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In March 2015, the Brighton and Hove Council passed a motion to support the movement to recognise Brighton as a city of sanctuary. The council stated that it welcomed efforts in the city to make Brighton into an ‘inclusive , welcoming and supportive community to those fleeing persecution and violence’ through what was to be known as sanctuary on sea. This was particularly crucial as the discourse on migration rights has been in crisis. The inextricable linkage of citizenship to rights as afforded by the nation-state has meant that migration discourse has become a site of struggle for rights, recognition and resistance of subordination. The EU’s migration response, which has been to militarise its borders and enforce a limited and inefficient asylum regime, has been clear indication that we need to rethink the rights protections discourse.
The city of sanctuary movement first emerged in Sheffield in 2005 with the goal of reimagining cities as sites of sanctuary and hospitality for refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. The movement aimed to transcend the limited spatial understanding of sanctuary by operating as a fluid network of practices that challenged the hostile attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers. This meant that sanctuary was not limited to a location but rather was defined by a relational re-imagining of a city’s culture, attitude and responsibility.
In Brighton, this has been achieved through collaborative initiatives by government institutions and local charities and organisations that have not only highlighted the experience of the refugee figure but also allowed the voices of refugees and asylum seekers
to be heard. In the four years that sanctuary on sea has existed, numerous projects of sanctuary practice have sprung up across the city. For example, to fulfil one of the sanctuary’s principles in creating opportunities for friendship between refugees and hosts, the Sussex Migrant and Refugee Self-Help Support Group runs the Jollof Café every Tuesday. It is a space where migrants and residents alike meet up to share a meal and discuss ways to support those facing a precarious and hostile immigration system. Voices in Exile is another local charity that not only provides advice, advocacy and material support to refugees and asylum seekers but also runs a migrant welcome project that explores day to day living in Brighton. Every Thursday afternoon, refugees and asylum seekers congregate alongside volunteer residents to learn how to access health services, public transport, leisure activities, connecting with new friends and so on. Although there’s an implied element of integration in this project, there is also potential to develop relationships and friendships imbibed with an ethics of care where people simply just support each other. Refugee Radio is also another initiative where refugees and asylum seekers are invited to tell their stories; that notably present them beyond their migration journey. Refugee Radio seeks to preserve the cultures and traditions of refugees and asylum seekers through highlighting their music, food, dance, art and just ways of being together. Brighton Migrant Solidarity is yet another grassroots campaigning group that advocates for the right to free movement. They run a support network for migrants battling bureaucracy in the migration regime including weekly English language classes, filling in forms, attending court, etc. The spirit of sanctuary has evidently taken root in the city - beyond the tangible initiatives of sanctuary, the city hosts a refugee week every year where residents and migrants come together to celebrate the contribution of migrants and refugees in the cities through music, art exhibitions, dance, food, etc.
Despite the concept of cities of sanctuary being relatively new, historically cities have always been imagined as spaces of hospitality. In Dan Bulley’s text ‘Migration, Ethics and Power’, cities are spaces that are “relationally constituted where multiple geographies of composition intersect, bringing distant worlds into the centre of urban being”. Indeed, cities allow for a plurality of difference and mobilities therefore making it easier to escape the sense of alienation that refugees and asylum seekers may face. However, this can be a double-edged sword. The indifference and anonymity enabled by the city can result in an underclass of exploited migrants that are made invisible by their precarious status and that are forced to work in the shadow economies. For refugees and asylum seekers, this means their ability to assert their rights and entitlements is severely impeded.
What the city of sanctuary movement does is make visible the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers, allowing for spaces where rights can be claimed without fear of deportability. The politics of sanctuary allows the hosts and the hosted to resist the hostile migration discourse that posit refugees and asylum seekers as:-
“Scrounger, sponger, fraudster, robbing the system, burden/strain on resources, illegal working, cheap labour, cash in hand, black economy, criminal, criminal violent, arrested, jailed, guilty, mob, horde, riot, rampage, disorder, a threat, a worry, to be feared (terror)”.
Furthermore, these spaces of sanctuary provide a setting for resisting the uncertainty and powerlessness of being in limbo while navigating the bureaucracy of the asylum process. They nurture hope, provide safety (temporarily) from immigration processes and develop actions to improve everyday life as one waits for or copes with rejected applications. This is vital in a migration regime where borders follow and surround one as they seek access to work, welfare, healthcare, housing, education, rights, etc. However, the unintended consequence here is that this normalises passivity. Consequently, this posits sanctuary cities “not as a solution to an exclusionary politics but as a problematic technology that regularizes and depoliticizes a violent temporality of waiting”. When the refugee is kept in limbo while their settled status is determined by a hostile regime, sanctuary practice pacifies and softens their unease, which has the unintended effect of perpetuating the system. Nonetheless, this does not entirely diminish the criticality of sanctuary politics. It may not immediately challenge the juridical framework of claiming rights but through allowing us to practice other ways of being together, there’s potential to produce a new mode of ethics and culture. It would be one that may allow us to practice migration management ethically, to extend our solidarity without being criminalized, to alleviate our ‘discomfort’ at otherness and acknowledge the present political processes and identities as shaped by colonial pasts and a neocolonial present and most importantly to reimagine rights as ethical relational concepts.