Sanctuary and Citizenship - A Normative Appreciation

In recent years, sanctuary has been mostly understood as a humanitarian response to state efforts to deport migrants or their children. In this debate sanctuary figures as a place where people are at least temporarily safe from deportation. Next to churches, municipalities have played a prominent role in resisting state attempts to deport people whom they regard as “well-integrated” into the local community. Understood in this way, a sanctuary is local site of resistance and a temporary arrangement. For certain migrants, however, stronger claims have been made that they should enjoy a legal status that makes them non-deportable. There are two distinct normative grounds for non-deportability. One is that people should generally not be expelled from places that have become their homes; the other one is that states should not have the power to expel their citizens. The citizenship logic of non-deportability operates (in somewhat different ways) at local, national and supranational level, while the humanitarian and domicile logics are strongest at the local level.