WORLD MIGRATION REPORT 2015 Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility
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A legacy of sanctuary in gateway cities of the United States5 The term “sanctuary city” is commonly applied to cities and states in the United States that offer some form of protection for undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers, typically by refusing to allow local officials or the police to enquire into an individual’s immigration status. In the past 20 years, dozens of cities have used this label as a symbol of a more inclusionary attitude towards newcomers. Most of the gateway cities have either formal or de facto sanctuary policies. San Francisco was one of the first “gateway” cities to formally pass a municipal sanctuary policy in the 1980s. At that time, the city was experiencing an influx of refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala fleeing civil war. In trying to serve this needy group who were not recognized as refugees, the Board of Supervisors passed San Francisco’s City of Refuge Ordinance in 1985. Initially it was to recognize just the people from El Salvador and Guatemala, yet it evolved into protection of all immigrant rights in the city (Ridgley, 2008). Today most people associate sanctuary cities with efforts in the late 1990s to counter restrictions on migrant access to services with the passing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. More cities adopted sanctuary policies in the 2000s as a counter measure to the Department of Homeland Security’s 287(g) Agreements that engage local police in immigration control. But now with California’s 2014 TRUST Act, the entire state has become a sanctuary. Some European cities face particular policy challenges to respond to the public service needs of those migrants whose migration status grants only limited entitlements to services but who may present significant welfare needs. The result may be formal or informal exclusion from welfare benefits which is most evident in informal settlements such as La Cañada Real, on the outskirts of Madrid, the largest shanty town in Europe whose residents are mostly migrants, and Oranienplatz in Berlin, a protest camp of asylum-seekers and migrants from Africa with Italian humanitarian status and therefore lacking entitlements to stay in Germany. While state laws, policies and judiciary processes shape migrants’ entitlements, migrants’ access to services are closely linked to the relationship between the national and local government. Migrants often have to negotiate the complex rules and restrictions with the assistance of informal social networks (Price and Spence, 2014). Policy fragmentation is particularly the case when it comes to migrant entry into the labour market as jobs tend to be insecure and underpaid with the work often not matching the migrants’ professional qualifications. A multi-stakeholder approach is critical in order to develop effective vocational training which 5
Based on M. Price, Cities Welcoming Immigrants: Local Strategies to Attract and Retain Immigrants in US Metropolitan Areas, 2014. Background Paper for the World Migration Report 2015: Migrants and Cities: New Partnerships to Manage Mobility, IOM, Geneva.