Dismantling urban sanctuary and the ‘migrant crisis’: the political economy of solidarity and providing support to asylum-seeking migrants in New York City

In this article, I analyze the underlying logic and the effects of New York City’s sanctuary and migration policies through the lens of asylum-seeking migrants’ arrival. Specifically, I qualitatively trace the development of the policies and practices of the urban government, service providers, and migrant organizations between 2018—when the conditions of asylum seekers received wider scrutiny because of Donald Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ approach—and 2023, when the city’s ‘migrant crisis’ escalated. My findings illustrate that the emergency governance evolving as a response to the ‘migrant crisis’ has exacerbated austerity and labor-centered approaches aimed at enabling asylum seekers’ exploitation. This produces what I call a ‘punitive market sanctuary’ through which access to city support and care is not only contingent on asylum seekers’ deservingness but on their racialized value and submission to the capitalist extraction of labor. Engaging with literature on sanctuary, solidarity, and urban migration governance, this article contributes a political economic perspective to debates about sanctuary and solidarity cities. It reveals how the growing politics of the ‘migrant crisis’ play out across urban locales, turning multiculturalist sanctuary policies into a repressive form of authoritarian migration governance applied to manage racialized and exploitable populations while dismantling city services for several residents and communities.