Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Sanctuary cities, explained
The stereotype and the reality.

By Dara Lind [e-mail] Mar 8, 2018, 12:00pm EST

But the Trump administration has also made a point to hype enforcement in sanctuary jurisdictions as a way to send a message that immigrants are not safe there.

So even as the Justice Department sues California for making it too hard to enforce immigration law, ICE is as visible in the state as ever.

The workplace raids law the DOJ is suing over didn’t stop ICE from raiding several 7-Eleven franchises in California in January, armed with notices to inspect their I-9 forms. Nor did California’s laws stop ICE from arresting more than 150 immigrants in a massive “sweep” in Northern California in February, including some who say they were approached at random in public by an ICE agent and asked for their papers (something ICE generally denies it does).

Logically, the fact that ICE is arresting immigrants in sanctuary cities ought to complicate the myth that these cities are blocking all enforcement of federal immigration law.

But it doesn’t. Because the people who are most invested in the false stereotype of sanctuary don’t have any opportunity to learn about the reality — and because the idea that Democrats and “illegal immigrants” would ally to thwart law enforcement plays into existing stereotypes.

In a way, sanctuary cities are a homegrown equivalent of the myth of “no-go zones” in Europe: neighborhoods dominated by Muslim immigrants in which it’s unsafe for anyone of white European descent to even set foot.

There aren’t any no-go zones in Europe, but that hasn’t stopped conservative outlets like Fox News from talking about them. Some conservatives appear to believe that America has no-go zones of its own.

But what’s more potent, in the American context, is the idea that Democratic local officials are attempting to undermine “real” America by sheltering masses of unauthorized immigrants and allowing them to terrorize Americans.

It would be much harder for such a fear to take root if conservative culture warriors didn’t already consider cities culturally suspect. For half a decade, since the beginning of white flight, cities have been seen as centers of crime; Americans tend to believe crime is going up throughout the country, even as they acknowledge it’s gone down in their own neighborhoods.

As white flight has guaranteed Democratic Party dominance of urban governance, conservatives have started to believe that Democrats are allowing cities to fail — or deliberately keeping them down to preserve their own political power.

And as cities have grown and revitalized over the past two decades thanks to millennial gentrification — and become accordingly tolerant of LGBTQ Americans — it’s only strengthened the perception that cities are a place where “traditional values” don’t matter anymore.

Deep-blue states — especially California — get painted with the same brush. The idea that California is basically a “third world country” isn’t unpopular in conservative circles — and the justification is often that it’s been overrun with immigrants and refuses to throw out the criminals among them.

Some conservatives, like Fox host Tucker Carlson, are even more forthright: “The majority in the past 30 years — where do the majority of those people come from?” Carlson asked a guest in March. “Do they come from the Midwest? No, they came from a third world country. Do you think that might have something to do with it?”

The Democratic base wants to see their leaders stand up for immigrants and against Trump

On the other side of the culture war, of course, progressives hear such invocations of traditional American values as nostalgia for a time when white supremacy was unquestioned and midcentury sexual mores kept LGBTQ people from homemaking and kept women from doing anything else. They hear an attack not just on marginalized groups but on pluralism and diversity — things many progressives defend as “American values.”

The Democratic Party has long been wary of defending diversity in its own right — especially when it comes to racial justice. Democratic politicians tended to understand that some whites felt threatened by demographic change, and tried to chart a course by which they could praise diversity while reassuring its skeptics that it sympathized with their concerns.

This was another key reason why fights over sanctuary cities never seemed as heated under Obama as they are today — local politicians were ambivalent about picking a fight that could make it look like they were favoring one group of people (unauthorized immigrants) over the well-being of everyone.

But the culture war has intensified in the past couple of years, and fewer and fewer progressives are worried about being accused of practicing “identity politics.” That’s led even once-hawkish politicians like Rahm Emanuel to proudly declare their cities “sanctuaries.”

They’re not always as concerned with explaining what exactly that means. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had to admit to the New York Times in February that he couldn’t prevent ICE from entering New York City by calling it an immigrant “sanctuary.” But the point is to send a message that unauthorized immigrants are just as welcome as everyone else.

The official position of the Trump administration is that any unauthorized immigrant in the US should be “looking over [her] shoulder” and worried that ICE will come after her at any time. The biggest change to policy under Trump hasn’t been the scope of deportations or even of arrests — it’s been the aggressive messaging that anyone could be next.

Local and state officials who see unauthorized immigrants as part of their own communities, and who are concerned about the effects that targeting unauthorized immigrants will have on their legal immigrant neighbors and US citizen children, are trying to combat that fear.

Laws that force ICE to put more effort into arresting and detaining immigrants are one way to do that. Simply sending the message that some politicians are looking out for immigrants and fighting for them is another — probably not as effective, but something nonetheless.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/8/17091984/sanctuary-cities-city-state-illegal-immigration-sessions