Comparing Urban Citizenship, Sanctuary Cities, Local Bureaucratic Membership, and Regularizations

Irregular migrants tend to live in dense urban settings. Cities respond to this phenomenon with a variety of urban immigration and citizenship policies in support of irregular migrants. These urban policies produce a disparity between local inclusion and national exclusion. This article describes and compares such urban policies, namely urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations. Urban citizenship serves as the normative foundation of these policies because it claims membership for all people that inhabit a city. Regularization programs confer a national residency status to irregular migrants. Pro-immigration actors favor this policy, however, when regularizations are not possible, cities can turn to sanctuary city and local bureaucratic membership policies. It is important for practitioners to comprehend and potentially engage with these various types of urban policies since they are likely to travel to cities worldwide.