The sanctuary movement and the smuggling of undocumented Central Americans into the United States: Crime, deviance, or defiance?

Abstract

We introduce the concept of defiant behavior: actions that, although often defined politically as crime, are defined by their actors as necessary, legitimate, and morally appropriate. We then link this concept to two distinct substantive subfields of sociology: (1) criminology and the sociology of deviance and social control, and (2) political sociology and the sociology of social movements. A review of the literature on organized defiance suggests a clear theoretical confluence between the microstructural concept of biographic availability, drawn from the resource mobilization and political process perspectives within the sociology of social movements, and social control theories of crime and deviance. Likewise, there is a similar confluence between the socialization effects of prior activism, also from the resource mobilization perspective, and differential association/social learning theory in criminology. Finally, we present results from a study of the defiant activities of some members of the sanctuary movement. The form of defiance examined here, the smuggling of undocumented Central Americans across the United States‐Mexico border, provides a unique test of the scope and power of both social control and social learning theories. Based on self‐report survey data collected from a sample of 141 participants in the Tuscon, Arizona, sanctuary movement, our findings provide strong support for social learning theory but fail to support social control theory. In fact, the observed effects of the control theory variables are generally in a direction opposite to that predicted by the theory. Implications of the study for the theoretical development of criminology and deviance and for the sociological study of social movements are discussed.