Suchergebnisse

Sanctuary policies first emerged in the 1980s as a response to the Reagan administration's denial of asylum claims for refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador. In response to a growing refugee crisis, and the fear that many of those who were being denied asylum faced persecution and death in their country of origin, churches and synagogues began offering "sanctuary" to refugees from these countries, based on ancient religious tradition. The Sanctuary Movement, as it came to be known, led a number of cities to adopt city resolutions in solidarity beginning in 1983, marking the birth of the sanctuary city. These policies forbade local officials from inquiring into the immigration status of residents and often criticized the Reagan administration's refugee policies. Today, the scope of sanctuary policies has expanded, and they may not only bar local officials from collecting information on immigration status, but also include a refusal to honor immigration detainers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which are issued by ICE to request that local authorities hold immigrants until they can be taken into federal custody for deportation proceedings. Most sanctuary policies in the United States were passed during three periods. The first ran from 1983 to 1989, with the policies passed in response to the Central American refugee crisis. The September 11 attacks and the subsequent immigration crackdown and passage of policies like Secure Communities would lead to more policies being passed between 2001 and 2012. Lastly, the presidency of Donald Trump led to more declarations based on the administration's crackdown on undocumented immigration. At the same time, an anti-sanctuary movement materialized for the first time at both the federal and state level that sought to either prevent further declarations or to attach penalties to sanctuary policies. One example is Texas's SB 4, which in 2017 introduced state-wide bans on these policies and allows for fines and removal from office for officials who do not comply with federal immigration policy. The Trump administration itself sought to deny federal grants to sanctuary jurisdictions, something that had been floated in the past by Republican presidential candidates like Fred Thompson but had never been attempted by previous administrations. The rhetoric of the Trump administration on sanctuary policies, as well as the media coverage of the 2015 accidental shooting of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant led to more coverage of the topic than at any other point in history. This in turn led to increased scholarship, which continues, as researchers look to connect the Sanctuary Movement to modern sanctuary cities; to examine the effects of media framing of these policies; to analyze the causes of public support or opposition; to explore the legality of sanctuary and anti-sanctuary legislation; and to document the effects these policies have on the incorporation of immigrant communities and crime rates in sanctuary cities.

Sanctuary cities, or localities where officials are prohibited from inquiring into immigration status, have become a part of the broader debate on undocumented immigration in the United States. Despite the increasing amount of coverage sanctuary policies receive, the American public knows little about these policies. In this text, Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien delve into the history, media coverage, effects, and public opinion on these sanctuary policies in the hope of helping readers reach an informed decision regarding them.

In the United States, drop box mail-in voting has increased, particularly in the all vote by mail (VBM) states of Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Oregon. To assess if drop boxes improve voter turnout, research proxies box treatment by voters' residence distance to nearest drop box. However, no research has tested the assumption that voters use drop boxes nearest their residence more so than they do other drop boxes. Using individual-level voter data from a 2020 Washington State election, we show that voters are more likely to use the nearest drop box to their residence relative to other drop boxes. In Washington's 2020 August primary, 52% of drop box voters in our data used their nearest drop box. Moreover, those who either (1) vote by mail, or (2) used a different drop box from the one closest to their residence live further away from their closest drop box. Implications are discussed.

AbstractThe covid-19 pandemic has revived a longstanding, and understudied, trope in American politics: the association of immigrants with disease. There has been a great deal of scholarship on the economic, cultural, and criminal threat frames attached to immigrant groups in media coverage, but little to date has specifically examined how national and local sources have framed covid-19 in the context of immigrant communities. In this paper we analyze the prevalence of two different framings of the pandemic in national and local online news outlets over the first year of the pandemic: immigration as a public health threat to the nation, and covid-19 as a threat to immigrant communities within the nation. We find significant differences between national and local coverage, with the former more likely to frame immigration as a covid-19 threat, while local news outlets were more likely to discuss the threat the virus posed to already marginalized immigrant communities.

Despite the increased scholarship on sanctuary localities in the United States, there is little research analyzing the factors that lead to the adoption of sanctuary resolutions at the municipal level. Drawing on a new dataset of sanctuary and nonsanctuary cities, we theorize that policy adoption is driven primarily by two factors and their interaction: the size of the foreign-born population and local partisanship. We examine cities that passed sanctuary policies between 2000 and 2018 and compare these localities to nonsanctuaries. Using a novel time series cross-section dataset (TSCS) of all cities and designated places and a Cox proportional hazard model, we find that Democratic-leaning cities with high foreign-born populations predict sanctuary passage, whereas Republican-leaning cities with larger foreign-born populations are unlikely to adopt these policies. We thus find that while partisanship motivates sanctuary policy adoption, at the same time, the size of the foreign-born population also increases the likelihood of passage.

AbstractSignificant research indicates that attitude change is often a product of partisan learning. However, as the party system continues to rearrange around issues of race and immigration, and as new racial policy issues thrust onto the agenda, it is unclear whether voters learn to adopt racial policy attitudes more based on race/ethnicity or on party identification. We evaluate the partisan-learning model versus a racial-learning model with regards to public opinion on sanctuary cities/policies among survey respondents in CA and TX. Given President Trump's public antipathy toward sanctuary cities, we argue and show that negative partisanship is the most plausible vehicle for sanctuary city attitude change between 2015 and 2017. In this particular case, we find no support for a racial/ethnic-learning model.

Building upon existing literature, we offer a particular model of network policy diffusion—which we call sustained organizational influence. Sustained organizational influence necessitates an institutional focus across a broad range of issues and across a long period of time. Sustaining organizations are well‐financed, and exert their influence on legislators through benefits, shared ideological interests, and time‐saving opportunities. Sustaining organizations' centralized nature makes legislators' jobs easier by providing legislators with ready‐made model legislation. We argue that sustaining organizations uniquely contribute to policy diffusion in the U.S. states. We evaluate this model with a case study of state‐level immigration sanctuary policy making and the role that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) played in disseminating model legislation. Through quantitative text analysis and several negative binomial state‐level regression models, we demonstrate that ALEC has exerted an overwhelming influence on the introduction of anti‐sanctuary legislative proposals in the U.S. states over the past 7 years consistent with our particular model of network policy diffusion. Implications are discussed.

This article assesses the claim that sanctuary cities—defined as cities that expressly forbid city officials or police departments from inquiring into an individual's immigration status—are associated with post hoc increases in crime. We employ a causal inference matching strategy to compare similarly situated cities where key variables are the same across the cities except the sanctuary status of the city. We find no statistically discernible difference in violent crime, rape, or property crime rates across the cities. Our findings provide evidence that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates, despite narratives to the contrary. The potential benefits of sanctuary cities, such as better incorporation of the undocumented community and cooperation with police, thus have little cost for the cities in question in terms of crime.

ObjectiveThis article examines the impact that reducing the distance to a voter's nearest ballot drop box has on turnout.MethodsThe placement of five new ballot drop boxes was randomized among six potential sites identified based on similar criteria. The randomization of the five boxes across the six sites created natural Treatment (those sites that received a new box) and Placebo (the site that did not receive a new box) groups. We then employed a difference‐in‐difference design to determine whether voters in the Treatment group were more likely to vote in the 2017 general election compared to those in the Placebo group.ResultsWe find that a decrease of one mile to the nearest drop box increased the probability of voting by 0.64 percent.ConclusionOur finding indicates that drop boxes have a positive effect on voter turnout and that decreasing the distance to these boxes can lead to an increased likelihood of voting.