use the United States as a case study to argue that even the relative consensus and relative cohesion of the postwar period in the United States cannot be recovered. National identity cannot be put back in the bottle. Deeper, postmodernFootnote ⁸ currents in human identity construction render the effort to resurrect the old, more unified national identities Sisyphean. And if those national identities cannot be resurrected, it is not at all clear that trying to bring such identities back to life – especially using immigration law – is a good idea. Any homogenized national identity imposed from on high at this point in human development, especially in the United States, will fail to satisfy a large portion of many nation’s populations, potentially furthering internal conflict, rather than ameliorating it. Because immigration law participates significantly in this identity construction work, it ought to become less centralized and homogenized to accommodate this pluralist reality. Migration governance structures should be decentralized to reflect and reinforce the pluralism of identity that thrives within nation-states and the global solidarities that are emerging between them.Footnote ⁹

A new, more decentralized approach to immigration governance is a better fit than top-down management, for the new postmodern order. Decentralization, I further claim, might in some countries, if properly designed, dial down the heat over immigration issues that the dislocations of global neoliberalism have caused. That heat, produced by numerous interlocking forces, has been narrowly projected onto immigration policy, since it is the dislocating factor that appears most tractable to nation-states. Pushing the immigration power, or a portion of it, down to a level where people can feel more agency over these cultural shifts could dissipate some of the heat immigration generates, or at least channel it into less violent and dangerous directions.

Decentralization also has much to offer the plurality of people across the world who welcome the blurring and pluralizing of national identities and the frission and beauty of cultural mixing. While the rise of a nostalgic nationalism is easy to see, and rational to fear, the way nationalism rhymes with the twentieth-century past tends to obscure the rise of fecund and cooperative pluralism in sites across the globe. Those places, mostly global cities, but also some rural and suburban locations, and some sub-national regions are in the process of creating postnational identitiesFootnote ¹⁰ with a more constructive relationship to cultural difference. These sites are fragile though. As Ran Hirshl has comprehensively articulated, the urban population centers that thrive on diversity and admixture lack sovereignty; they are oppressed and artificially constrained to their detriment by national and regional powers that draw financial sustenance from the productivity of the miscegenated cities they deny autonomy toFootnote ¹¹ – this is especially true in the United States.

In these conditions, the key to managing immigration effectively, I argue, is to pluralize our governance approach. With more than one answer to the immigration question, nation-states can nurture new cosmopolitan spaces where they arise and respect the ability of more traditional geographies to manage the cultural change immigrants bring – or, in some cases, reject it altogether – on their – local – terms.

The United States is the focus of this chapter, and its circumstances are sui generis. But the identity pressures I articulate are a global phenomenon. Witness, for example, how American race consciousness has travelled to France and become a flashpointFootnote ¹² for catalyzing discussions of racial difference that were long suppressed by the unwavering French commitment to colorblindness. That now-contested willful denial of race was long thought constitutive of French identity in combination with lacité, official state secularism that served to suppress religious difference, by suppressing public religious expression. Together, both norms are integral to securing French cultural homogeneity. Like France, other nations are having or will have their own idiosyncratic reckonings with national identity and I trust that the American example may rhyme just enough with the experiences of other territories to be of use in other studies of distinct places.

My argument for decentralization of immigration law proceeds in three parts. Part I denaturalizes centralized control of immigration, exposing the way national control is tied to a normative preference for social and cultural homogeneity. I make the case by taking on Michael Walzer’s influential characterization of decentralized immigration law as an anticommons of “a thousand petty fortresses,” showing how Walzer’s fear of a decentralized immigration control structure which he fears might lead to “deracination.” Part II argues that immigration law does identity-making work and examines the relationship between that work and the rise of “post-modern” national identities. Doing identity-construction work via centralized and national immigration law pushes a one-size-fits-all national identity that conflicts with the hyper-pluralized and hyphenated identities on the rise today. In Part III, I explore how to structure workable delegations of immigration authority to three distinct American geographies, rural, urban, and suburban, all of which have distinct identity needs.

2 The Purported Moral Value of National Immigration Control

Today’s conventional wisdom on the necessity of national immigration control was captured and distilled by Michael Walzer in 1983. In his much-cited volume, Spheres of Justice, Walzer derided a decentralized immigration control system as a premodern artifact and described a world of local immigration control as an anticommons of “a thousand petty fortresses.” Yet with four decades of centralized – and increasingly punitive – national control of immigration behind us, we now know that the alternative to “a thousand petty fortresses” suffers from its own – grander, violent – pettiness. The consistent failure of modern nation-states to make enough room for migrants seeking entry across the globe – despite the economic and social benefits that migrants bring with themFootnote ¹³ – is its own special irrationality. And the effort to police the arbitrary limits that nation-states place on migration causes morally arbitrary, and potentially vindictive forms of state violence. No moral or legal principle can adequately rationalize these deaths from border crossing, or on whom, in particular, they befall.

Nonetheless, during a period when migration enforcement was far less harsh, and radically less commonFootnote ¹⁴ than it is today, Michael Walzer theorized that the historical rise of nation-level immigration controls that “sometimes restrain the flow of immigrants” is a moral good. Such controls are valuable, per Walzer, because they facilitate human thriving in national communities. Walzer wrote dismissively of prenational state formations for their cultural pluralism. The world of empires and metropoles, like “the ancient city of Alexandria … [or] early twentieth century New York,”Footnote ¹⁵ which permitted unencumbered migration and unrestrained movement over vast territories were less than ideal because their openness produced a lack of fellow-feeling and cultural continuity over the breadth of the territory. Under such conditions, cities and towns became “closed or parochial communities.” For the New Yorker in 1910 or the Ancient Alexandrian, “the Country [or Empire was] an open but also an alien world – or, alternatively, a world full of aliens.” The glory of the Westphalian order circa 1983, then, was not just the ability to zip from Bangor, Maine, through Chicago and down to Galveston, Texas; or from Hamburg to Essen to Stuttgart; or Nantes, to Paris and on to Toulouse – it was to make these trips and encounter cultural compatriots all along the way. The Alexandrian on a jaunt to the hinterlands, by contrast, would be mixing with “strangers.”

What held this new and felicitous homogeneity together across large stretches of the globe? National control over immigration played a critical role, Walzer urged. Without such centralized control, Bangor, Hamburg, and Toulouse, as much as Berlin, Paris and Chicago would each stand alone and distinct among “a thousand petty fortresses.” City Walls would be built because cities and towns could not rely on the nation-state to weed out those who would disrupt the social fabric of these locales. Self-policing remained the only option to protect distinctive ways of life. The absence of city walls and national borders would produce a still more distressing outcome: a “world of radically deracinated men and women.”Footnote ¹⁶

Walzer’s formulation has come in for forceful critique,Footnote ¹⁷ but it, and related theories, remains extremely influential.Footnote ¹⁸ His theory also captures a still-reigning conventional wisdom that national, centralized immigration control is essential, necessary, and proper. Efforts to control immigration at other governmental levels are reflexively deviant by contrast; they are vehicles for xenophobia, spaces for symbolic dissent,Footnote ¹⁹ or, at best, sites of policy entrepreneurship that produce change at the national level. In all respects, local efforts are widely dismissed as “petty” by contrast to their national counterparts.

But Walzer was wrong and the dogma that naturalizes and legitimates centralized immigration authority is wrong. More generously, even if Walzer was not wrong at the time he wrote, he is wrong in this moment. The pathologies of national immigration control today reveal the historicity and contingent nature of Walzer’s claim – which were long taken to be timeless and universal. Section 2.1 unpacks these claims to expose the way that assumptions about the value of cultural homogeneity are bound to a particular – national, centralized – way of structuring immigration control. I suggest, in turn, that cultural pluralism and decentralization of migration control run together in a similar way.

3 National Immigration Control in a Pluralizing Nation

Walzer’s package of national cultural goods (homogenized national identity) and regulatory means (centralized immigration control) have run their course. We are at an inflection point. Whatever the benefits of a relatively homogenized, national identity, the thick, shared(ish) consensus of the postwar period is not recoverable or even desirable any longer, at least not in the rich West – and especially not in the United States.Footnote ²⁸ The impossibility of a relative re-homogenization – which would entail significant state coercionFootnote ²⁹ – should be obvious now and has been for some time. Only ten years after Walzer sang the value of sameness, Charles Taylor predicted its disintegration in the Politics of Recognition.Footnote ³⁰ Taylor noticed the tendency of citizens of contemporary democracies that differed from the dominant culture along some criterion to want to be seen in the state; to be valorized by it, reflected back to them in officialdom, and to be treated with equal dignity by their government and their fellow citizens. Even a conservative US Supreme Court signed off on the importance of this form of politics and emphasized the way in which it built solidarity and legitimacy in a hyper-diverse nation. Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, approved of affirmative action at the prestigious University of Michigan Law School, “because universities, and in particular, law schools, represent the training ground for a large number of the Nation’s leaders,” as a result, in a diverse Nation like ours, the Court held that “the path to leadership must be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.”Footnote ³¹ Social order and solidarity were thus tied to the institutionalization of the politics of recognition.

Consider also the recent rise of Trump and the “coming out” of White Nationalism. The stunning success of Trump’s caricature of white alpha-male masculinity in this context of pluralizing national identities signals how entrenched the politics of recognition have become in the United States. While the material substance of white dominance remains (white men still rule over nearly every public and private institution), its now-sectional purchase in the cultural realm,Footnote ³² and its demotion from the ideal,Footnote ³³ has put whiteness on the defensive.Footnote ³⁴ Once normative, white identity now believes itself to be one among many identities competing for esteem – to be seen. That the norm to which all others bent, now itself feels a need to be recognized, underlines the degree to which the continued dominance of Whites over other groups can no longer be taken for granted. Not only is White cultural dominance over, a return to it is irretrievable – at least without the sort of violence that constructed it in the first instance. This is not to say that the new, self-consciously sectional and embattled whiteness is something to celebrate. It is causing violence and will continue to do so, especially against racialized Americans and noncitizens.

American Immigration regulation has always had a lot to do with maintaining white cultural dominance and establishing “whiteness” as the national identity. From the ban on Chinese immigration, to the attempt of the 1920s quota acts to purify a white race gone “weak” from the genetic inputs of the “lesser” races of Europe, to the refusal to admit Jewish refugees as they died in concentration camps by Hitler’s hand identity-fashioning was at the core of immigration statecraft. It is hard to view any of these policies as primarily keyed to the material benefits of exclusion. The substance of these immigration laws, what they did in the material world (say, prevent “excess” labor competition) was always subordinate to their identity-making function. The principle work of all this violence directed at immigrants was to shore up the status anxieties of dominant whites and to secure cultural uniformity, in part through the assimilating pressures that came from placing whiteness at the top of the social hierarchy.

Trump understood all this well and revealed for a new generation the essential identity work that centralized immigration law had always done. The Muslim Ban, Trump’s first official act as president, was an assertion of White Christian primacy; a recognition of the superiority of whiteness achieved by denigration of the Muslim world as unfit for entrance and inclusion in the United States.Footnote ³⁵ (As everyone knew, especially Trump, the ban had nothing at all to do with protecting the United States from terrorism.) The spectacular cruelty of Trump’s family separation policy at the US–Mexico border, was the Muslim ban’s Latino twin. Such obvious inhumanity communicated to Whites the depth of the status threats that brown people on the move posed to white dominance. In the reflection of such menace, whiteness saw itself recognized in both of these racist policies as worth preserving at any cost.

There is a – sectional – hunger for this spectacle: “today, for citizens who remain invested in whiteness as ‘a badge of status,’ there are fewer legally sanctioned outlets for publicly engaging in” practices that valorize whiteness. “Anti-migrant rhetoric … offers nativists democratic pleasures that are increasingly difficult to access.”Footnote ³⁶ A bread and circus leader, Trump always gave his followers the satisfactions they most desired using whatever tools were at his disposal. Yet, Trump could only provide this form of violent recognition to his following because of centralized national control and a multi-decade ramp-up in bureaucratic capacity. And these tools were put in place and upheld as constitutional over the last two centuries for precisely the purposes Trump put them to (and which Walzer valued) to secure a homogenous national identity.

Immigration law scholars have largely ignored this relationship between ideology and the structure of the immigration power, or believed it had been permanently sublimated into the service of a new multiracial immigration consensus with the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. That act was a centralized national response to the pressures of anticommunism and the civil rights movement that ushered in a radical diversification of the United States. In 1970, 80 percent of American immigrants were of European origin – today less than 10 percent are. Even though national centralized control had been designed to serve white dominance, in that moment in 1965, it also ushered in the demographic eclipse of whiteness through the front door.Footnote ³⁷ Still, Trump’s use of immigration law to shore up white nationalism is not incongruous or exceptional, but it is a return to form. The dramatic demographic and cultural revolution that the Hart-Cellar Act yielded should not distract from the reality that centralized, national immigration control has an unavoidable antipluralist structural bias – if only because it gives a single answer to the question of “who belongs” in a dispersed nation of 325 million individuals.

Still, we should recognize that the post-1965 transformation of the United States’ demographic composition was also a product of high-modernist ideology. And, like all governance strategies that involve “muscle-bound self-confidence in … the rational design of social order,” the civil-rights era transformation of American identity via immigration law could not account for all the downstream consequences of this ambitious, continent-wide, and diversity-promoting endeavor. While the project dramatically enriched the United States and successfully stretched the median American’s tolerance for diversity, it has also produced dislocations that many native-born Americans feel constitute its own kind of violence. We are encountering the most dangerous effects of the fallout today and must grapple with it: in particular what to do with the violent white rage the post-1965 transformation has added fuel to.

We must face head on the fact the immigration regulates metaphysical life in nation-states as much or more than material reality. Part of that grappling, I suggest in the rest of this chapter, should come from creating a better fit between migration governance structures and the reality of postmonocultural, postmodern American identity. If who “we” are as a nation is radically more plural than was ever thought possible in the high-modern period, then governance strategies related to migration need to become supple and plural enough to account for this new diversity of identity needs.Footnote ³⁸

4 Postmodern Identity and Immigration Law Structure

High-modernist identity construction was a top-down process that produced cultural continuity across massive national geographies. Postmodern identity construction is bottom-up, chosen, curated; it produces strong continuities, but ones that are geographically discontinuous across the national terrain.Footnote ³⁹ These newer identities and cultures do have a loose geography (and one that maps nationally), they form a recursive pattern across national territory that tracks housing density.Footnote ⁴⁰ Today, the culture of rural Michigan has more in common with rural Texas than ever before, but both places have far less in common culturally than they used to have with central Houston or Detroit, or even with those cities’ respective suburbs. Houston, Columbus, Ohio, or even Salt Lake City, Utah, have more in common with each other, than any of these cities has with its hinterlands.

This new discontinuous geography of cultural norms is distinct from what came before, but it is not a return to the unintelligibility of ancient Alexandrians to the barbarians outside their gates, as Walzer might fear. The significant gains in cultural continuity purchased in the period of high-modern nation-making remain in place: New identities and cultural mores have been graphed on top of them. So while the culture has pluralized, the change has not been as destabilizing as it might otherwise have been. With common and contiguous foundations of a national cultural already in place, pluralism could increase substantially without creating a Babel.

Even so, the rise of cultural pluralization, and the sorting of individuals with overlapping commonality along multiple demographic markers – economic, racial, educational attainment, and political affiliation – into specific, nationwide geographic patterns is a source of consistent concern in public and academic discourse. It is not overstatement to characterize these critiques as portending the death nell to national social cohesion.Footnote ⁴¹ And, surely there is much to worry about in this new order. After all, the culture that results from this geographic sorting gains its normative superiority to top-down arrangements to the extent that the “foot-voting” that creates these places and cultures actually reflects individual preferences and choices.Footnote ⁴² To the extent the most powerful groups use zoning and other governmental tools to hoard common resources for themselves and serve their own interests over others, the new order really is worse than what came before.Footnote ⁴³ Still, the relentless pessimism about this sorting seems over the top. (Perhaps, all new human geographies will be feared as they come into being?)

Just as with high-modernist cultural production, postmodern national identities are constructive too. Metropolitan area productivity levels, which diverged markedly by region 100 years ago have now converged, creating more wealth nationally than existed before the “big sort.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And from a welfarist point of view, it seems hard to argue that the homogenized status quo ante served the mass of individuals better than what exists today. To the extent the prior, contiguous national culture that Walzer favored was good it was good because it created thick cultural bonds. Arguably, new arrangements are just as thick, even thicker. Surely, the thick cultural bonds created in communities where shared cultural norms run deep are also valuable – and all the more valuable for being more freely chosen. Moreover, the pluralization of cultural norms between geographies within the same nation means that more people actually have a meaningful choice of what kind of community to affiliate with.

Beyond sorting, there are other aspects to postmodern identify formation that bear mention. Postmodern identity is bespoke. Individuals contain multitudes and those multitudes seek out social affirmation. The shift began as identities repressed or subordinated by the high-modernist cultural mode began seeking recognition. The Black civil-rights movement first, next women’s equality and reproductive freedom, and then queer identity. Work continues in all these areas, of course, but identities have multiplied on from there (nonbinary, asexual, genderqueer, and biracial), and the focus of recognition now encompasses repressed subgroups within broader oppressed categoriesFootnote ⁴⁵ (e.g., respectability politics and colorism in the Black community, white heteropatriarchy in Queer movements).

The proliferation of identities has made the search for recognition increasingly personalized. The concept of intersectionality inspires and sustains this mode. Following intersectional insights, ways of knowing and forms of knowledge are increasingly grounded in standpoint epistemologyFootnote ⁴⁶ (as a biracial, genderqueer, first-generation college student, etc.). These intersecting, plural, self-made selves increasingly demand recognition in every context – the workplace, educational institutions, religious institutions, bathrooms, and the law. What looks like it might descend into unmanageable social atomization is actually anarchy in the best sense, a spontaneous order – a commitment to bottom-up social organization and a resistance to norms imposed from above especially where they impinge on personal choices that do no material harm to others. Emergent norms to accommodate these needs for recognition, like declaring personal pronouns, stretch our capacities for pluralism further.

What might all this have to do with the structure of immigration control? Simply put, immigration law does and has always done identity work, and high-modernist immigration control looks increasingly at odds with the nature and geography of postmodern identity construction. In the metropolitan geographies where the postmodern mode reigns, social boundaries of every sort – including the borders Walzer took as fundamental – look increasingly artificial. As the locus of culture focuses increasingly on the individual and whatever voluntary groupings individuals wish to be a part of – from a reactionary Catholic intentional community that gives the Latin mass to a polyamorous nudist commune – the invasion of “foreign” cultures into the milieu seems ever less threatening to “national identity” itself, and the fear of cultural “deracination” still more absurd and unintelligible. How can you “deracinate” a culture increasingly defined by the personal freedom to shape a bespoke, individualized, and cross-cutting set of commitments?

Moreover, for all the mockery endured by the young social entrepreneurs that have relentlessly pushed the boundaries of identity and demands for recognition, this work has yielded an increasingly muscular capacity for these geographies to manage, coexist, and thrive in this hyper pluralist environment. In these geographies, old-school, high-modern identity differences – like national origin – just do not register as broadly threatening, much less uniquely threatening to the cultural continuity of these geographies. Indeed, we may be at the point where openness to immigration is constitutive of these geographies. Maintaining an openness to a radically plural and ever-expanding mix of personal identity commitments is difficult to square with a posture of exclusion toward noncitizens.

Rural areas, by contrast increasingly occupy a universe where the disintegration of high-modern identity is acutely threatening. Just as metropolitan identities have thickened in place, so too have rural ones. And economic decline in rural areas has only compounded the sense of threat felt by the inversion of the national identity hierarchy.Footnote ⁴⁷ In such normative environments, immigration does register as an existential threat. Capacities for managing difference in these areas have not grown as substantially as they have in cities and metro areas. Indeed, most who might have challenged the rural cultural status quo have increasingly and relentlessly exited those geographies, leaving homogeneity partisans behind. And, as Trump underlined, the culture of these rural geographies feels increasingly threatened and unrecognized – unseen – by the broader culture.

While the metaphysical aspects of immigration and identity may be felt symmetrically across differing geographies, the material effects are radically asymmetrical. The vast majority of immigrants land in major metropolitan areas. Where immigrants do land in rural areas, the impact is often disproportionate to numbers because of the differing cultural ecologies in rural areas. Votes for Trump in the 2016 election cycle were highly correlated to the percentage change in immigrant population in a particular local geography. But again, the difference in material impacts is another strike against high-modernist immigration control and another reason to adjust course for a postmodern order.

5 Seeing Immigration from Different Vantage Points

If immigration law has a lot to do with identity construction, and national identity has ruptured into distinct, national identities that track housing density, then to design an immigration – or identity law – system that fits this new geography of identity, we need to look at immigration from different geographic vantage points. Seeing through diverse perspectives is an increasingly mandatory skill in diverse societies because of their increasingly pluralism. High-modernist immigration control is crafted from a single dominate perspective, so it should not surprise that it yields unsatisfactory results. Different vantage points, of course, offer different kinds of information.

In light of the increasing divergence in perspectives and cultures that map to differences in geography, I offer accounts of three distinct geographic perspectives below. We will “see” immigration like a city, a suburb, and “the country,” that is, from urban, suburban, and rural vantage points. For each of these vantage points, I offer suggestions for how certain forms of immigration power might be devolved down from the national level and what policy shape those powers might take. The claim is that immigration power devolution would nurture the identities these geographies sustain and help them to adapt and to thrive, along with the immigrants that become part of these communities. With the identity needs of these geographies accommodated, the nation as a whole will be better positioned to accommodate the difference that we already have and the new differences that we invite with immigration.

6 Conclusion

Human identity construction has changed in ways that are discordant with one-size-fits-all, high-modern, national identity of the sort that Walzer validated, and that a plurality of citizens across the global north wish to return to. Because immigration law plays such an integral role in structuring national identity – reminding the body politic who it is and is not with every visa issuance and every deportation – the structure of immigration law must adapt to this new reality. In this chapter, I have suggested decentralization of immigration powers down to subnational levels of government as a prescription to better match American identity needs with the pluralism of those needs across a variety of different geographies: the city, the country, and the suburbs. The wisdom of this strategy will vary across nation-states, but the geography of the phenomena I have described track across nation-states, suggesting the American case holds insights for other places across the Globe.

1 Introduction

Following almost forty years of operating essentially in isolation in Canada, community sponsorship has gathered recent international momentum, with fourteen countries piloting or establishing community sponsorship schemes since 2015 alone. In the EU, the fallout of the 2015 migrant and refugee crisis has driven a search for innovative approaches to protection, including the development of community sponsorship schemes in Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain, as well as the United Kingdom. In the recent New Pact on Migration and Asylum, the European Commission calls for the development of a ‘European model’ of community sponsorship, though the key features of such an approach remain unexplained.Footnote ¹ Outside Europe, both Australia and New Zealand have piloted community-based models.Footnote ² Most recently, the United States has launched a community sponsorship programme to support evacuated Afghans.Footnote ³ Beyond traditional resettlement states in the Global North, Argentina has implemented a community sponsorship model supporting the integration of Syrian refugees.

Community sponsorship has no settled definition, but inherent to the model is shared responsibility between civil society and the state for the admission and/or integration of refugees.Footnote ⁴ Community sponsorship has been described by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as ‘programmes where individuals or groups of individuals come together to provide financial, emotional and practical support toward reception and integration’ of refugees.Footnote ⁵

The rise of community sponsorship has tracked the development and implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees (‘the Compact’), a non-binding international agreement for ‘predictable and equitable responsibility-sharing’ passed by the UN General Assembly in December 2018.Footnote ⁶ In particular, community sponsorship is closely linked to one of the four Compact objectives focused on the expansion of ‘third country solutions’ through resettlement and complementary pathways.Footnote ⁷ UNHCR defines complementary pathways as ‘safe and regulated avenues for refugees that complement resettlement by providing lawful stay in a third country where their international protection needs are met’.Footnote ⁸ Complementary pathways identified in the Compact are family reunification, private refugee sponsorship, humanitarian visas and labour and educational opportunities for refugees.

The global push to expand community sponsorship may be traced to the 2016 New York Declaration, which calls for the expansion of resettlement and other alternative avenues to asylum for refugees. The Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative was launched in the margins of the New York Declaration, with a mandate to ‘encourage and support the adoption and expansion of refugee sponsorship programs around the world’.Footnote ⁹ More broadly, community sponsorship is aligned to the Compact as an example of a whole-of-society approach to refugee protection, which includes local authorities.Footnote ¹⁰ At the first Global Refugee Forum held in December 2019, Brazil, Belgium, Malta and Portugal pledged to explore pilot community sponsorship models, while Finland has recently completed a feasibility study for a pilot scheme.Footnote ¹¹

Against the backdrop of this rapid uptake of community sponsorship models, this chapter seeks to set out key protective principles drawn from international human rights and refugee law. At this early stage of the development of community sponsorship beyond Canada, the purpose of these principles is to guide the implementation of community sponsorship and inform policymakers and advocates seeking to implement new or adjust existing programmes. In keeping with this volume’s focus on the ‘local turn’ in migration governance, the chapter further addresses the current and potential roles of local authorities in community sponsorship schemes.Footnote ¹² The chapter concludes that while national governments remain the ‘ultimate gatekeepers’ in terms of the creation and scale of community sponsorship models, globally engaged local authorities have the potential to ensure a principled approach to community sponsorship as a means to increase protection space.

This contribution proceeds in five sections. First, the role of resettlement and complementary pathways in the Compact is discussed, as a counterpoint to the lack of access to asylum in destination states in the Global North. Second, the chapter frames community sponsorship as a flexible concept that may take the form of resettlement or standalone a complementary pathway to protection. Third, the chapter uses the recent proliferation of community sponsorship models to draw out both promising and problematic practices in terms of refugee protection. Fourth, the role of local authorities in the various community sponsorship models is explored. Finally, the chapter puts forward a number of protection principles to inform new and existing community sponsorship models, before providing some concluding reflections on the place of community sponsorship in the international refugee regime and the role of local authorities in developing this form of refugee protection.

2 Resettlement and Complementary Pathways in the Global Compact on Refugees

The adoption of the Compact as a global responsibility sharing instrument comes against a backdrop of the ‘deterrence paradigm’Footnote ¹³ in traditional asylum countries, in which a broad array of ‘non-entrée’ measures prevent asylum seekers accessing the territory or asylum procedures of destination states.Footnote ¹⁴ As a result, lack of legal access to asylum for refugees has emerged as a key gap in the international refugee regime in the past thirty years, with some authors predicting the end of the right to seek asylum in the Global North.Footnote ¹⁵

The Compact does not directly address challenges of access to asylum, instead placing the expansion of resettlement and complementary pathways as one of its four objectives.Footnote ¹⁶ Paragraphs 94–96 provide that such pathways should act as a ‘complement to resettlement’, and the Compact aims to significantly increase their availability and predictability. The Compact further provides that complementary pathways ‘contain appropriate protection safeguards’, though it does not elaborate on what standards these contain.Footnote ¹⁷ Following the adoption of the Compact, UNHCR set out highly ambitious targets for increased resettlement and complementary pathways in the decade ahead.Footnote ¹⁸

Such controlled pathways are often the preferred modes of protection in destination countries, rather than spontaneous asylum.Footnote ¹⁹ Resettlement is not an international legal obligation but rather a discretionary policy choice.Footnote ²⁰ As Hashimoto points out, ‘no state has a legal obligation proactively to admit refugees via resettlement who are still outside their jurisdiction; nor can a refugee claim a “right” to be resettled’.Footnote ²¹

Resettlement is palatable to destination states as it is a means of providing asylum that meets their control interests in a number of respects. First, resettlement involves the orderly movement of recognised refugees across international borders, in some contrast to the spontaneous arrival of asylum seekers.Footnote ²² Second, resettlement involves the predictable allocation of annual quotas, allowing the destination state to predetermine how many refugees receive protection in a given year. Furthermore, resettlement allows destination states to allow access to recognised refugees only, thereby avoiding the entry of migrants not requiring international protection. This is particularly pertinent in the EU, where implemented return rates hover around 40 per cent.Footnote ²³ In a number of destination states, admission of refugees under an organised resettlement program tends to be more politically popular than the admission of asylum seekers.Footnote ²⁴

Resettlement and complementary pathways allow destination states to maintain a commitment to the international refugee regime, holding out a form of responsibility sharing to ‘trade-off’ deterrence efforts.Footnote ²⁵ This tendency is evident in the linking of the two approaches. The EU–Turkey Statement, for example, includes a built-in resettlement element, with one Syrian refugee resettled for every one returned. Australia’s deterrence efforts are often justified in terms of a relatively generous resettlement program.Footnote ²⁶ This relationship between deterrence, on the one hand, and controlled pathways via third-country solutions, on the other, runs as a red thread through the implementation of the Compact.Footnote ²⁷

3 Conceptualising Community Sponsorship

Community sponsorship may be either a form of resettlement or a complementary pathway.Footnote ²⁸ A 2018 study undertaken by the European Commission, as well as a number of individual country feasibility studies, demonstrate the wide range of approaches to community sponsorship, straddling more established forms of resettlement and standalone complementary pathways.Footnote ²⁹ The following explains how the concept is best understood as an ‘umbrella’ term encompassing several different modalities.Footnote ³⁰

Community sponsorship as a tool for resettlement focuses solely on integration support for resettled refugees matched with civil society sponsors. Rather than creating a pathway to admission, community sponsorship involves integration assistance for resettled refugees. This model of community sponsorship uses existing UNHCR and state resettlement channels (including selection, referral, health checks etc.) to admit refugees. Civil society involvement is generally limited to the provision of support after arrival and focused on the successful integration of refugees. Moreover, community sponsorship as resettlement usually benefits UNHCR-referred refugees, rather than ‘named’ individuals, although practice varies between jurisdictions.Footnote ³¹

Existing community sponsorship schemes in Ireland and the United Kingdom are squarely focused on the support of resettled refugees, initiated within the state resettlement quota with the intention of becoming additional over time.Footnote ³² Similarly, the German Neustart im Team (NesT) programme is a clear example of community sponsorship as a resettlement tool.

Community sponsorship models that involve privately led admission and integration of asylum seekers and refugees create a standalone complementary pathway. Such programmes are firmly separated from state-run resettlement as an ‘initiative by private associations with recognized expertise in the field to provide for an alternative, legal, and safe pathway’.Footnote ³³ In its original form in Canada, community sponsorship involved the ‘naming’ of individual refugees by sponsors and the creation of a pathway independent of other channels to admission.Footnote ³⁴ More recently, the Humanitarian Corridors model pioneered in Italy is a good example of community sponsorship as a complementary pathway.Footnote ³⁵ Community sponsorship may also form a complementary pathway for the purpose of family reunification, such as the German Federal Länder Sponsorship Scheme, in place between 2013 and 2018.Footnote ³⁶

Community sponsorship as a complementary pathway raises questions of the extent to which the model provides protection to refugees, rather than other migrants. Hashimoto has recently critiqued the role of complementary pathways as risking the transformation of the institution of asylum into ‘a neoliberal, privatised immigration enterprise reserved only for highly skilled and educated migrants or for certain ethnic or religious groups’.Footnote ³⁷ By contrast, Van Selm highlights their potential as ‘ways out of the asylum and refugee policy debate and deterrence in Europe’.Footnote ³⁸

Finally, the long-standing question of additionality is a constant tension between an approach that is complementary to existing resettlement, thus expanding protection, and a model that replaces state resettlement, leading to concerns of outsourcing or privatisation of refugee protection.Footnote ³⁹ In essence, additionality in community sponsorship expands refugee protection, while community sponsorship that replaces resettlement allows the state to outsource its responsibility.Footnote ⁴⁰ To meet the principles outlined in this contribution, community sponsorship models should expand refugee protection, not merely shift responsibility from government to civil society or private actors.

Nevertheless, additionality is not a straightforward concept, and pragmatic considerations may require that initial community sponsorship models take place within existing resettlement quotas.Footnote ⁴¹ In such cases, a shift to additionality in the short to medium-term should remain a focus, with the realistic understanding that some national governments may seek to dilute or reverse-engineer additionality.Footnote ⁴² As discussed later, local authorities have a key role to play in holding national governments to account in this respect, to ensure that community sponsorship models expand rather than outsource refugee protection.

Relatedly, the establishment of community sponsorship schemes in states with no existing resettlement programme raises complex questions of pragmatic or realistic approaches. On the one hand, community sponsorship has the potential to kick start resettlement by mobilising local authorities, civil society and private funding where national governments have historically proven unwilling. Some authors have recently pointed out that the introduction of complementary pathways, including community sponsorship, may lead to the ‘development of fully-fledged and regular resettlement programmes’.Footnote ⁴³ On the other hand, the establishment of privately led resettlement may disincentivise governments from assuming their traditional responsibilities for such programmes whatsoever.

4 Promising and Problematic Practices

The primary objective of community sponsorship models should be the protection of refugees. The proliferation of new and varied community sponsorship models offers some recent but rich examples of practices to be emulated and avoided. The following makes some reflections on promising and problematic practices in the development of community sponsorship since 2015.

A number of community sponsorship models have successfully expanded protection for refugees, by remaining or emerging as additional to state resettlement. Canadian sponsors supported 62,000 Syrian refugees between 2015 and 2020 alone, over and above the Canadian government’s resettlement scheme.Footnote ⁴⁴ Humanitarian Corridors Italy has provided a safe and legal pathway to protection for 3,632 refugees since 2016, in addition to the country’s annual resettlement programme of 1,000 places.Footnote ⁴⁵ On a smaller scale, Germany’s NeST model is additional to the national resettlement program, with 400 sponsored refugees admitted from Germany’s overall resettlement quota of 5,500.Footnote ⁴⁶ The United Kingdom Community Sponsorship Scheme started out within the state’s resettlement quota, with the government pledging additionality at the Global Refugee Forum.Footnote ⁴⁷

A further promising practice is the provision of permanent protection to refugees under a number of community sponsorship models. In this respect, the close links between community sponsorship and resettlement have proven useful. While complementary pathways generally provide refugees with ‘lawful stay in a third country where their international protection needs are met’,Footnote ⁴⁸ most community sponsorship schemes currently provide permanent protection to refugees, or at least temporary visas with the expectation of subsequent permanent residence.Footnote ⁴⁹ There are at least two possible reasons for this relatively generous level of protection. First, the use of resettlement channels for sponsored refugees introduces a presumption of permanent protection, as resettlement by definition involves the ‘transfer of refugees from one State in which they have sought protection to a third State which has agreed to admit them – as refugees – with permanent residence status’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Second, the integration-focused role of sponsors tends towards permanent rather than temporary protection. In Denmark, for example, the feasibility of community sponsorship is significantly hampered by a recent policy shift to temporary protection of refugees.Footnote ⁵¹

Finally, some recent community sponsorship programs have placed significant focus on practical safeguards for sponsored refugees. In particular, the creation of civil society focal points with expertise in refugee support to screen, select and train sponsors is good practice to ensure refugees benefit from sponsors. Such a body is vital to act as liaison between sponsors and government, as well as to step in in the case of sponsorship breakdown.Footnote ⁵² Building on Canada’s Sponsorship Agreement Holders model, Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom have all established such civil society focal points. Relatedly, recent practice has prioritised monitoring and evaluation of community sponsorship schemes, in part to ensure refugees are adequately supported during sponsorship.Footnote ⁵³ Systematic evaluations have been undertaken soon after implementation in, for example, the Basque region,Footnote ⁵⁴ New ZealandFootnote ⁵⁵ and the United Kingdom.Footnote ⁵⁶

A number of more problematic practices may also be observed. Some community sponsorship models have featured discrimination between refugees on the basis of religion. For example, ad hoc community sponsorship models in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia provided admission only to Christians, with no consideration of international protection needs.Footnote ⁵⁷ Refugees admitted under these schemes either moved on to another EU member state or returned to their country of origin.Footnote ⁵⁸ By contrast, community sponsorship schemes in Germany (NesT), New Zealand and the United Kingdom draw beneficiaries from UNHCR’s resettlement submission categories, which focus referrals on seven objective criteria in line with the humanitarian basis of resettlement.Footnote ⁵⁹

Still, other community sponsorship models have shifted the focus of community sponsorship away from protection to particular migration streams, such as labour migration or family reunion. Australia’s Community Support Program, notably, provides for 1,000 sponsored refugees per year within Australia’s resettlement scheme. However, the scheme only supports refugees who are ‘job-ready’ with ‘functional English’ and sponsors pay significant costs related to visas, administration and integration.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a result, the Community Support Program has been criticised as ‘an exercise in the privatization of resettlement responsibilities and costs’ more akin to a labour migration or family reunification scheme than a humanitarian mechanism.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, New Zealand’s pilot included job-focused eligibility criteria.Footnote ⁶² Previous practice has also placed onerous requirements on sponsors, causing stress for both sponsors and refugees. Germany’s Federal Länder Sponsorship Scheme, a family reunification model in place between 2013 and 2018, was criticised for requiring individuals to commit to five years of sponsorship.Footnote ⁶³

Finally, inadequate policy frameworks have revealed corruption in community sponsorship in at least one case. In Belgium, a city counsellor has been arrested on suspicion of selling humanitarian visas to refugees for €20,000 under a humanitarian corridors pilot.Footnote ⁶⁴ Notwithstanding its undoubted successes, the Humanitarian Corridors model places significant responsibility for selection of refugees on faith-based actors. A robust policy framework at both national and local levels is necessary to avoid such governance problems, especially where pilot programs are used to test the possibility of a permanent community sponsorship model.Footnote ⁶⁵

5 The Role of Local Authorities in Community Sponsorship

The role of local authorities in community sponsorship models requires further research. In Canada, the question is less relevant as the federal government is responsible for the country’s community sponsorship streams, with the exception of the provincial government of Quebec. Hitherto, in those jurisdictions where community sponsorship is in a pilot or relatively recent phase, focus has tended to remain on the role of national authorities and civil society.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nevertheless, the legal, policy and operational roles of local authorities are often essential to the inception and implementation of community sponsorship models.

The role of local authorities in refugee governance more broadly is addressed in the Compact as ‘among the actors that experience the most significant impact over the medium term’.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, while the Global Compact on Refugees goes on to call on cities and municipalities to share their good practices and innovative approaches in supporting refugees, it falls short of outlining the role of local governance actors in resettlement and complementary pathway arrangements, including community sponsorship. Sabchev and Baumgärtel have sought to bridge this gap, calling for the upscaling of ‘locally organised, city-led routes’ to protection for refugees in the EU, given the capacity of municipal and regional authorities to assess local capacity to host and integrate refugees, manage refugee reception and integration and a recent tendency of local governments to cooperate directly with key international organisations, notably UNHCR and International Organization for Migration.Footnote ⁶⁸

Three overlapping tendencies in the roles of local authorities are observed here, telegraphing the increasingly important role of local authorities in both the uptake and implementation of community sponsorship schemes. First, local authorities champion locally driven community sponsorship, often as a counterpoint to the restrictive policies of national governments. Since 2015, for example, Barcelona, Vienna and Hamburg have repeatedly expressed their willingness to host and support refugees, often in direct opposition to their national counterparts.Footnote ⁶⁹ Similarly, Barcelona and Athens agreed in 2016 to cooperate on a pilot project to relocate 100 refugees living in camps in the Greek capital to Barcelona, which was ultimately rejected by the national Spanish government.Footnote ⁷⁰ With respect to complementary pathways more broadly, German self-declared ‘Safe Ports’ municipalities have lobbied their states to develop humanitarian admission programmes. Most recently, a Thuringia state proposal for a humanitarian admission programme aimed at Afghans was blocked by the German federal interior ministry.Footnote ⁷¹

Such city-led advocacy with respect to community sponsorship in some ways reflects the broader sanctuary cities movement from the United States dating back to the 1980s,Footnote ⁷² as well as the emergence of the Solidarity Cities project in Europe since 2016.Footnote ⁷³ However, the advocacy of local authorities with respect to community sponsorship is distinct from the sanctuary city concept in important respects. Perhaps most notably, cities calling for the introduction of community sponsorship are actively seeking to provide an avenue to protection for refugees, rather than supporting the enduring residence of those already present. Moreover, cities calling for community sponsorship models generally propose protection for a relatively small group of refugees, rather than large groups of existing migrant or refugee populations.

Second, and related, subnational authorities have played a catalytic role in certain settings. The Basque regional government in Spain led the country’s community sponsorship pilot, advocating for the scheme through negotiations with national authorities in Madrid.Footnote ⁷⁴ The pilot supporting five Syrian families took place within Spain’s National Resettlement Program,Footnote ⁷⁵ with a 2019 agreement between the Ministry of Labour, Migration and Social Security, the Basque regional government, UNHCR Spain, Caritas Euskadi and Ellacuría Foundation placing responsibility for the reception of sponsored refugees with the Basque regional government.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Spanish pilot is further an example of cooperation between regional and municipal authorities, as the Basque regional government distributed beneficiaries among the three major Basque cities of Bilbao, Donostia and Vitoria.Footnote ⁷⁷ Local authorities in other EU states have expressed interest in piloting local or regional models, with a number of Swedish municipalities currently considering a pilot.Footnote ⁷⁸

Finally, local authorities clearly often play an important operational role in implementing a community sponsorship scheme. In many European states, municipal authorities are responsible for delivering the entirety or majority of refugees’ integration programmes, ranging from housing assistance, language classes, cultural orientation and employment support.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the United Kingdom, for example, the cities of Bristol and Birmingham support local community sponsorship by raising awareness among volunteer organisations and training and coordinating and monitoring sponsorship groups.Footnote ⁸⁰

However, the inclusion of civil society in integration systems run by local authorities that community sponsorship entails gives rise to questions of complexity. In a recent UNHCR scoping report on the feasibility of community sponsorship in Sweden, existing coordination between multiple national agencies and municipalities was identified as a challenge to the devolution of certain responsibilities to a civil society actor.Footnote ⁸¹ In contrast, a recent Finnish study on the potential for introducing community sponsorship found extensive cooperation between municipalities and civil society, concluding that existing cooperation provides ‘a functional foundation for a community sponsorship programme’.Footnote ⁸²

6 Towards Protection Principles

The proliferation of new community sponsorship models since 2015 bring both risks and opportunities for refugee protection. On the one hand, the rapid growth of community sponsorship means national and local policymakers may quickly be informed of the various models implemented in multiple jurisdictions. On the other hand, the inherent flexibility of the concept may leave it open to co-option where, for example, governments use community sponsorship to replace resettlement, or discriminate by protecting only particular groups. To mitigate these risks, the following section suggests six protective standards drawn from international human rights and refugee law and lessons from recent practice.Footnote ⁸³

7 Conclusions: Community Sponsorship, Local Governance and the International Refugee Regime

The scale, additionality and protection-focus of community sponsorship will define its success in meaningfully contributing to the international protection of refugees. With low resettlement numbers since the COVID-19 pandemic and pressure on the Compact to deliver, the push to expand community sponsorship is already being felt.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the coming years, we are likely to see the emergence of new community sponsorship models that challenge the protective core of the concept. Three critical reflections are provided here: the role of community sponsorship with respect to the Global Compact on Refugees; the relationship between local authorities and international actors in community sponsorship; and the current and potential future role of local authorities in this area.

First, community sponsorship is emerging as a key pillar of the Global Compact on Refugees, both as a tool for resettlement and a standalone complementary pathway.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Community sponsorship is part of a suite of ‘controlled’ avenues to protection with the potential to meet the Compact objective of expanding access to third-country solutions. However, against a backdrop of restrictions on territorial asylum exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic,Footnote ¹⁰² it remains highly unlikely that community sponsorship and other third-country solutions can be scaled up to fill the substantial protection gaps extant in the international refugee regime.

Moreover, there is a risk that community sponsorship may be employed as a ‘fig leaf’ to divert from restrictions on access to asylum. For example, the introduction of a small-scale community sponsorship pilot by a particular state cannot meaningfully contribute to solutions for refugees when the national government is simultaneously preventing access to territory and/or national asylum procedures for spontaneous arrivals.

Second, and related, locally led efforts towards community sponsorship under the auspices of instruments like the Compact can lead to the ‘decoupling’ of local policies from national approaches in the field of migration governance.Footnote ¹⁰³ The engagement of cities, municipalities and regional governments with the Compact establishes transnational feedback loops between local authorities and UN processes and entities. Indeed, such transnational networks are already emerging, through UNHCR’s granting of the regional Nansen award to the Humanitarian Corridors initiative and the use of the Compacts’ ‘good practices’ portal by local authorities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While I am not confident we will see what Sabchev and Baumgärtel label a ‘paradigm shift in migration governance’ through locally led community sponsorship,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ the connecting of local governments with transnational and international actors, such as the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative and UNHCR, increases the prospects of the emergence of a principled approach to the community sponsorship of refugees.

Third, the role of local authorities in driving the principled development of community sponsorship is not straightforward. On the one hand, as a locally driven initiative community sponsorship is particularly well suited to leadership from subnational authorities. The track record of some local authorities in proposing, advocating for and implementing community sponsorship schemes indicates the enormous potential for local ownership of this new mode of welcoming refugees. On the other hand, as community sponsorship is inherently concerned with the admission of refugees (either through traditional resettlement pathways or as a standalone complementary pathway), local authorities equally face the reality that national authorities remain the ultimate ‘gatekeeper’ in terms of uptake, durability and scale of community sponsorship schemes.

There may be no elegant solution to this tension in the role of local governments in community sponsorship models. A key factor here is the need for local authorities to be globally engaged, with an eye not only to immediate local outcomes but also the sustainability of community sponsorship as a means to increase refugee protection locally, nationally and internationally.

1 On Municipal Governance: Who Is ‘The City’?

It is high time to collectively dispel the myth that there is a single legal and financial entity, ‘the city’ – one that acts autonomously except when engaging with or being buffeted by ‘higher’ levels of government. City staff and city-level politicians constantly interact with civil society organizations and individuals in their daily work, though the identity of these interlocutors will differ across geographies. (For example, in China, city leaders will be in constant touch with Communist party leaders.) A notable example of this porousness of ‘the city’ is found in the networks of developers, philanthropists and city officials that are common in North American and British urban revitalization efforts. These formal or informal groups that wield leadership in urban affairs include business interests as well as local authorities and link them through ad hoc, evolving relationships. Other civil society interests besides the influential businessmen that have traditionally dominated urban elites can be and sometimes are very visible, to the point that in some instances, civil society groups become almost part of the city apparatus. Traditionally, homeowners’ associations had great power in United States and English Canadian cities. In recent years, however, African-American interests have emerged as occasional but important interlocutors for American city governments.

Other civil society groups have managed to become important actors in urban governance in many places, including advocates for migrants and refugees and organizations representing wage workers, women and/or ‘special’ groups, such as India’s urban ‘pavement dwellers’. These and other types of civil society groups have in many urban contexts become quite central to the decision-making process, at least some of the time. Some Canadian municipalities, for instance, have taken it upon themselves to seriously consult with Indigenous organizations, usually representing nearby Indigenous communities, on issues such as infrastructure and public health projects.Footnote ¹ Depending on the depth and sincerity of the ‘consultations’, repeated interactions can bring Indigenous leaders and entities, formerly rarely visible at the local municipal level, into decision-making circles. In New Zealand, and parts of Australia, Indigenous leaders and organizations have also sometimes managed to gain visibility in the networks that govern urban spaces and urban issues, although as in the case of Canada, their influence is usually greater in non-urban areas. Cities elsewhere similarly feature locally specific networks in which the municipality, usually represented by paid staff, interacts with and is, to some extent, influenced by civil society interests.

Urban governance is thus one thing; the formal municipal apparatus is another. The two can be coterminous, when city officials act on their own; but it is not unusual for a formal city decision to be motivated by a complex chain of behind-the-scenes negotiations with particular civil society organizations or with select corporate firms. How urban governance is produced in practice requires close empirical study of ‘the city’, which may have to extend well beyond the activities of officials on city salaries. Furthermore, while many critical urban scholars, especially in the UK and the United States, have for decades now focused on the role played by business corporations in urban decision-making, in recent decades many cities have become somewhat more democratic and more responsive to a variety of civil society entities and interests, as mentioned previously in the case of African-American groups in US cities and Indigenous interests in Canadian city governance. Close attention not only to financial flows and business interests but also to countervailing forces ‘from below’ will be needed as scholars document city decision-making in different settings.

2 Is ‘The City’ a Scale of Governance? Jurisdiction vs Scale

In both legal studies and political science, it is traditional to claim that there are four scales of law: the international, the national, the subnational (the state/province or the ‘region’), and the municipal. Socio-legal scholar Boaventura Santos developed his influential notion of ‘interlegality’ in 1987 based on the assumed existence of separate scales of government and law, although his interest was not in the abstract Russian-doll model but in how the different scales interact (hence his term ‘interlegality’, which is to legal studies what ‘intertextuality’ is to literary studies). However, recent thinking about ‘jurisdiction’ (within legal studies, work by Annelise Riles and Shaun McVeigh, for instance) has complicated this picture. It turns out that when one pays attention to what are often dismissed as ‘legal technicalities’, scale and jurisdiction often coincide: but not always. Furthermore, as Rhadika Mongia’s contribution to this book shows, and as Indigenous scholars all over have pointed out, imperial relations and habits of governing persist into our present, well after empires have been officially dismantled. There is thus an imperial scale of governance, and even of formal law, in many places today, from Latin America and North America to Africa and Asia.

Jurisdictions are often functional rather than spatial. We see this in this book’s premise, namely that within the boundaries of cities there are matters – such as immigration – that are not within municipal jurisdiction. Geography is thus not much of a help in determining jurisdiction. Furthermore, jurisdiction over a certain geographic area (say the legal boundaries of a city) does not mean that every regulation applies to/governs that whole space. A city ordinance regulating parks, for example, is obviously an exercise of municipal jurisdiction: but its scale is not that of ‘the city’, but rather that of special spaces within ‘the city’ that have particular functions and uses. Hence, the governance of issues and problems that are located in urban settings requires an understanding of the complexities, in that instance, of both scale and jurisdiction.

This brings us to the question of whether official cities, cities as sites of norm-making and regulation, have a distinct way of operating: that is, one that is different from that associated with national states, which often (though not always) utilize a certain top-down gaze – ‘seeing like a state’, in James Scott’s influential formulation. I have argued elsewhere that cities do in fact often manage problems in a pragmatic and contextual fashion rather than imposing strict criminal-law style rules; but in some areas, such as public health, cities often ‘see like a state’ rather than ‘seeing like a city’.Footnote ² Thus, when I refer to ‘seeing like a city’, I do not mean to create a binary opposition between a Jane-Jacobs style of local informality on the one hand and the disciplinary gaze of national-level law and national-level actors on the other. Instead, I draw attention to the persistence, particularly notable in municipal contexts, of premodern forms of knowledge and power (such as the embodied and after-the-fact logic of nuisance law and nuisance-style regulations), and the ability of premodern knowledges/powers to coexist with modernist techniques of governance. But premodern knowledges and powers and governing styles are certainly found at all other levels of law and governance as well, though there they may be more heavily disguised under the rhetorics of legality and prevention.

In addition, within legal geography and within socio-legal studies generally, there is a tendency to privilege cities and urban affairs and to see those as paradigmatic of local governance as such. The conflation of ‘the local’ and ‘the urban’ is highly problematic, however, theoretically and empirically. Migrants who cross rural municipalities or eventually settle in them become a local ‘issue’, and if large cities are generally more attractive to migrants and sometimes promote progressive policies such as ‘sanctuary cities’, it would be quite dangerous for scholars as well as activists to assume that pro-migrant activism and legal reform can only be promoted within cities. In Canada today, a good number of privately sponsored refugees are settling in small towns and even in rural areas, due to the emergence of private citizen groups interested in sponsoring migrants (and helped by the far lower price of housing in rural areas). In general, it is true that migrants tend to be attracted to cities; but the local governance of migration and of refugees cannot be assumed to be coterminous with the urban governance of migration.

Indeed, if the rise of ‘cities of refuge’ is currently an important topic and a theme, for scholarship and for activism and legal reform, ‘municipalities of refuge’ as a broader movement that would include small towns and villages may also have a future.

We see a concrete example of the unpredictability of the knowledge/power assemblages that produce and govern the urban when city councils declare that their city is a ‘refuge’ or ‘sanctuary’ for migrants. When they do so, as several contributions in this book point out, they run into difficulties, and their legal texts often lack political clarity and legal certainty. Cities have no role in formal immigration policy. And yet, the sanctuary/refuge movement can be more than merely symbolic, as Hudson and other contributors point out. Sometimes such a declaration is essentially a political resistance statement aimed at conservative anti-immigrant higher levels of government, one that has little effectivity on the ground. But the declarations, if accompanied by actual changes in bureaucratic processes, can shape the lived experience of migration for many for the better.

I saw this personally in 2016, when accompanying a Syrian refugee family to the Toronto Public Library very soon after their arrival in Canada. The public library follows the city’s sanctuary policy and even exceeds it: they are remarkably flexible with ID requirement. The Syrian children were provided with cards – and hence the beginning of a new urban identity – without any need to show legal immigration status (though they did have that).

While many suburban and rural municipalities have also acted to receive and welcome new immigrants, especially refugees, there is no doubt that cities are the primary site for on-the-ground struggles around migration. In my experience of Toronto (where I have lived as a first-generation migrant for over 40 years), migrants sometimes say they wanted to come to Canada (especially refugees fleeing from war or persecution), but in most cases, migrants state that they wanted to go to Vancouver or Montreal or Toronto. However and wherever they arrive, once within the borders they tend to congregate not only in certain cities but in certain neighbourhoods, in Toronto forming a ‘little India’, a Korea Town, and some 15 km away but still in the same city, a Little Mogadishu, among many other ‘ethnic enclaves’.

In general, immigration experiences are clearly shaped by local structures and local policies and local norms as well as national policies and personnel. And as several chapters in the book show, Canada is perhaps a good place to highlight the cross-jurisdictional character of state policies in regard to migrants. Unlike in many European countries, where state officials perform the state’s work to a much greater extent, the actual work of what is called ‘settlement’ (meaning immigrant reception and associated services) is in Canada to a large extent devolved on assemblages characterized by great legal and financial complexity.

Community agencies, more often than not staffed by newcomers, often professionals, receive regular grants from the Immigration federal department to deliver services to newcomers. While their activities are often highly regulated by funding systems, nevertheless, they are, in the aggregate, an actor in the network of immigration policy. In the 1980s, I volunteered as a translator at the local Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples, then receiving many refugees from Central America. Translation was not a routine part of ‘settlement’ work, so I had to volunteer; but the agency staff were paid through federal ‘settlement’ funding. Importantly, the federal government was not the sole funder. As is the case today, the same agencies in receipt of federal ‘settlement’ money also received philanthropic funding from the local United Way, which required a great deal of grant writing and auditing. They also obtained special funding, often grant-based rather than permanent, from other levels of government (e.g. provincial job retraining programs.)

In my experience, few immigrants understood just how services were being provided and by whom; indeed, they did not care, for good reasons. For that matter, the Canadian-born lawyers who provided immigration law services also did not appreciate the incredible complexity of the ‘immigrant settlement’ assemblage. But readers of this book might like to know that a key service for migrants, English as a second language classes, was and still is provided in part by the federal government, free of charge, and for several years; but very similar classes are provided by voluntary-sector agencies and religious organizations, and not federally funded, at least not on a permanent basis. In other words, the actual reception of migrants and refugees in a country that has long seen itself as a nation of immigrants (and where half of the largest city’s inhabitants were born in another country) is the work of multi-jurisdictional assemblages of considerable complexity.

These are vulnerable assemblages, since an unpredictable event such as a decrease in philanthropic donations due to the pandemic can greatly affect an agency that requires for its basic functioning more resources than what the federal immigration department provides. The immigrant-reception assemblage is not even a single thing, since its composition differs from province to province and city to city – even though immigration law is uniform across the country.

These days it is fashionable to talk about ‘multi-level governance’. Insofar as it helps to undermine the antiquated myth of a single sovereign power hovering godlike over every other organized political and social entity, the term is to be welcomed. However, the phrase can also act as one of those shortcuts to thinking that prevent us from seeing what is actually happening.Footnote ³ The term ‘multi-level’ sounds vaguely collaborative; but it only gestures in the direction of organizational complexity. It doesn’t describe anything in particular, and it could hinder us from investigating how exactly powers and resources are allocated among the ‘levels’ and discovering which actors wield what kind of power over which other actors. (For instance, I have long heard from people who work in community agencies that the philanthropic giant the United Way exercises much more surveillance over organizations than government funders; this could well be true, in which case the formal organizational chart picture of ‘multi-level governance’ would be misleading.)

Is the field of migration/immigration governance particularly complex? Are the examples in this book of city actors doing things they may not be legally empowered to do totally unusual? I have not studied migration empirically, but I have studied many other aspects of urban governance. And on that basis, I do not think that immigration is an unusually complicated subject. The inherent complexity of the multi-jurisdictional assemblage that is present in the most mundane activity of a community centre serving immigrants is also found in other fields of urban or municipal governance. Studying infrastructure governance, for instance, I have discovered very complex arrangements that are seldom made visible to the taxpaying public – arrangements whose dynamics and effects are concealed rather than revealed by the constant use of the vague phrase ‘partnerships’.

In general, in many countries and cities today, the actual work of the elusive network of entities that some still call ‘the state’ is not neatly organized and divided up ahead of time by scale, or indeed by jurisdiction. State resources, state personnel, and state rules and policies are mixed, in practice, with the resources, competences, personnel, and norms and policies of an unpredictable range of organizations.

3 Analysing Governance Networks Dynamically

The neat organizational diagrams featuring boxes linked by arrows routinely found in both official documents and scholarly papers are necessarily misleading. Why? Because political and governance realities are always in motion, with the various actors always doing something, or trying to do something, whether by allying with other actors or by other means. Static models found in official ‘org charts’ or produced by order-seeking scholars necessarily fail to capture how things work. In the real world, a federal agency may well be responsible for a certain service; but the specific path by which the service is delivered may change, with the change in ‘delivery’ greatly affecting the experiences of the people in question. Similarly, a city council may be thought of as a mini-sovereign, at least over matters not already claimed by higher levels of government. But that may not be true. The Toronto Public Library mentioned previously in relation to Syrian refugees in Toronto has its own board; because the board is largely progressive the Library implemented a migrant-friendly policy regarding the ID required to get a library card. But as an arms-length agency of the city, their board could have decided to create new bureaucratic obstacles frustrating the city’s official ‘sanctuary’ declaration. Indeed, the Toronto police force, also governed by an arms-length appointed police services board rather than directly by city council, has refused to follow the city’s sanctuary policy – with dire consequences for those hapless residents who, finding themselves in contact with police, even as victims of crime, may end up being deported as the police officer decides to call a buddy who works in immigration enforcement. So much for the sanctuary city, then. Or indeed, so much for ‘the city’.

Generally, decisions classed as merely administrative, such as the choice to contract out work previously done by civil servants, could have more significant effect on people than a change in the law. What ‘the state’ amounts to in real life depends more on administration than on law, it could be argued. For example, Canada has contracted out consular services in some countries, and this has greatly affected the people needing visas; but it will obviously also have a major impact on the lives and careers of the civil servants who are now out of a job or are moved elsewhere – thus shaping their experiences of ‘the Canadian state’.

Static models of jurisdiction make for tidy charts – but these charts are not just simplifications: they are in many cases highly misleading and to that extent they are bad simplifications. Especially in countries where constitutions are difficult to amend and/or countries where legislatures are unlikely to ensure that the formal legal apparatus is up to date with social and economic and technical developments, the formal allocation of legal powers or competences may bear very little resemblance to the practical realities of governance. In the case of ‘cities of refuge’, whether cities have a formal legal role in immigration policy or not, it is quite possible that many cities are not reduced to simple acts of political resistance, such as ‘sanctuary city’ declarations. It is likewise possible that certain officials or the mayors of some big cities are consulted and their advice is taken, quite outside of formal law.

Governance is always dynamic and interactive, and hence unpredictable. For example, some ‘city of refuge’ declarations may have been prompted not only by a xenophobic national government but also by other events, such as the actions of certain rogue law enforcement bodies. To study cities of refuge, the text of a city council resolution is not always the best place to start. Like all political statements and laws, and indeed like all human speech acts, any text that matters is always a response to something else, to another statement or to an action that one either likes or dislikes, approves or disapproves.

It is thus no surprise to find that the ever-shifting, largely contingent reality of immigrant and refugee policy greatly differs across cities and regions that are in theory governed by the same national laws. Law in action, as American legal thinker Roscoe Pound said a century ago, is different from law in the books. And law in action has to be studied dynamically, looking at how policy evolves, what paths were not taken, how compromises are negotiated or not negotiated – while attempting to document who are the actual decision-makers, as well as who is considered a legitimate interlocutor for the state and who is considered a mere gadfly to be shooed away or ignored.

As Nietzsche pointed out over a century ago, human thinking gravitates naturally to static abstractions. People are happy to repeatedly ask questions about abstractions, questions for which the human intellect can never provide answers (‘what is the meaning of life?’ or ‘do humans have a free will?’).

Similarly, typologies of states or typologies of migration regimes are of limited use to those interested in understanding how migration and migrants are governed, and understanding whether what is observed is a purely temporary phenomenon due to unexpected circumstances or whether it is rooted in long-term governance habits. The Canadian system of ‘private refugee sponsorship’, for example, heavily used to bring Syrian families such as the one I accompanied to the public library, is rooted in a very long history of state funds provided to the mainly religiously based organizations that from the earliest days of white settlement provided health care and social services (such as orphanages and homes for the aged). Currently, there are efforts to export what is known as ‘the Canadian model’ to other countries; but if these efforts are mere attempts at ‘policy transfer’, they are unlikely to succeed (see Nik Tan’s chapter).

The ‘cities of refuge’ theme thus draws attention to a situation that is not as unusual as some would have it. During the pandemic, there have been many examples of entities, public and private, taking on new tasks for which they did not necessarily have formal legal authority. How governance works on the ground – including the governance of migration and refugee flows – cannot be deduced from some chart about formal legal powers; it needs to be studied concretely. As practitioners well know, one can look at this or that city and label a project as ‘best practices’; but whether the underlying conditions that made the practice possible in the first place are ones that exist elsewhere or can be replicated is a difficult question.

4 Spacetimes of Migration and Migrant Reception

In a recent book, Chronotopes of Law, I argued that social and legal scholars engaged in empirical studies of governance might benefit from choosing as their object of study not an institution but rather a network or assemblage, and analysing its spatiotemporal dynamics. For example, instead of focusing on the US–Mexico border, one might inquire into a particular event or series of related spatiotemporally specific events – such as vigilante actions by US citizens who try to make physical entry into the United States more difficult or dangerous as well as the parallel actions of benevolent pro-immigration activists who try to make that same entry easier, physically and legally. Including both would-be excluders and would-be includers in the same study would be illuminating, since implicitly or explicitly they are engaged in battle against each other. However, delimited, though, each network or assemblage of migration, enforcement, benevolence, legality, illegality, and resistance is both enabled and limited by a particular spatiotemporal scale (or more than one).

The vigilantes and their benevolent opponents likely all do their actual day-to-day work at same highly local spatial scale (a small part of the US–Mexico border); but their connections and supporters around the country and perhaps around the world are arguably also important, and so the larger scale of national and/or global politics cannot be ignored, even though one might have to rely on other people’s research to fill that in. One might also include in one’s study the ‘push’ factors, in Central America or Mexico, that drive particular groups towards the US border – even if that part of the network cannot be documented in the same detail.

Clearly, different processes converge at any of the points one might choose as the site of one’s study, and it is impossible to study all of them personally: but the best studies are those that show at least an awareness of the lines of force and influence that extend well beyond one’s research site.

5 Conclusion: Method, Not Theory

How would a greater awareness of jurisdiction, scale and spatiotemporal dynamics work, in practice? It may be that apparently opposite chronotopes or spatiotemporal scales can be documented as operating at the same time in the same place. In that case, paying attention to spatiotemporal dynamics might shed some new light on old tensions and conflicts. Continuing with the hypothetical example of the US–Mexico border, immigration enforcement agents, within the state or in vigilante groups, necessarily rely on sovereignty tropes – the integrity of ‘America’ construed as both a mystical body of citizens and as a destiny-filled special geographical space. But that transcendental spacetime is physically acting upon the actual, all too vulnerable bodies of the specific migrants being policed, or helped as the case might be.

In the language of my book Chronotopes of Law, we could say that the regulation of so-called illegal migrants at the US–Mexico border is likely to both rely upon and reproduce two different spatiotemporalities at the same time: that of the individual, mainly physical ‘body of the condemned’ (pace Foucault), with its vulnerability to pain, on the one hand, and on the other hand the spacetime of the sovereign state, which especially in the case of the United States has acquired not only a sacred spatiality (as ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’) but also an almost timeless quality, visible in the constant popular appeals to a constitution that is supposed to be eternal (as when Republican politicians refuse gun control measures because ‘the Second Amendment is sacred’, as if that text had a clear meaning and as if that text were more sacred than people’s lives.) The spatiotemporality of the United States as a nation-state has managed to acquire the semi-divine spatiotemporality of medieval kings; the sacralization even in popular speech of a certain view of what ‘the constitution’ says is part of that. But in the case of the Mexican or Salvadorean migrant in the act of walking through the desert or swimming across the Rio Grande, the mystical and almost placeless spacetime of American sovereignty bears down hard on a spacetime of almost opposite characteristics: the embodied spacetime of this breathing body, right now.

Those whose interest is piqued by the fashionable term ‘multi-level governance’ could thus consider including the spatiotemporal dynamics of relevant assemblages in their analytical framework, including the assemblage that is the body of the actual migrant, often left out in legally oriented studies of migration. Furthermore, it needs to be remembered that the spatiotemporality of particular legal tools or particular governance assemblages cannot be deduced from their location in the formal apparatus of law; understanding spatiotemporalities concretely requires an appreciation of the history and the social context.

It is conventional to end academic discourses by calling for more theory or claiming that such and such a phenomenon is ‘undertheorized’. I beg to differ. In my view, conversations amongst researchers, activists and policy analysts may instead benefit from exploring the rich array of methodological tools offered by today’s social science, including scale, jurisdiction and spatiotemporal analysis.