‘SANCTUARY FOR ALL’ OR ‘SANCTUARY FOR THE DESERVING’: How Municipal Bureaucracies Mediate and Decide Contentious Struggles over Urban Citizenship

Walter Nicholls

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2024, vol. 48, issue 5, 743-763

Abstract: During the late 2010s, pro‐immigrant activists in the politically progressive municipality of Mayville, California (pseudonym) mounted a campaign to enact a radically egalitarian sanctuary city policy (“sanctuary for all”) that would have changed the boundaries of urban citizenship. The campaign crafted compelling and resonant mobilization frames, constructed a broad and diverse coalition, won the support of large majorities of the public, and targeted elected officials who were all supportive of the rights of immigrant residents. Such conditions, according to literature on immigration politics and urban citizenship, should have resulted in success, but this was not entirely the case. Elected officials did open the policymaking process in response to pressure from activists, but a far‐reaching policy never emerged. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article develops the concept of the ‘bureaucratic field’ to explain how the distinctive and relatively autonomous power dynamics of a municipality shapes policy outcomes (despite advantages in the political field). The article concludes that without a robust theory of the bureaucratic field, contemporary theorists of social movements and urban citizenship cannot explain the disparity between highly advantageous conditions in progressive political fields and the paucity of transformative policy outcomes.

Date: 2024
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