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Rethinking Sanctuary: The Origins of Non-Cooperation Policies in Social Welfare Agencies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

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Abstract

Too often, scholarship on immigration conflates sanctuary ordinances with the non-cooperation policies, often embedded in these ordinances, which limit cooperation between local officials and federal immigration authorities. In this article, I disentangle the two by tracing the rise of non-cooperation policies in health and welfare agencies since the New Deal. Doing so challenges assumptions about the origins, targets, consequences, and significance of early sanctuary policies. It reveals that non-cooperation was federal policy between 1935 and the early 1970s, when local, state, and federal officials began to experiment with cooperation. When the consequences of such practices became clear, welfare and health officials were forced to reaffirm non-cooperation just before the sanctuary movement burst onto the scene. This research clarifies why scholars see early sanctuary ordinances as largely symbolic: because many local, state, and federal officials had largely abandoned cooperation in practice. It also challenges the widespread assumption that non-cooperation fundamentally represents local resistance to federal power. Instead, I demonstrate the key role played by the federal government in the rise of non-cooperation in health and welfare agencies. Lastly, this research reaffirms the significance of the fragmented nature of federal institutions for promoting immigrant rights.

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Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 175 - 204
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

Special thanks to Luis Gallardo and Jessica Law for their research assistance and to Irene Bloemraad, Rachel Humphris, Anil Kalhan, Kim Voss, members of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative faculty workshop, and several reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

References

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