MIGRATION AS MORALITY POLITICS
The Contentious Politics of Sanctuary in Europe and the United States
Publications
Key publications in scientific journals have been made since 2019 within the project's scope.
Journal Article
2023
Bauböck, Rainer and Julia Mourão Permoser
Liberal democratic states can respond to the presence of irregular migrants in three basic ways: by attempting to deport all migrants without legal status, by ignoring their irregular presence without providing them with rights or legal status, or by attempting to include them in the host society. This epilogue to a special issue on sanctuary discusses three inclusive responses to unauthorised immigration: sanctuaries, firewalls and regularizations. We describe their characteristic features by examining their specific benefits for migrants (protection from deportation, access to public services, and pathways to membership), the types of actors promoting or providing these responses (subnational or national governments, civil society actors), and the challenges to national immigration control they raise (contestations over jurisdiction, division of competencies, and determination of legal status). We acknowledge overlaps and ambiguities between the three responses and discuss whether asylum can be considered as sanctuary within the international state system and whether not only regularizations, but also sanctuaries and firewalls can promote inclusive membership. Finally, we lay the ground for empirical and normative analyses of justifications for each of the three responses by showing that these invoke specific claims about contestation rights, benefits for migrants, and benefits for the wider society.
Introduction to the Special Issue
2023
Bauböck, Rainer and Julia Mourão Permoser
At a time when restrictive immigration policies are high on the political agenda of many states, resistance to such policies is emerging from below. One form of resistance is the provision of sanctuary by civil society and subnational administrations. Sanctuary can be understood as the creation of a safe space for immigrants where they are beyond reach for immigration law enforcement. Research on sanctuary has been proliferating in the last few years. Nevertheless, a common definition and analytical framework are still missing. This article aims to fill this gap. In it, we provide a definition of sanctuary which identifies four key features that all sanctuary initiatives have in common, and that distinguish them from other forms of social and political action. Further, we distinguish between three spheres in which sanctuary can be enacted – the territorial, social and discursive spheres – and develop a typology that identifies the spaces, modes of enactment, and types of actors associated with each sphere. We show how our typology can be used to address both empirical and normative questions that require comparing different types of sanctuary. Our aim is to provide new impulses to the growing research agenda on the contentious politics and practices of sanctuary.
Special Issue
2023
Bauböck, Rainer and Julia Mourão Permoser
This special issue contributes in two ways to the literature on sanctuary and on migration studies more broadly. First, it makes an empirical contribution by analysing the phenomenon in Europe. For a long time, the academic literature on sanctuary focused almost exclusively on Canada and the United States. Recently, there has been a surge of academic interest in the topic of sanctuary also in Europe, mainly driven by the fact that several European cities declared themselves to be cities of sanctuary or refuge, and some have organised themselves into transnational networks of urban solidarity. Second, and most importantly, the special issue makes an analytical contribution to the literature by conceptualising sanctuary as a political phenomenon that takes place in various (territorial, social and discursive) spheres, is enacted by multiple authors, has differential effects on migrants, and articulates diverse types of contestation.
Commentary
2023
Mourão Permoser, Julia and Itamar Mann
What, if any, can be the adverse byproducts of rescuing life at sea? Following a phenomenological approach, we have conducted interviews with rescuers, asking them about their experiences at sea and what meaning they attach to these experiences. We thank the fantastic line-up of scholars who took time to engage with our work, and appreciate deeply this opportunity to respond.
Journal Article
2022
Mourão Permoser, Julia
Countries across Europe have been confronted with pro-migrant solidarity movements that engage both organized civil society and local political actors. The church asylum movement in Germany has revived the ancient practice of solidarity, drawing upon both its history and symbolism. The movement has also reshaped social and political contours. In this working paper, Julia Mourão Permoser explains that though church asylum has sparked controversy and elevated tensions between religious communities and governments, activists justify their actions on normative grounds.
Special Issue
2022
Mourão Permoser, Julia, Rainer Bauböck and Martin Ruhs (Eds.)
This Special Issue of Migration Studies—and the larger new research program that it initiates — analyzes fundamental ethical dilemmas in policy making on migration and refugee protection. In doing so, it seeks to bring a new perspective to normative debates in migration studies: one that finds its point of departure in concrete policy dilemmas as faced by actors on the ground, and that works from there inductively toward more abstract normative theorizing.
Journal Article
2022
Bauböck, Rainer, Julia Mourão Permoser and Martin Ruhs
This article proposes a new approach to the political theory of migration: the ethics of migration policy dilemmas. The core of this new approach lies in identifying specific policy dilemmas of central relevance to policy makers and other stakeholders in the field, and then submitting these dilemmas to systematic theoretical analysis. We conceptualize policy dilemmas as involving hard choices between competing moral goals and distinguish this kind of dilemma from other types of ethical choices, such as conflicting means, dirty hands, political feasibility, and politics dilemmas. We argue that, besides enlarging the range of questions asked by political theorists of migration, our approach of engaging normatively with hard policy dilemmas can help mitigate the negative political and societal effects of reductionist political positions that seek to negate the existence of competing moral goals.
Book Chapter
2022
Mourão Permoser, Julia
This chapter investigates the democratic challenges surrounding the Church Asylum Movement in Germany. It focuses in particular on how church asylum generates principled political conflicts over secularism and rule of law. Despite having lost its legal standing, church asylum remained part of the cultural imaginary of many Christian societies, so much that, at specific historical times, churches have mobilized this ancient tradition and offered refuge to certain groups in defiance of the legislation in force. The German Church Asylum Movement is not only one of the oldest existing such movements but also one of the biggest. Until the mid-2010s, there were fewer than 100 cases per year; then there was a dramatic increase from 79 cases in 2013 to 430 cases in 2014. Between 2014 and 2018, the numbers continued to rise, achieving the impressive figure of 1,325 cases in 2018.
Journal Article
2022
Mann, Itamar and Julia Mourão Permoser
In this article, we concentrate on the dilemmas involved in search and rescue (SAR) as rescuers have described them. Our aim is two-fold. The first is to offer a phenomenological account of search-and-rescue dilemmas. The article sheds light on the complexity and nuance of the ethical landscape of maritime rescue, revealing an intricate web of interactions acknowledged by rescuers as posing ethical challenges. The second aim is to offer a conceptual framework for what it is that SAR NGOs are, in fact, doing. We contextualize their actions within the larger terrain of ‘border externalization’, in which states have moved enforcement activities to extraterritorial zones, where human rights law is diluted or inapplicable. We thus argue that the set of norms underlying NGO rescue practices amounts to a strategy of counter-externalization.
Book Chapter
2021
Mourão Permoser, Julia
Solidaritätsbewegungen, der Kirchenasylbewegung in Deutschland. Kirchenasyl bietet Asylbewerber_innen und Migrant_innen ohne regulären Status Zuflucht, um Abschiebungen zu verhindern und staatliche Institutionen zur Überprüfung von Asylanträgen zu zwingen. Kirchenasylaktivist_innen nutzen den Symbolcharakter der Kirche und das Widerstreben politischer Akteur_in- nen, einen von vielen als heilig empfundenen Raum zu verletzen, um einen sicheren Raum für Migrant_innen zu schaffen, in dem sie nicht von den Behörden aufgegriffen werden. Geographisch organisiert sich die Kirchenasylbewegung zugleich subnational, national und transnational.
Published in Die Stadt als Stätte der Solidarität, edited by Niki Kubaczek and Monika Mokre
Journal Article
2019
Mourão Permoser, Julia
This article critically reviews the literature on morality policies and the politics of values, focusing in particular on the question of what defines morality policies as a specific policy field. Drawing from both US American and European literature, it surveys to which extent morality policies can be understood as a particular form of contention over primary values, a way of framing, a cultural conflict, a specific type of politics, or a class of substantive policy issues. The article then develops a new approach that draws on political theory and pays particular attention to the role of religion, arguing that morality policies reflect deep divisions within modern societies over key principles of political liberalism.