Up until the 1990s immigration restrictionists largely framed their opposition to immigrants on cultural and economic arguments emphasizing the erosion of traditional American values and exaggerating immigration’s costs to the native-born labor force. However, over the last three decades a new narrative has emerged as political leaders of both parties and the media have imported the familiar “law and order” discourse used to construct a system of mass incarceration to fuel mass deportation and detention. An important new book by Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien traces this decades-long criminalization of immigration through the rise and evolution of sanctuary city policies. Cutting-edge methods in textual, survey research, and policy analysis make Sanctuary Cities a landmark study that shows how the pernicious link between immigration and crime is as prevalent as it is inaccurate.

Fear of sanctuary cities, defined by the authors as those created by ordinances that “limit local cooperation in federal immigration enforcement to varying degrees” (p. 3), is predicated on stereotypes of immigrant criminality. For example, former attorney general Jeff Sessions (to whom the book is dedicated) once stated that sanctuary city ordinances serve as a “trafficker, smuggler, or gang member’s best friend.” Yet for as long as restrictionists have sought to solidify the immigrant–crime linkage there has been evidence to refute these claims. As the authors indicate, just two years after the passage of the Undesirable Aliens Act of 1929, which codified unauthorized entry as a misdemeanor and reentry as a felony, the government published an official study concluding that the foreign-born, and Mexican immigrants specifically, were no more prone to violence than native-born individuals or earlier immigrant groups.

Multiple studies have established that immigrants are no more, and are often less, likely to commit crimes compared to the non-immigrant population. Sanctuary Cities further corroborates this pattern by showing how these policies have no discernible effect on crime, but it breaks exciting new ground in the literature with compelling evidence suggesting anti-sanctuary city backlash measures like Texas’s S.B. 4 pose a far greater liability for public safety. However, the most significant contributions of the book are the ones that provide insights about why the negative stereotype that immigrants are criminally inclined persists in the face of so much empirical evidence to the contrary. The profound insight that emerges is that resistance to these policies is not and has never been about the objective realities of crime. Instead, public opinion and the actions of policy makers are increasingly driven by partisan politics and racial anxieties generated from diversifying local contexts.

The authors provide historical perspective by charting the evolution of sanctuary city declarations over the course of three waves of policy making. The first generation of ordinances expressed support for the efforts of faith communities during the Central American refugee crisis in the 1980s, whereas the second and third waves combated the post-9/11 proliferation of 287 (g) agreements and targeted deportation operations by the Trump administration. Over the course of these 35 years the original purpose of sanctuary policies shifted from offering refuge to Central American asylum seekers to serving undocumented immigrants who are now the “unintended beneficiaries of these policies” (p. 43)—a transformation the authors contend has contributed to the politicization of the issue. The history of Los Angeles’s sanctuary policy in the 1980s illustrates this politicization process referenced by the book’s subtitle, “the politics of refuge.” LAPD’s Special Order 40 (S.O. 40), the nation’s first proto-sanctuary city policy adopted in 1979, prohibited officers from inquiring about immigration status and managed to avoid a fraught partisan battle because it lacked the overtly political messages that would come to characterize later measures, resulting in their repeal. An important lesson from the history of S.O. 40 for immigrant rights advocates is that framing sanctuary policies in terms of best practices for sound police work and resisting the urge to politicize ordinances may be a more effective strategy to achieve the movement’s long-term goals.

The book then presents a media framing analysis of nearly 30 years of print and TV broadcast coverage of sanctuary city policies. The authors show how sympathetic religious framing of news coverage in the 1980s has been replaced by a negative crime frame and then document the rise of a one-sided partisan framing whereby Republican Party sources outnumber Democratic Party sources in stories by a nearly 3:1 margin. The architecture of this immigrant criminality narrative relies heavily on racialized tropes of immigrant men of color threatening a feminized citizenry represented typically by a white woman, as in the death of Kathryn Steinle. Although the undocumented immigrant who accidently fired the fatal shot in the case was acquitted by a jury, restrictionists sought to implicate San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy in Steinle’s death.

Since Steinle’s death occurred two weeks after the launch of Trump’s campaign for president, the authors test whether individuals relied on their partisan or racial identities to formulate opinions about sanctuary city policies as the issue became nationalized. Their initial findings warrant further analysis in two respects. First, though they find greater support for the “partisan learning” over the “racial learning” hypothesis, they may discount the latter too prematurely, given the increasing overlap between partisan and racial identities as documented by John Sides and coauthors’ Identity Crisis (2016). The lack of support for the racial learning hypothesis is also difficult to reconcile given that the size and growth rate of the local Latino population are strongly associated with opposition to sanctuary city policies among the public and heavily influence both pro-sanctuary and anti-sanctuary bill introductions. Second, the authors interpret the effects of immigration and crime issue salience as a product of the media patterns outlined in the preceding chapter. Although it is perfectly plausible that “attitudes about crime are driven more by media coverage of crime than actual crime” (p. 89), the absence of any measures of media consumption or local media coverage of these issues leaves room for future research to strengthen these causal claims.

A rigorous yet straightforward set of quantitative methods are on full display in the final policy analysis chapter of Sanctuary Cities. A direct comparison of crime rates before and after sanctuary city policy implementation is followed by a sophisticated genetic-matching algorithm analysis comparing otherwise similar sanctuary and nonsanctuary cities. The authors also use interrupted time series analysis to examine crime data from five counties that adopted either more or less cooperative stances with federal immigration officials on ICE detainer policies. Although these analyses reveal that neither the adoption of sanctuary city designations nor changes in ICE detainer policies have a discernible effect on crime statistics, anti-sanctuary city policies are shown to be a liability for public safety. A regression discontinuity in time analysis of 911 calls in El Paso, Texas, immediately preceding and following the implementation of S.B. 4 shows a statistically significant drop in emergency calls in census tracts with a high density of immigrants—the exact sort of chilling effect many lawmakers and law enforcement officials warned would occur.

The authors conclude by examining the potential for positive effects of sanctuary policy on immigrant incorporation. They find that Latino voters in sanctuary cities exhibit higher voter turnout rates than Latinos living in nonsanctuary cities and that the share of Latino police officers increases more rapidly in sanctuary cities. Although these positive “spillover effects” suggest that sanctuary city policies are more than symbolic gestures and provide tangible benefits to the wider Latino population, future work should operationalize political integration with measures that can also capture aspects of incorporation more proximate to the immigrant experience.

These small critiques notwithstanding, Sanctuary Cities is an incredibly important book made all the more urgent by the parallels between the early 1980s and today, which sees a new generation of Central Americans fleeing violence only to be met with cruelty. Collingwood and Gonzalez O’Brien deserve praise for producing an excellent work of social science research that shows that healthy and safe communities are also those that provide refuge.