Seeing like a Zone: Privately deputized sovereignty within Toronto’s Sanctuary City

Abstract

Scholarship is split between seeing the Sanctuary City movement in a progressivist light of anti-border civil society movements, or, viewed as another iteration of citizenship controls. Critics point out how Sanctuary Cities, wherein municipalities provide services regardless of immigration status, do little to guarantee security for undocumented peoples who are at constant risk of deportation. Those who are optimistic about the movement’s emancipatory potential celebrate Sanctuary Cities’ ability to challenge the policing of migration. Why are the interpretations of Sanctuary City policies so polarized? I argue Sanctuary City literature suffers from trying to resolve the contradictions of state-based citizenship, devolving the challenge to the city, thus obscuring how state officials, business, and civil society actors can each possess local sovereignty control over urban space. My paper develops the metric of ‘private deputized sovereignty’ to trace how local policy discretion can implement or contest control over citizenship enforcement powers. I investigate how ‘private deputized sovereignty’ emerges from zoning technology inherent to urban spatial production. Conceptually, I introduce ‘seeing like a zone’ as a heuristic to challenge methodological nationalism and cityism which assume sovereignty resides with corporeal structures. In applying zoning analysis to Toronto’s Sanctuary City policy, the paper identifies economic and sanctuary zones where jurisdictional exceptions empowers local authorities, civil society, and/or private actors to either grant amnesty or exile migrants. Toronto being located within an immigrant federal state and being a global city offers a case for multiscalar analysis where migrants’ well-being and harm depends on the ‘privately deputized sovereign’s’ zoning choices in workplaces, healthcare, schools and the street.