Book Review: Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship, and Urban Governance

Guest post by Adaiah Hudgins-Lopez. Adaiah is a writer, dancer, creative, and PhD Social Anthropology candidate at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She is a 2021 and 2022 Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her writing and creative work centres Afrofuturist musings, narratives of migration, and explorations of community and movement building. Adaiah’s doctoral research explores how and why the Latine community living at the Detroit-Windsor international border creates politically distinct space-times that contest their erasure from Detroit’s future. 

Review of: Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship, and Urban Governance by Rachel Humphris (Stanford University Press, 2025).

In Making Sanctuary Cities (2025), Humphris sets up a “comparative policy ethnography” that explores how sanctuary city policy unfolds in San Francisco, USA; Sheffield, UK; and Toronto, Canada. Throughout this ethnography, Humphris demonstrates that “the sanctuary city policy is a set of contested narratives”. This is continuously illustrated through explorations of the variation in the meaning of sanctuary city in each city, and how this is negotiated between people, within organizations, and between organizations and government entities within a city. Humphris argues the importance of understanding sanctuary cities lies in the fact they can speak to how we attribute value and build community within urban spaces. This book also contributes further insight into how cities regard racialised communities and those with precarious immigration status; how economic concerns shape how cities respond to and support those with precarious immigration status; and, how the scapegoating of racialised migrants within cities contributes to how cities govern and shape the relationship between people, territory, and wealth. 

This book fundamentally shifts anthropological accounts of sanctuary by placing the sanctuary city as policy negotiated in the urban. The sanctuary city requires contextualisation within the unique historical specificity of who could enter, remain, or be removed from each city where it is implemented today. The unique way each city established its right to governance over residents, in consistent struggle with the sovereign control of the state, now determines how immigration enforcement occurs —particularly at the intersection of the implementation of welfare and the possession of citizenship. Humphris employs the term “hierarchies of enforcement” to acknowledge the myriad manifestations of sanctuary practices within bureaucracy and community-organizing in the three cities. Given the international reach of sanctuary, and its evolution and attachment to the urban, this is a necessary intervention in how scholars of urban migration can understand relations emerging in cities via policy. 

Moreover, Humphris reframes the sanctuary city as emergent within the negotiations of relations during the navigation of policy, moving beyond conceptions of sanctuary as inherent legal right. Instead, Humphris proposes “emerging moral values” to characterise how sanctuary city policy takes form and shifts in the affective, moral negotiations between interlocutors about their duties to and principles around the support of “precaritised” residents. Examining ethnographic instances from each city, Humphris identifies the ‘efficient city’, the ‘healthy city’ and the ‘just city’ as shared emerging moral values that commonly shape the practice of sanctuary city as policy. Further, Humphris illustrates how “the potential of the sanctuary city for providing political contestation and alternative forms of solidarity” can be eclipsed through the practical, palatable attempts to broker relations of power and governance between cities and the state. This ethnography demonstrates “sanctuary is not a status that can be achieved but is in a constant state of becoming”. 

Finally, this text offers a new methodological approach, “comparative policy ethnography”, which centres “sanctuary city” as policy and as the ethnographic object, which is excavated through in depth archival and policy research blended with ethnographic tools like interviews, participant observation, surveys and more. Moreover, Humphris’ approach grounds this study in each particular city by accounting for a variety of actors involved in as many levels of related local governance as possible—yielding a convincing, holistic view of what sanctuary city policy is as it lives in legislation, how it has evolved, and what it can be in practice.  

This ethnographic approach does not yield grounded, embedded ethnographic examples of how sanctuary city policy shapes the lives of those it seeks to govern: precaritised migrants. This “comparative policy ethnography” prioritises a middle-up study of the state, while not addressing the limitations of multi-sited, “patchwork” ethnography discussed by Falzon and Günel and others. Studying this policy across multiple cities, multiple levels of governance and community sector work, thousands of policy documents and legislation, across multiple years requires a researcher to prioritise the clear synthesis of a potentially elusive, shifting phenomenon. This leaves little space to capture that same elusive topic by witnessing its impact in the lives of people in embodied and sensory ways over an extended period of time. Prioritising the voices of migrants and how they experience sanctuary city policy would acknowledge the non-legal “citizenship” normally addressed in narratives of immigration policy, which acknowledge agentive activity and potential within migrant communities (see the work of Lazar & Nuijten). Just as Humphris shows sanctuary city policy as emergent in bureaucratic and community-organizing relations, immigration policy is emergent through contestation occurring in the ‘everyday’ in migrant communities (see the work of Angela Garcia, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, and William Lopez). It would have been fascinating to see how differently this manifested in San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto. 

Humphris’ argument does maintain a fixed eye on the way capitalism operates at a global scale to create the need for migrants and the need to migrate. Capitalism also appears in sanctuary city policy implementation negotiations between city governance and national immigration enforcement, where financial autonomy determines the balance of cooperation between city and the state. Precaritised residents, particularly migrants, are caught in the middle. Humphris writes brilliantly about the complex way that government entities, local nonprofit service providers, and activists come together to impact the lives of migrants. How, in the tousle for funds and clarity of power, certain commitments become lost or sanitised without addressing the needs of the migrant community. This ethnography is, therefore, also an ethnography of how some individuals contest “everyday bordering” by the state, similarly explored by Yuval-Davis and others.  

Further, the multi-sited nature of the ethnography forces one to consider how physical borders do and do not factor into the shared, global experiences of migrants in relation to policy, especially ubiquitous policies like the sanctuary city. Humphris’ focus on the sanctuary city necessitates an attention to the purposeful, political dissolving of borders (between nations, the city and the nation, and cultures in a shared community) that allows this policy to be employed for the benefit of racialised, low-income, migrant communities.