Abstract
A handful of Canadian church congregations provide sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. Many also participate in resettling refugees through a government program called private sponsorship. Both sanctuary and sponsorship arise as specific modes of hospitality in response to practices of exclusion and inclusion under national migration regimes. Sanctuary engages oppositional politics, whereby providers confront and challenge state authority to exclude. Refugee sponsorship embodies a form of collaborative politics, in which sponsorship groups partner with government in settlement and integration. I demonstrate how the state’s perspective on asylum versus resettlement structures the relationship between citizen and state and between citizen and refugee. I also reveal that there is more collaboration in sanctuary and resistance in sponsorship than might be supposed.
Highlights
A handful of Canadian church congregations provide sanctuary to failed asylum seekers
Sanctuary is about oppositional politics; sponsorship is about collaborative politics
There were extenuating circumstances that can cause us to act with mercy.”. He relates his growth to his embrace of the Christian duty to welcome the stranger: “We have a duty that I believe is quite clearly spelled out in Scripture to be welcoming to refugees especially those fleeing the state and persecution. . . . That it’s in our name, we call it the sanctuary where we provide worship
Summary
Refugees arrive in the Global North in two ways. Asylum seekers flee their country of origin on their own initiative and ask for refugee protection in the destination country. This sovereign prerogative is variously defended by analogies to property and to private associations, by arguments based on national self-determination, and by consequentialist conjecture about the catastrophic consequences of free movement. Asylum seekers are portrayed as imposing themselves on a receiving state that did not choose them and does not want them Their unwelcome arrival [allegedly] diminishes the sovereign prerogative to exclude noncitizens. By signing the Refugee Convention, state parties undertake to admit those who meet the refugee definition, fully anticipating that they may arrive without prior screening or notice and might resort to irregular means of entry.
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