The Long-View History of Sanctuary Cities

When the Trump administration started seizing and deporting undocumented immigrants, many American cities responded by declaring themselves to be so-called sanctuary cities. Sanctuary cities protect undocumented immigrants by refusing to cooperate with federal immigration officials. Often, that means releasing a jailed undocumented immigrant before the federal government can secure a warrant to begin deportation proceedings.

Many historians claim that sanctuary cities have their roots in the sanctuary church movement of the 1980s. But a recent article in Politics & Society challenges that claim. The author of the article, J. Matthew Hoye, suggests instead that sanctuary cities are rooted in a republican (with a small r) tradition that goes all the way back to the colonial era of the early 1700s.

Hoye, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Free University of Amsterdam, explains it this way. In Britain, the king and Parliament always had trouble exerting their will on the American colonies—after all, the colonies were well over 3,000 miles away, and modern communication systems had yet to be invented. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the colonies had become so politically autonomous that the mother country began seeing them as a threat to its power. This included the power of Britain to decide who emigrated to the colonies and which immigrants would be granted the "rights of Englishmen." 

Such power grated more and more on colonial governors, who were eager to increase their populations—even if it meant circumventing or changing the law. Hence, the colonies began developing theories with which to claim autonomy over their handling of immigrants. Hoye classifies those theories as republican because they asserted the right to be free from social and political domination. Such republicanism, Hoye points out, is present our founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

By taking a 400-year view, Hoye reveals what he says is truly at stake in today's debates over sanctuary cities: freedom for citizens as well as aliens from the unrestrained power of the federal government. He acknowledges that his focus on republicanism is not without controversy: republicanism is often associated with settler colonialism, genocide, and racism. 

But there is another side of republicanism that is relevant to his interpretation of sanctuary cities, and that is the "radical Enlightenment" tradition of people like Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man. The radical Enlightenment "encompasses a cluster of ideas grounded in principles of reason, toleration, equality, universal rights, and the common good." It is that side of republicanism in which one can find the theoretical and historical underpinnings of today's sanctuary cities.