Sanctuary Revisited: Central American Refugee Assistance in the History of Church-based Immigrant Advocacy

Abstract

Extant literature on the U.S. Sanctuary movement of the 1980s mainly facilitates an understanding of the movement as part of liberal religious resistance to the Reagan-Bush Administrations' policy in Central America. However, I argue that Sanctuary should also be understood as pivotal to church involvement in a longer lineage of social activism that can be called immigrant advocacy. Church-based immigrant advocates (CBIAs) were in short supply until the end of World War II, when Christian clergy and laity used biblical calls for hospitality to argue for the admission of thousands of displaced persons from Europe. Over the next quarter-century, many CBIAs provided services to political refugees admitted under State Department criteria. But as CBIAs grew frustrated with double standards in refugee admissions, they began to develop discourses legitimating hospitality work outside of a nation-state framework. In tracing the history of church-based immigrant advocacy, Sanctuary indexes the juncture at which many Christian organizations widened their operations beyond the standard of sovereignty to accommodate undocumented refugees as well as immigrants motivated by economic need.