Sanctuary Policies and the Influence of Local Demographics and Partisanship
Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien (San Diego State University), Loren Collingwood (University of New Mexico), Michael Ahn Paarlberg (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Today we understand immigration to be a highly polarizing and partisan issue, but it was not always this way. At many times throughout the history of the United States, immigration was a political non-issue, particularly at the local level. When it has arisen as a matter of public debate, partisan cleavages around the issue were far from clearly defined. Both parties have traditionally been torn on the issue of migration, with Republicans divided between their nationalist wing and business wing seeking new low-wage labor, and Democrats between immigrant constituencies and unions which were, until the 1990s, often nativist.
Yet immigration has undeniably become a hot button issue today, as well as a highly partisan one. Though immigration is the legal purview of the federal government, governors and mayors, state legislatures and city councils have increasingly sought to weigh in on the issue, branding their localities as either immigrant friendly or tough on border security – including places far from any national border.
Sanctuary cities have become a flashpoint of this highly partisan culture war. But like immigration itself, they were not always high profile. Sanctuary cities today describe localities that restrict the cooperation of local officials – particularly police – with federal immigration enforcement. This is meant to reassure immigrant communities, including those who are undocumented, that they can engage with local authorities without fear of deportation. Yet the original self-designated sanctuary city, Berkeley, California, did not originally protect undocumented immigrants, but rather resistors to the Vietnam War draft. Only in the 1980s, when the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala sent many Central Americans fleeing to the U.S., did Berkeley and other cities refocus sanctuary policies to protect those refugees. It was not a purely humanitarian concern: The Reagan administration was an active participant in those wars, sending weapons and training government forces battling rebels, and became enmeshed in extensive human rights abuses. Sanctuary policies allowed liberal cities to showcase their opposition to the Reagan administration and to weigh in on another issue area outside of their purview, U.S. foreign policy.
A neighboring city, Oakland, California, took a different approach. It too, passed a sanctuary law. But its justification was different: rather than emphasize its opposition to U.S. involvement in Central America, it emphasized law enforcement as its reason to protect undocumented immigrants. Compared to Berkeley, Oakland’s immigrant population was much larger: one-fifth of its total population. For Oakland, the decision was more practical than partisan: if it wanted its police to solve crimes, it needed the cooperation of all of its residents, including those who might otherwise not wish to speak to police due to their, or a friend or family member’s immigration status.
Berkeley and Oakland embody the two factors that led to the growth of sanctuary cities in the US, which exploded under the Trump presidency to nearly 300. For many, such as liberal college towns with relatively small immigrant populations, sanctuary laws are a question of partisan signaling: demonstrating to voters – mostly non-immigrants – that their politicians embrace liberal values broadly. For others, cities with large and growing immigrant populations, they are practical measures to serve their new constituents, who may belong to mixed-immigration-status families. To restrictionists, including those in the Trump administration, they are flouting the law. Yet local government coordination with, or resistance to, federal government actions has been an open question on many issues, not only immigration.
What, then, makes a city become a sanctuary? Is it partisan signaling, or servicing constituents? In other words, are more sanctuary cities like Berkeley or like Oakland?
We sought to find the underlying causes of cities adopting sanctuary policies. To test this, we created a novel time series cross section (TSCS, or panel) dataset of all census-designated places (cities and municipalities) in the U.S. Sanctuary policies also exist and have been studied at the state and county level, but cities are where most sanctuary policies are passed. We coded for sanctuary status by city and year between 2000 and 2018 inclusive, creating a total of 472,970 observations. Using a Cox hazard model, we tested for the probability of “failure” (i.e. adopting sanctuary status) for each city-year. To test our hypotheses that cities went sanctuary for 1) partisan reasons, 2) demographic reasons, or 3) both, we used as our key covariates the Democratic vote share most recent presidential election, and the percent foreign born population, and interacted the two. We further controlled for median income, unemployment rate, educational attainment, percent homeownership, and median rent, all of which have proven to correlate with immigration policies at the county level.
Our findings show that for most sanctuary cities, partisanship is a more decisive motivating factor. Comparing the 295 cities in our database that went sanctuary at least one year between 2000 and 2018 to those that did not, it can be seen that leaning Democrat is a stronger predictor for going sanctuary than having a large immigrant population. This is not to say that demographics don’t matter: cities that are Democrat-leaning and also have a large immigration population are especially likely to adopt sanctuary policies. But absent either of the two factors, a Republican-leaning city with a large immigrant population is less likely to become a sanctuary than a Democratic-leaning city without one.
Thus, to borrow some political discourse cliches, demographics is not destiny, and partisanship is a hell of a drug. Sanctuary policies may indeed help protect immigrant populations, and studies indicate that they do indeed encourage cooperation with law enforcement. But in the modern era of deep polarization and the localization of national politics, sanctuary policies play a more useful role for city politicians as a signal of liberal bona fides. The benefits to immigrants are, in many ways, a knock-on effect.
Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University. He is the author of Handcuffs and Chain Link: Criminalizing the Undocumented in America (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2018) and Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Loren Collingwood is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge (2019) and Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America: When and How Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization Works (2019) both with Oxford University Press.
Michael Ahn Paarlberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work on diaspora politics, transnational migration and crime has been published in Comparative Politics, Comparative Migration Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and other journals and edited volumes. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration at the University of Pennsylvania.