The Politics and Experience of Sanctuary Cities
In this four-part miniseries, we spoke with six scholars whose research addresses different aspects, geographies, and approaches to analyzing and understanding the relationship between migration and urban politics and culture. In this episode, we take a multidisciplinary look at the sanctuary city with political scientist David Kaufmann and historian Domenic Vitiello, and examine the fraught concept of climate migration with Andrew Baldwin.
We could have created an entire show focused on this topic! But instead, we’re taking a wide-angled and ecumenical approach to general topics in urban studies. We hope to expose scholars, students, and practitioners of urban studies to diverse research methods and approaches to these themes. Each episode will be accompanied by a suggested reading list based on our discussions, and we welcome suggestions for future guests and topics!
Guests
Andrew Baldwin, Durham University
Deirdre Conlon, University of Leeds
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Yale University
Nancy Hiemstra, Stony Brook University (SUNY)
David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich
Domenic Vitiello, University of Pennsylvania
Reading List
Andrew Baldwin. 2022. The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism. Rowman and Littlefield.
Andrew Baldwin and Bruce Erickson. 2020. Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 3-11.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe (guest editors). 2019. Anthropocene mobilities. Mobilities 14(3), special issue.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe. 2019. From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: shifting the debate. Mobilities 14(3): 289-297.
Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini. 2017. Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration. Critique.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. How subcontracting key services leads to the entrenchment of urban immigration detention in many us communities. American Politics and Policy Blog.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. ‘Unpleasant’but ‘helpful’: Immigration detention and urban entanglements in New Jersey, USA. Urban Studies 59(11): 2179-2198.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2023. ‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies. The Journal of North African Studies 28(3): 635-665.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen & Zineb Rachdi El Yacoubi. 2022. Externalizing otherness: The racialization of belonging in the Morocco-EU Border. Geoforum.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2020. Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(5): 887-904.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2018. Intimate economies of immigration detention: critical perspectives. Gender, Place & Culture 25(9): 1399-1401.
Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon. 2021. Reading between the (redacted) lines: muddling through absent presences in public information requests on US Immigration detention. ACME 20(6): 666-686.
Nancy Hiemstra. 2019. Detain and Deport: The chaotic US immigration enforcement regime. University of Georgia Press.
David Kaufmann, Nora Räss, Dominique Strebel and Fritz Sager. 2022. Sanctuary Cities in Europe? A Policy Survey of Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants. British Journal of Political Science 52(4):1954–1963.
David Kaufmann and Dominique Strebel. 2021. Urbanizing Migration Policy-Making: Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants in Geneva and Zürich. Urban Studies 58(4): 2991-3008.
David Kaufmann. 2019. Comparing urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations, Public Administration Review 79(3): 443–446.
Domenic Vitiello. 2022. The Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia. Cornell University Press. [open access]
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Domenic Vitiello
If I have a one goal for what they might take away, it’s an appreciation of the complexity and diversity of immigrant and receiving communities’ experiences, because there's so much in our discourse about immigration that totalizes the immigrant experience. Which I think is a completely false and unproductive way to understand how people decide to move across borders, how and why people decide to settle any given place if they are the people given the decision about that even the diversity of people's, you know, ability to choose, and the diversity of immigration statuses in the United States. We have over 80 types of visa status, right? And that's not counting the large share of immigrants who don't have a legal status and I don't think there are any easy answers about immigration policy in the United States or the world, particularly, you know, if we confront honestly right the political challenges and political realities of the United States and other countries.
Emily Holloway
You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast from the journal Urban Affairs Review. That’s Domenic Vitiello, a historian and associate professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the 2022 book, The Sanctuary City. I spoke with Domenic and four other scholars whose research examines the geographic, political, and cultural dynamics of global migration on topics ranging from borders and citizenship to racism and belonging. In this episode, part three of our four-part miniseries on cities and migration, we’ll be discussing some of the more tangible policy and political outcomes and processes of urban migration, including sanctuary cities and the role played by climate change and so-called “climate migration.” I spoke with David Kaufmann, a political scientist and professor at the University of Zurich, about his research pathway into the politics of migration and asylum.
David Kaufmann
The first image that stick to my mind and a bit the story I tell myself and the audience why I'm interested in migration and migration questions and cities as well was I think in 2008 and but also before there were, there were kind of protests and occupations of irregular migrants. So, migrants without the status in the city of Zurich, but also in other cities in Switzerland demanding for more rights and dignity, services to them and so on. They were hosted then by different institutions, also by universities, but also churches. They offered sanctuary and opened their doors for them to protest and occupy the building. And one of the churches in Zurich was close to the library where we studied at the University of Zurich and there, I went into the churches and got a bit informed about that, and then a year afterwards,
during my master's students study I worked part time for refugee support organizations that we helped refugees to handle the asylum process in Switzerland. So, there I got very much interested in asylum, law asylum policies also on the European level. Because it's very important for refugees in Europe, the European laws and after, and then I focused on migration policies in my studies. And so I did political science, but also public policy and worked on migration policies And afterwards I joined for a bit more than half a year The UNHCR, the UN refugee agencies. But then I decided to do a PhD and my PhD was in urban studies and urban policy and towards the end of my PhD and my postdoc project to have a bit of more freedom to choose my research avenue and then I decided to merge a bit urban studies and migration studies and worked on particularly urban questions of migration.
Emily Holloway
Some of your research addresses the phenomenon of sanctuary cities, and specifically how these operate in a European context. Can you explain what they are, maybe in the terms of how they actually operate on the ground?
David Kaufmann
Yes, the concept or the practice, I think it comes from the US a lot. This is just what I read in books and that you have like refugees from Central American countries and churches, but also other houses of prayer from other religions offered sanctuary to them when the US government wanted to deport them. And then these practices that were kind of buildings or institution wide then spread a bit more towards cities and cities also adopted these practices. But I think San Francisco is one of the first one, there’s also dissertation and research about that and in the specific so sanctuary cities. So, we understand now can have two definitions, and the narrower definition is a specific US definition.
So it's a specific product of US, because in US federalism as I understand it, you cannot force a city or municipality to cooperate in a task that is on a federal level or on a higher level of government. And immigration enforcement is that. So cities in this definition are the cities or police department that passed a resolution on ordinance that express that city and law enforcement officials are forbidden and to help the immigration enforcement of the ICE and to collaborate with them. So, it's actually a noncooperation with the immigration enforcement. This doesn't mean that the national, the federal authorities cannot do raids in the city, but the city department and its officials are not helping them out. So, it's a kind of noncompliance noncollaboration. This is kind of more the narrow definition, the more context specific definition of US federalism. Then this term, because it also has kind of a more symbolic term to it that somebody offers sanctuary is also adopted in wider cities that are inclusive towards all migrants and don't distinguish between who has documents or residency stages. And who not to and who specific, very explicitly or implicitly formulate some laws or practices or support programs to support and protect them, and this is a bit more the European definition when sanctuary is used as a term, it's not a specific noncooperation, but it's more kind of this attitude towards not distinguishing between who has a residency status and who doesn't.
Emily Holloway
So how a sanctuary city functions really has a lot to do with the degree of administrative or political autonomy the city or municipal government has relative to other levels, like county, federal, etc?
David Kaufmann
Yes, I mean we see it in a lot of different policy fields. So this is also why in Europe, but I think also for other contexts, also federalist contexts or contexts where also lower levels of government enjoy a lot of autonomy with regard to policy, but also with regard to financial means. So where we have a lot of cities that have substantial financial means and autonomy to do their own, their own type of policies, and there we see this these conflicts, this contestation, and there is where the concept of multi-level governance is very important. And there it looks exactly at these different levels of government how these influence each other. And where there are conflicts, where there are cooperations and not, whereas more that the concept of intergovernmentalism looks more on a top down way in how laws that were decided on the federal level or the European level gets implemented on more lower levels of government whereas multi-level governance can be looked at from top down and bottom up and looks exactly at this contestations. And what we see we see different things and the European level has a very ambiguous role.
Emily Holloway
How uniform are the approaches to sanctuary cities and similar movements in European cities? Do you see a lot of variation? And not only in the types of policies, but also how cities respond to more restrictive or conservative national migration policies?
David Kaufmann
On the one hand they were the ones who set minimum standards for asylum seekers with regard to accommodation, services, housing, welfare and so on, where some national governments didn't provide any standards or any system, so they had more kind of favorable role towards migrants, but on the other hand, especially with regard to border control and access to countries that were rather restrictive, and there is this specific doubling regulation where we don't have to go into detail, but this means that the country of first entry is responsible for the asylum claim. And this is very problematic, obviously, because out of geographical regions you enter in the south or in the east, it would be like in the US, Texas or California would be responsible for most or all the of a lot of asylum seekers. So, it's very problematic. So and this kind of ambiguous role together with and ambiguous policies of national states set kind of the framework in which city act, and sometimes they, for example, they openly contest the doubling regulation and say we are not checking for where you entered and we are sending you and the you can leave also our cities even though when you should stay in, for example, in Milano we looked at that. When they said OK, no, we are not for doubling regulation in this moment of time during the crisis in 2015 with the Syrian refugees, doesn't make any sense, or Barcelona, where they openly contested that and they wanted to help relocate refugees from city to city. And Greek islands and Greek cities to Barcelona, they wanted to install such a program for more city to city solidarity, to openly contest and confront tenants, some of them, Some of these efforts were more successful and others not, but it's also a bit of a symbolic kind of protest against restrictive asylum policy.
So, it's very dynamic. It's not all cities that do the same, but we see a better trend of bigger cities trying to contest this. At least the more exclusive European and national asylum policies.
And yes, we see a bit of variation. And as you kind of describe to it, it's certainly some, some, the city kind of, protest this high-level migration policy, certainly something more in the south of Europe because of more kind of they're more kind of confronted with Really, the presence of migrants and the problems they have, as well as a bit more in the northwestern cities where they have a bit of, where they have money as well, more to act and to do something as well as where they have a liberal progressive ideology. Not saying that other cities don't have that and there is a bit of a pattern, but as you said, it's very context specific. For example, with NGOs we see in a lot of different countries as well present and trying to support the rights of refugees. I try to look also at kind of sanctuary policies in in Europe and there we see a bit is what I just described as well as kind of countries in which cities have more leeway or more autonomy regarding policy, more general, but also regarding their migration framework. For example, Spain has a migration citizenship framework where the where cities should register all migrants, and this is very historically path dependent created and they have way more leeway in migration and citizenship questions. And there we see also a way more active role from this city. So, it's very dependent. We have variation it's not so clear. I also tried to do some statistical analysis, but this don't work out and there is no clear pattern, but to look comparatively at the cities is very interesting, but there is not just a very clear explanation.
Emily Holloway
What are some examples of how cities have fostered sanctuary-like policies to protect migrants? I guess the more precise term I’m looking for here is regularization – could you explain that to listeners a bit, too?
David Kaufmann
So regularization is a process or a framework that migrants without residency permits, they get a regular status and so and this has been done in the 1990s and 2000s by on the national level by a couple of European states, for example, Italy and Spain in the I think in the 2000s, they have certain kind of two or three times where they regularized a lot of irregular migrants. They just gave in to some degree and say, OK, we have so many workers. For example, most in agriculture, they don't have a residence permit here. They are kind of nevertheless here for 10 years, so we just regularized them. They are part of migrants so national states can do this as a kind of exception to their migration policy. So some countries have them in the law as a normal process, if on an individual level where migrants can apply for it so, so-called hardship clauses as well to say OK, I'm here now for 10 years, maybe I have a family. My family is here. My kids go to school and so on. So this hardship clause argument. Also, hardship clause maybe when you need medical treatment and so on. For example, France has such a such a framework or process in mind, so either there's kind of a more general one giving out regular status to almost all without checking, or you have individual based on assessment and hardship clause on the national level in Switzerland because we are so federalist, cantons can do this. Cantons is the state, so the sub national level. They have specific regularization process on the state law. What happened then in Geneva? What is very interesting in case of a regularization program, Geneva is a city, a city state, a city with the rights of a state. So it's a very small state that is more or less the city of Geneva or the Republic of Geneva. What they did then, they said OK, we have a lot of irregular migrants, Geneva hosts a lot of UN institution, they have a lot of domestic workers without a state, just working kind of in in households of diplomats and so on. And they say, OK, we want to have a fast track and a simplified procedure and because they have the autonomy and rights of a state, they could do it way more easily. Other cantons that are not a city and the problem is not so and present to them and they're not as progressive, and they don't want to do that. But Geneva could do that.
So this is a specific kind of subnational type of regularization. Spain has also a more local type of regularization, where everyone who lives in Spain should register in a local registry called Patron Municipal and you don't need a national status to register. You should just register. This makes you eligible for public services. And you can get kind of an identity and when you are three years in the country, you can kind of go through the national regularization process. It's a permanent regularization process and you can use then the patrol municipal to prove your registry to prove that you're already in a country And you're there for three or more years. So there are a couple of regularization programs, mostly there on a national level, without cities or states of any influence, but in some instances… and then it's very interesting for me to research them and cities have some leeway to do to implement them to, to have that discretion, we implement that in favor of irregular migrants, or they can do their own regularization program.
But Geneva did the other thing to have a fast track procedure and they were able to this operation papiers, they were able to regularize around 3000 people, 70% women and kids and through this program. In Zurich wanted to do that because they probably have even more irregular migrants than Geneva. But the Canton of Zurich, so it's a larger Canton with a lot of also rural, more conservative voters. So, they don't want to do that. They say we already have the individual hardship class, it's good enough for us, and then what they are now thinking about doing is an urban ID card.
So, they have now a program to provide them with an urban ID card so that they can better access local services, schools, libraries, contact with, with, with the city and so on. But the big question is about if the police will allow or will accept this urban ID card or not, kind of see that as kind of a proof that they don't have any residency. So this is a bit a big debate, it goes into courts probably at the moment.
So what happens with this provision of urban ID card, but the urban ID card is interesting because it's again, symbolic, but maybe also in a materialistic effort of cities to contest that only the national states can issue ID cards and so on. So it's very interesting how this will play out.
Emily Holloway
Could you share some examples from your research about how this has unfolded in different contexts? There have been a few very qualitatively distinct migration trends across Western Europe over the last decade or so – just thinking here about the vast difference in attitudes towards refugees from Syria versus those from Ukraine.
David Kaufmann
So, this is not something I studied, but colleagues of mine just also at the same institution, just released a large survey about acceptance of how refugees are accepted in different cities and what they found is and what is also kind of clear from the media landscape that people were very, very welcoming of Ukrainian refugees in general. This can be a bit explained, or the researcher explained this by this couple of things, so they were mostly women, so males were not able to leave, and they were rather well educated. They have Christian religions, and they were also more European looking, white looking persons. So, this all played a bit together so as well as kind of the proximity of the conflict being very close to Europe. So, we saw a huge solidarity with that, but interestingly, in the research in the survey research, this is not at the cost of other refugees, so also the acceptance solidarity with other type of refugees was not lower, not at the expense of the Ukrainian refugees.
So, if something refugee solidarity from residents was stable or even increased now over the last couple of years. So, there's just general, a high solidarity in Europe, in Switzerland, and I think in other countries we had suddenly being able to create fast track programs for refugees where they said for other type of refugees or in the Syrian conflict, for example, this is not possible. Suddenly it was possible, so we had also, kind of a political majority for being very inclusive for this Ukrainian refugee. So, we saw that a bit of openness to it and the politics that could move very quickly towards being more inclusive. Cities stepped in. But at this time, It is did not have to step in with such a force as, for example in the Syrian refugee crisis, because the national state frameworks were inclusive, so cities did not have to compensate for exclusive national framework, whereas in the Syrian refugee crisis where we did our research, cities have to compensate for national framework that didn't want to host them, allow them to come and so on. So, we have like a different multi-level governance framework where when the national government framework is inclusive, and cities do not have to kind of compensate for it. But when they are in exclusive and the migrants are anyway there, then cities must be kind of more inclusive and must be at the forefront. In this Ukrainian crisis, cities did not have to be at the forefront of the efforts to accommodate them.
I mean, there's always kind of the bit the question and some say, OK, now tolerance is not so high or long and it's just a short-term thing. But I think there is still a general solidarity in European residents on a very kind of general sense. But then when it's obviously when it's then when then the numbers raise in your country, then then the picture can change rather quick. But I think there is kind of a general solidarity. I think still the numbers are rather high for Ukrainian refugees. But there is still an acceptance of them, so I don't expect a large shift, although some media tried to say this or some political parties tried to push into this direction, that now kind of we had enough of refugees and so on. But I don't think that this is in the general population a huge trend in this regard.
Emily Holloway
Your work also explores how policies are translated, disseminated, and taken up by the public through policy narratives. Can you discuss this a bit further and how it does or doesn’t end up impacting policy design and implementation in Switzerland?
David Kaufmann
Political parties and other political actors in the Swiss landscape use the narrative policy framework is one of policy process theories that sets out that the policies are communicated in a certain way and they have kind of a framework that we also use. And what we found striking over the last 20 years in Switzerland, who has a direct democracy. So, we vote about a lot of different asylum policies, revisions of the policies as well. So that mostly when we vote about that, there is this abuse narrative, abuse policy narrative comes into play. What it says is that a large portions of asylum seekers, or actually, economic migrants coming out of economic region reasons, they are bogus refugee and that they abuse the country's generosity. And because we have too much who are wrong refugees or they abuse the system, we don't have space for the real refugees. So and this can be seen also as a narrative also play a role. For example, in Australia where they have this whole discourse about people should not come to Australia directly. They should not jump the line. And we also saw it in the US to some degree that we say, I mean some actors say we wanted to be generous and protect refugees, but only the real refugees, so they make a line between real and fake refugees where there is not no such line to make or very hard to hold such a line or distinction. And what we see then, so when we talk with all the major political actors there, what kind of framework narrative, what kind of narrative they used in the direct democratic campaigns, and we thought that and the more the right ideology, the political ideology the actors have, or I mean in the US, it would be more the more conservative ideologies. And you have, the more you're using this this narrative, but also more in context where it's or it's about a potential tightening or more restrictive asylum policy. So in this context, political context about more tightening actors or actually use. I think this asylum abuse narrative and they say yes, we make it tighter, but only to also to the protection of the real refugees. And so, this is a very strategic narrative that is being used. And then we looked at after the vote, they are kind of surveys of voters, and where they were asked what your main reason was to vote for yeah, for tightening or not the tightening of asylum policies. And there we saw kind of the abuse policy narrative was kind very much also stated as a reason as one of the top reasons why they voted for more tighter asylum policies and not just for people with a conservative or right political ideology but into the middle of the political spectrum. So, it's very convincing also for people who are not polarized, they're not into the what's the left or to what's right. And this makes it so dangerous because it's kind of a very kind of constructed policy that cannot be uphold by any means of data or evidence. But it's very powerful with voters and it's used in Switzerland over the last 30 years.
Emily Holloway
These kinds of narratives David is describing are extremely pervasive and difficult to detect and change. Domenic Vitiello, who you heard from at the top of the episode, gets at this dilemma in a slightly different way. Domenic, early in your book – which is a kind of historical accounting of how civil society groups and immigrant communities create and practice the sanctuary city – you call out this incredibly prevalent discourse that reduces immigration to economic benefits as its only justification. This is probably the single most common data point, or set of data points, that’s used to legitimize more open immigration policies in the United States – like, look at how many jobs immigrants create in their communities, look at how these communities can revitalize struggling and shrinking cities, and so on. So how do you propose we think about the relationship between migrants and cities instead?
Domenic Vitiello
And it's even hard to frame that question right like without coming back at the end to saying benefits, right? What are the benefits? So let me step back in answering, that I hope this is a useful way for you to answer that by saying that I think in the United States, and to a great extent, other immigrant receiving countries, there have been a variety of narratives, or of frameworks that people have used in scholarly discourse. And you know, some of our core social science disciplines to understand – as well as popularly and in in in policy discussion to understand – the relationships between immigrants or immigration and cities. And some of this is really at the core of urban sociology, and in in the United States and globally but especially the United States, comes out of Chicago School ideas about invasion and succession of newcomer groups in in immigrant enclaves, and only really 2 of those enclaves, you know, remain sort of undissolved as a really two groups in in American season in the early and mid-twentieth century who aren't starting to gain some mobility and dissolve their enclaves and move up and out, if you will, up in in terms of social class and out towards the suburbs. Those two groups are of course, African Americans, and if you're in places like New York, there are also many Black people coming from the Caribbean across the twentieth century. But Chinese people and Chinatowns in particular, right? Until you know, really, after World War II remain highly segregated and aren't dissolving right people aren't you know, able to continue to come, except illegally under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to 1943. And so that's an enclave that's not dissolving, but otherwise, invasion and succession. So is the way that that people understand, especially in sociology, and even still today. That idea remains a powerful even among sociologist on the left, who might be sensitive to the push back, I think, against you know the idea of invasion being so closely associated including an anti-immigrant rhetoric today, right with newcomers generally.
I think in more recent years, much more popularly, the idea of costs and benefits and tallying them has been a popular one for more than a generation among economists and other social scientists. And it's certainly been a major part of I think, both pro- and anti-immigration policy, advocacy, and populism, you know. But you know for many of us in a variety of social sciences and immigration policy, integration is another way that we think of not just of language, acquisition and labor market integration, incorporation and all sorts of other aspects of political and social and cultural integration, but also spatial, integration especially as we talk about housing and neighborhoods. And so, it's another frame, right? So that that social scientists and policy makers use to think about the relationships between migrants and cities. And I'd suggest that in some ways that's a more constructive frame to consider this relationship. And yet it's also fraught with, you know, all sorts of expectations on some people's sides that are really much more assimilationist and demanding of newcomers to in some way give up aspects of their culture, of their identity and heritage.
Emily Holloway
A little earlier in this episode, David Kaufmann gave us a really helpful and accessible working definition for a sanctuary city, at least from the perspective of a political scientist. But Domenic, your book is really approaching the question through a more sociological perspective. And in fact, while I was reading the “Sanctuary City,” which traces the practices of sanctuary through the experiences of six different migrant communities in Philadelphia over the past several decades, I couldn’t help but think of this book as a kind of ethnography of the sanctuary city. Can you talk about how you define or think about sanctuary in this work?
Domenic Vitiello
I use the term, you know, a sanctuary not just to explore what it means in the context of sanctuary movements and sanctuary cities for different communities. But also as something of an analytical framework to think about the relationships between some cities and migrants. But I hope that’s not an overly idealistic way to think, because sanctuary, at least the way I think about it. And I think the way that most people engaged in sanctuary movements think about it, is a term that that really, you know, recognizes an inherent tension and disagreement between national governments and local governments and governments writ large and social movements disagreeing over people's right to be in any given space in a city, in a national territory. And so I find it useful for exploring those tensions and contradictions, and the ways they play out in people's lives and in policy. But I don't, again, see it as in in in any way a utopian sort of vision that some people would like it to be of the relationships between newcomers and cities or places towns.
Emily Holloway
Both David and Domenic have shared a lot of nuance and depth around the concept or idea of the sanctuary city – how it functions as a political mechanism and how it is created and practiced by the community that constitutes it. Domenic’s book examines how various US imperialist interventions in the post war period, from Vietnam to covert operations in Central America, have fostered the connections that push refugees to seek asylum in American cities like Philadelphia. This is one important structural dimension of international migration, and one that often gets obscured by other dynamics that are superficially apolitical – like climate change, for example. I spoke with Andrew Baldwin, professor of geography at Durham University, about how cities get involved in these dynamics around migration, climate change, and politics.
Andrew Baldwin
Yeah, exactly. No, I think you're exactly right about that. My colleague Giovanni Bettini has written extensively around the way that the discourse of climate change and migration operates as a tool of depoliticization and sort of reconfigures questions about development, adaptation, climate change in terms of just, you know, a kind of raw, technocratic, managerial form of thinking, I guess.
Within the wider context of the political discussion about climate change and human migration there has been a kind of a recent turn, if you like, towards the urban, particularly in the context of international climate change policy debates. So, if we go back to the Glasgow COP, I think that was COP 26, was it?
The Mayors’ Migration Council and C40 had launched a campaign to you know, get cities around the world, you know, municipal agencies and so forth thinking about the relationship between climate change and migration and the sort of premise of that policy move was, people who are being forced to leave their homes because of climate change and so forth are coming to cities.
Urban planners need to sort of prepare and manage for that, and that's actually quite a problematic framing, in fact. But this is why I think this genre of thinking and the category of the climate refugee stroke climate migrant is really important for…
Now, why is this a problem? Why is the category of the climate refugee stroke climate migrant a problematic one? Well, largely, at least for me, this comes down to this sort of, the problematic way that climate change is said to relate to migration or displacement very often. And here we start to get into some of the real complexity that is baked into this discourse. But quite often that relationship between climate change and migration is framed in a kind of deterministic language. So climate causes migration or climate forces people to move, climate creates climate refugees, people displaced by climate or climate refugees. And what that framing does is it displaces the sort of historical explanations for why it is that people are vulnerable to climate change in the first place, right? So that's something that most people get straight away. So there's a kind of with that notion of climate refugees. There's a kind of unstated environmental determinism that that we need to be careful of and sort of be critical of, I think.
Emily Holloway
Right, because it’s just not that simple of a relationship.
Andrew Baldwin
Where it starts to get really complicated is that the discourse in climate change and migration from say, around for the last 15 years, let's say, perhaps even longer, has been really explicitly trying to articulate itself against a determinist logic. In other words, what you see in a lot of policy studies, a lot of policy reports, particularly internationally. But you see it also in the academic literature is a move away from determinist reasoning towards what people will oftentimes call a complex framing of climate change and migration. And what is often meant by that is that migration is a complex phenomenon. It's never simply the result of climate change alone, it's the result of a whole host of intermediary factors, the social context that the impacts of climate change meet, if you like.
The social, the political factors that shape people's everyday lives and so forth. Economy, culture, and you know, a whole range of other variables will also explain why it is that people move and or are displaced, and climate change is just one of many different variables. That's what is often meant when people say that climate change, the relationship between climate change and migration is complex.
And yet, what's interesting and problematic, I think, and I go into some detail in my book about this, is that that turn to complexity, there's a curious little slippage that happens, which is that OK, migration is a complex phenomena. It's the result of a whole range of different things, not just climate change.
But then climate change is instantly elevated to become a kind of overarching first among equals that would explain migration, right? So it's given a kind of elevated status. And that's, you know, an additional sort of, at least to me, it suggests the kind of return of environmental determinism In the language of its explicit refusal.
Emily Holloway
So we’ve been talking about different scales of governance, particularly with David Kaufmann earlier – these tensions in authority between municipal, state, or federal, or even supranational governance. Each level seems to think through the political category of the migrant in different ways. Since your work really looks holistically at these dynamics, what bearing does that kind of global geography have on the category of the migrant, or the refugee, or the climate migrant?
Andrew Baldwin
The empirical site has been the international, so the sort of if the “space” of the international, you know what is that space? That's a really interesting question, but I've been I've been particularly interested in the way that the category of the climate migrant refugee stroke migrant figures in relation to international governance debates, basically.
Why is that? I think it's because the sort of the discourse around climate change and migration emerges out of the international. It sort of originates probably in the, you know, some say the mid 1980s with the publication of a report. Others put it sort of originating back in the 70s, also in relation to international environmental debates. You know, climate change itself is obviously, you know, an international collective action problem. And so, it stands to reason that migration sort of gets configured within the space of the international. So I've been focusing empirically on that as the empirical site, if you like, so not a specific region per se.
Emily Holloway
So what is, the international, exactly? And relatedly, what is the figure of the climate migrant?
Andrew Baldwin
I think we could make an argument that the that the figure of the climate migrant refugee is there in the origins of western thought with the barbarians, right? The fall of Rome is an effect of the barbarians. Who are the Barbarians, but these climate migrants or naturalized environmental, you know, migrant zombies, whatever.
Probably a more a sort of better way to think about the emergence of the discourse around climate change, migration and climate refugees is to say that it starts to surface In the sort of in the 70s, the World Watch Institute. This was Paul Erlicht group from the 70s, starting to make you know, generate some concerns about climate refugees. You know, If the environment, the global planetary environment is poorly managed, then we will end up with, you know, climate refugees and from the sort of framework of Paul Ehrlich.
Emily Holloway
Paul Ehrlich as in “The Population Bomb” Paul Ehrlich – a pretty widely debunked alarmist and thinly veiled racist screed about overpopulation, and was really weaponized in decolonizing or postcolonial nations in the Global South – regions that are also particularly vulnerable to the impacts of rapid climate change.
Andrew Baldwin
You know, this is the climate refugee is a racialized figure that will be coming to a western country near you, right? Like it's that kind of mobilization that's happening. Why is that significant in the 1970s? Well, it obviously coincides sharply with decolonization and you know, Western authorities looking for ways of reasserting a kind of colonial imperial dominance that has been undercut by, you know, anti-colonial movements and decoloniality more generally. So, that's I think an important historical context.
I would love someone to pay me money so that I can go and investigate that in more detail.
But then the sort of the next phase of that is in the mid 1980s with the publication called Environmental Refugees by El Hinwani, I think I'm saying this surname correctly. I'm not sure exactly who that was, but it was published by the United Nations Environment report and it's the same kind of argument. You know, if the global environment is badly managed, then we're going to have a real problem on our hands, which are climate refugees are going to be moving all over the place, and this will catalyze political violence. This will result in humanitarian strife, and all these things can be managed if we just manage the global environmental commons more effectively.
The debate around climate change and migration… I think we can safely say surfaces for the first time in a report that was commissioned by the US Pentagon that was published in 2003, called an abrupt...What is that? I can't remember the Title of it...An abrupt climate change scenario, the national security implications of climate change, or something like that, in which climate migration is articulate, or at least climate change. Climate change is articulated as a problem of migration and refugees. And again, all the same tropes surface in that text around the migrant is a catalyst for political violence. The migrant is a catalyst for strife and so if we, you know, the imperative then is we need to manage the global climate to avoid, you know the inevitable chaos, violence and strife that will resolve.
Emily Holloway
We barely got to scratch the surface of some of these questions about sanctuary politics, migration policy, and the role of the city in mediating those dynamics. But next week, we’ll be revisiting some of these themes, along with some from earlier episodes in this series, to understand how the city itself – the fabric of it, the built environment, the social geography of neighborhoods and commerce – changes in response to and sometimes through the circulation of migrant individuals and communities.
Deirdre Conlon
So in terms of how the fabric of cities or communities has changed, I think that one of the key dimensions is simply around the normalization of both the presence of immigration detention facilities and the normalization of a perspective whereby migrants are themselves understood as criminals. So I think that that has become very ingrained, very normal for not only for the communities that are kind of housing immigrant detainees in these kinds of facilities, but also across the entire country.
Emily Holloway
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.