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What We Talk About When We Talk About Sanctuary Cities, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

In this Essay, Professor Michael Kagan asserts when immigrant rights advocates ask their local, state and university leaders to become "sanctuary cities," "sanctuary states," "sanctuary campuses," and so on, they carelessly hurt immigrants in places like Nevada, Texas, and Arizona. And there are a lot of immigrants in those states. People who mean to help immigrants are hurting them. He first sets out assumptions he makes about the semantics and politics of "sanctuary" debates. These assumptions include setting out the kind of actual policies that are usually under consideration when people invoke the sanctuary label, and a way of understanding …