Sanctuary Cities

Josh Landy
What gives the city the right to offer sanctuary to undocumented immigrants?

Ken Taylor
Can a city ever be justified in defying the laws of the nation?

Josh Landy
Don’t the feds have an absolute right to control the nation’s borders?

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Joshua Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Jack Adams Hall on the campus of San Francisco State University.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford University campus, where Ken teaches philosophy and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone, to Philosophy Talk.

Josh Landy
Today, we’re thinking about sanctuary cities.

You know, this is a really complicated question, Ken. I mean, on the one hand, the Constitution clearly gives the federal government the right to make and enforce immigration policy, right?

Yeah, that’s right. It’s but it’s not just the right. It’s actually the duty and which leads the complication? Because you might, that might lead you to think that once the feds have established a policy, then a city like say, our fair San Francisco here shouldn’t just thumb its nose at that policy.

Well, maybe not. If it’s a morally just policy can but look, problem is that in our country, the immigration system is a disaster. I mean, it breaks up families, it forces people into the shadows, it turns its back on desperate people seeking refuge.

Ken Taylor
Well, you’ll you’ll get no argument from me on that score. Josh, here’s one thing I do know about sanctuary cities, they definitely provide a wedge issue that can be exploited by certain demagogues and many different sides of this thing.

Josh Landy
Well, look, it’s unfortunate that that happens. But you have to admit they also do something else. They make our cities more just but immigrants deserve humane treatment. And it’s not just about them. It’s also about the rest of us. I mean, don’t you want our cities to be safer?

Ken Taylor
Nah, I don’t want safe cities. Of course I want safe cities! But how precisely do you think that sanctuary policies managed to do all this good stuff?

Josh Landy
Well, you know, by putting less strain on local budgets, right, by encouraging undocumented people to come forward and report crimes, by allowing them safe access to education and health care. I mean, come on, Ken, would you really rather live in a city filled with sick, uneducated migrants cowering in the shadows for fear of deportation?

Ken Taylor
God no, that sounds like some nightmare scenario. But but here’s the question: how do we prevent that nightmare scenario? Look, okay, sanctuary cities—I mean, come on, you even you have to admit, at best they’re about as effective as at solving a national problem is putting like a bandaid over a gaping wound. And at their very worst, again, they just helped increase all this division.

Josh Landy
Well, thanks to those demagogues were talking about earlier.

Ken Taylor
Well, I agree. It’s thanks to the demagogues. But you know, here’s the sad fact. Demagoguery only works when, you know, real people have real fears and anxieties that can be exploited.

Josh Landy
Look, I’m not claiming sanctuary policies are a panacea. I mean, yeah, if we had more humane, just, and effective national policies in the first place, we wouldn’t need sanctuary cities, but we don’t have those things, Ken. We aren’t living in an ideal world—we’re living in the real world.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, we are living in the real world. But even in the real world—come on, tell me how you think it can be a good thing for cities to openly flout federal law.

Josh Landy
But sanctuary cities don’t have to flout the law, right—all you have to do is refuse to be deputized by the feds.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but in the refusing they’re kind of giving the finger to the federal law enforcement, aren’t they? And then aren’t they actually, even if they don’t intend to, and they’re actually helping to undermine the rule of law, don’t you think?

Josh Landy
No, I don’t agree with that, Ken. Look, there’s a big difference between positively hindering law enforcement and just not helping law enforcement. The thought is this: if the Feds wants to round up and deport undocumented individuals, okay, they’re free to do so. They just can’t expect any help from us, the local authorities. How does that undermine the rule of law?

Ken Taylor
Well, yeah, because okay, think about ordinary citizens. Suppose ordinary citizens, you and me and all the people in this room—suppose we took that attitude toward the law. Okay. When anybody in this room sees a crime, they refuse to report it to the authorities. Come on, wouldn’t that make them complicit in the spread of crime? So how’s it any different when sanctuary cities?

Josh Landy
Look, sanctuary advocates don’t see themselves as spreading crime, Ken. On the countrary, they see themselves as resisting it.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, they do see—okay, why? Why, because are they see our immigration system isn’t just broken and dysfunctional. Is it like supposed to be like downright criminal or something?

Josh Landy
Well look, at least some sanctuary advocates see it that way, Ken, yeah. I mean, they see themselves as righteous crusaders engaged of acts in acts of, you know, civil disobedience, right? Yeah, I’m not totally convinced they’re wrong.

Ken Taylor
Well, I don’t know Josh. The problem is that we too many people think they have like a monopoly on righteousness and they don’t talk to each other and that’s why it’s so darn hard—so hard to strike a balance among all these competing points of view.

Josh Landy
Well, to help us think about how we might achieve such a balance, we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Holly J. McDede, to examine the history of contentious debates over sanctuary policies in our fair city, San Francisco. She files this report.

Holly McDede
If you want to understand why we have sanctuary cities today, the first place you should go is a church.

Jose Artiga
So this will be where I came by newly arrived refugee.

Holly McDede
Jose Artiga once lived inside a Catholic Church in San Francisco’s Castro district. He fled El Salvador in the early 80s after a death squad came looking for him.

Jose Artiga
My sister came early in the morning physically as I was leaving the house where I was staying and told me, “You gotta go. There is no time for question. There is no time for investigation. You gotta go.”

Holly McDede
Churches at the time declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants like Artiga. But even in the shelter of churches, many immigrants were still afraid of the police.

Bill Hing
The San Francisco police actually took part in several immigration rates during that era.

Holly McDede
Bill Hing is an immigration professor at the University of San Francisco. He remembers when police helped immigration agents rate a Mission District nightclub.

Bill Hing
And it was quite upsetting because it scared the heck out of immigrant communities.

Holly McDede
In response to the community’s outrage helped draft the city’s first binding sanctuary ordinance in 1989. It said the city would not use resources to help federal immigration agents. When Maria Hernandez, a community organizer moved to San Francisco from Mexico in the early 90s. She didn’t realize there was this new policy.

Maria Hernandez
I didn’t feel comfortable or safe at all reporting anything to the police. I’m actually a survivor of domestic violence. And I didn’t feel safe reporting any of that before I knew that I had rights in the sanctuary city

Holly McDede
When she did learn she lived in a sanctuary city and what that meant, her perspective on herself and the world around her change.d

Maria Hernandez
It’s been real reassurement, a breath of fresh air, a respite. Because knowing that we have rights and in the US and the city that we have access to services, it gives me a calmness and it gives me a semblance of normalcy in my life.

Holly McDede
But by 2008 San Francisco sanctuary city policy came under attack. An undocumented immigrant killed three people during a traffic dispute in the city. Here’s former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

Megyn Kelly
A suspected MS-13 gang member here illegally from El Salvador, Ramos had been convicted of two violent crimes as a juvenile, but he was never referred to the feds for deportation, because San Francisco is a sanctuary city.

Holly McDede
After that, police begin turning over kids to ice for minor crimes like bringing BB guns to school or stealing change. The immigrant community was outraged once again. In response San Francisco officials restored sanctuary city policies. Then in 2015, Kate Stanley was shot and killed in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant. That suspect was later acquitted of all charges for the tragedy caught Donald Trump’s attention during his presidential run.

Donald Trump
You know Kate, magnificent Kate, shot in the back by—and killed in San Francisco, sanctuary city. Can you believe it? I have property in San Francisco? I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building, can you believe it?

Holly McDede
When Vicki Hennesey ran for sheriff that same year, she promised to cooperate more with ice and she went on that platform, but the immigrant community pushed back.

Vicki Hennesey
I ran on having stricter enforcement of immigration laws. I did run on that. But once I got here, and I started working with everybody in city government and I worked in with people in the community, I realized that the problem in making it too strict, too, would have been to cause that distrust of the community.

Holly McDede
In the past, San Francisco politicians and officials criticized part the city’s own sanctuary policy. That doesn’t happen anymore. At least for now, those threats are coming from the feds. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that nuanced and subtle piece, Holly—that was terrific. I’m Ken Taylor, along with my Stanford colleague Josh Landy. And we’re coming to you from the campus of San Francisco State University.

Josh Landy
Our guest today is a professor of philosophy here at San Francisco State. She’s the author of “How can sanctuary policies be justified?” Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Shelley Wilcox.

Ken Taylor
So, Shelley, you’ve written a lot, not just about sanctuary cities, but about migration issues in general. And I think you’re going to be busy writing about that for quite a while. But I want to know what first got you interested in this topic, so interested that you decided to spend an entire career teaching thinking and writing about it?

Shelley Wilcox
Well, I’ve always been motivated by this intuition that we shouldn’t be held responsible for conditions over which we have no control. And in particular, that social policy shouldn’t reward people for characteristics that they haven’t chosen that they can’t be held responsible for. And I had already always associated that with our race, our gender, and felt that it was important to recognize the privilege that I have for characteristics over which I have no control. And then it dawned on me that I didn’t choose the country in which I was born, and that my citizenship was just like my skin color, a matter of brute luck.

Josh Landy
And where do you stand on this general issue? A moment ago, Ken and I were were arguing back and forth about sanctuary policies. And Ken was worried that they were going to undermine the rule of law. And I was saying, Well, no, maybe we should look at them as something like a form of civil disobedience against unjust policy. So So where do you stand on this question?

Shelley Wilcox
Well, I heard you mention that sanctuary policies can promote the good of public safety. And I think that’s true. However, I think even though some sanctuary policies certainly do express an attempt to achieve some resistance to federal immigration policy, I think it’s a mistake to think of them as civil disobedience. Part of the problem with that understanding, even though we can see municipal sanctuary policies growing out of the private and religious sanctuary movement, the issue of sanctuary policies is they’re just not illegal. So they may, in part, express opposition, certainly to federal immigration policies.

Josh Landy
But they don’t count technically as civil disobedience.

Shelley Wilcox
That’s exactly right.

Ken Taylor
So they’re not illegal. It’s not aiding the Feds is is not illegal. What doesn’t have a positive duty under law to aid the feds? But I still wonder, though, is don’t you don’t see any thought that they’re, in some ways undermining the rule of law take if none of us were willing to report crime on the street? Right? We’re not violating the law. Right. But aren’t we undermining the law in some ways?

Shelley Wilcox
But that’s precisely I think the issue with sanctuary policies, those that attempt to rule out enforcement partnerships between ice and local communities, they want to make it possible for local law enforcement to do their job to enforce the rule of law without having their resources diverted.

Ken Taylor
I get that. And Josh said something like that, right? How does it make our city safer by not straining budgets by on, you know, local money on federal priorities, but the feds take care of this. But by not eating law enforcement, not eating police not being willing to testify? I’m okay. The police can go investigate. They don’t need my testimony. Aren’t I undermining the police somehow?

Josh Landy
And I also wonder whether it depends on what we’re talking about. Because in what in the instance we’ve been talking about, we’re just not helping, right. Our local law enforcement isn’t going to help you do, you know, do immigration, policing. But you know, it can also have things like we won’t let ice into hospitals. Won’t that ice into schools, we won’t let ice into courthouses. Right. We can have, you know, we’re not going to report or you could even go as far as you know, one local mayor, warning a community when ICE was was on the way. That’s right. So it seems like there’s kind of a there’s a spectrum of attitudes. Is there any point at which it becomes civil disobedience?

Shelley Wilcox
I think you’re right, there’s absolutely a gradient between those policies, which absolutely do not infringe or impede federal immigration enforcement, and those that may attempt to do so explicitly. I think even on that end of that gradient, we still shouldn’t call them civil disobedience, we should instead look at those policies as a form of collective resistance. So we might have a broader definition that involves resisting Expressing opposition to attempting to protect people from without also saying that the way to make the get those points across is by violating a law to draw attention to it and to try to convince other people to change it.

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk coming to you from San Francisco State University. Our guest is SF State philosopher, Shelly Wilcox,

Josh Landy
Do localities have a duty to aid federal authorities? Are sanctuary policies a legitimate form of civil disobedience or resistance? Or do they only serve to undermine the rule of law?

Resistance to federal policy: futile or effective? Along with questions—effective questions—from our live audience, when Philosophy Talk it continues.

Tiffany Austin
Mano negra, clandestina, illegal.

Josh Landy
Thanks once again to our musical guests, the Tiffany Austin Quartet. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Shelly Wilcox from San Francisco State University. And we’re talking and thinking about sanctuary cities.

Josh Landy
Are sanctuary cities a good or a bad thing? Do they help us achieve less broken national policies, or at least more humane local outcomes? Join the discussion by stepping up to the microphone in front of the stage.

Ken Taylor
So Shelley, I want to think about this thing you were saying more opposition, local opposition, whether in the form of civil disobedience, or some other kind of opposition, look, the federal government is democratically elected. It has the sole constitutional right to set policy, immigration policy for the nation. So I’m not quite sure how to think about a city that says to itself, you know, what policies screwed up, you know, the way to change the policy you want to think is, well, elect people sign up the Congress and Congress debated What’s with this saying, I’m not gonna help you. I’m going to oppose you. I mean, what with that out? How should I think about a city relevant relative to? Sure, no,

Shelley Wilcox
yeah. So we we might think that cities under principles of federalism, if we agree that the federal government has jurisdiction and has the responsibility over a certain body of policy, we might expect that local communities would generally respect that authority. Now, I’ve already said that I don’t think that all sanctuary policies impede federal immigration control. But let’s assume that we’re talking about one that may actually infringe and is really taking a moral stand against federal migration policy. In that case, like I was saying, we might think that generally speaking, right, if a federal policy is imperfectly just or minimally unjust, then we would like to see people take ordinary democratic challenge channels to make a change. But when a certain threshold is met, of serious injustice, then I think we’re looking at a different sort of situation.

Josh Landy
And because also, is there also worry about democratic deficit? I mean, we’re talking about a case in which these decisions are reached through standard, you know, democratic channels. But what if it’s a series of executive orders, right? What if you have 82% of the population favoring a path to citizenship? But that’s something that because of the way our Congress is currently constituted, can’t get done? What if people feel actually these weren’t democratically decided upon decisions?

Shelley Wilcox
Well, sure. That’s part of the calculation here. Because the local policies, right, we expect that they’re going to arise from democratic participation. And it is the case right, that local communities ought to have some legitimate say, in federal policy. And it’s true, I think under executive orders, which have been dictating much of migration policy that isn’t currently the case.

Ken Taylor
So I’ll give you a clear case in which I think I could see a kind of civil disobedience or oppositional resistance of the sword is perfectly legitimate for a conscientious citizen. I mean, go back to the Reagan refusal to accept these refugees from Central America. There’s a reason why they refuse to accept those refugees, because they would have to have been admitted that there they were, like fleeing war, but our involvement in the war against the Contras and all that was, was a secret. It was a secret war so they couldn’t their their policy couldn’t say in the light of publicity, so that was completely legit. It was a abandonment of, of democratic principles and all that. I totally agree with that the conscientious citizen ought to have been on the barricades trying to resist that. Totally agree. But just take a complicated country like the United States in which citizens are bitterly divided over this thing and try to their legislative process to get a comprehensive immigration reform and they fail and they fail and they fail. And what stands is some kind of rough equilibrium among the citizens divided that may be dysfunctional and may be broken, it may, in some ways be unjust, but it seems a little odd for each jurisdiction to say, well, I’m going to pursue the path of justice and forget this democratic deliberation. I mean, what do you think about that?

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah, I mean, I think that these things can happen on parallel paths. Right. I mean, we certainly could, and people are right, agitating and fighting for fair immigration reform. At the very same time, there are members of our community, right, and some of whom have every legitimate moral right to be present in the community who are being arbitrarily deported in ways that tear apart families that take children away from their parents, right, that reject people who have spent their entire life growing up in the United States. That’s the kind of thing I think we should stand for. I don’t think that necessarily means that we shouldn’t also be working to try to reach a more just overall comprehensive immigration, right?

Josh Landy
Because, you know, I like to put that you have to say, open borders that anybody who wants to, it’s a question of, well, how are you running this immigration policy? Right? You don’t that everybody and but on what basis? Do you make the decision, Ken was saying the way that Reagan was making that decision clearly wasn’t just right. It was arbitrary, as you were saying was—

Ken Taylor
It wasn’t arbitrary, it was evil. It was worse than arbitrary.

Josh Landy
And we more recently, we’ve seen Muslim bans, and we’ve seen a kind of pressure put on asylum seekers. Yeah. And no distinction made between asylum seekers and economic refugees, and so on. And so it seems like there really should be a distinction between just wanting to keep immigration at a certain level, on the one hand, and on the other hand, having these arbitrary discriminatory policies, and unnecessarily cruel methods of enforcement.

Shelley Wilcox
That’s right. I think it’s important to to keep in mind that we might have a conversation about border policy and immigration reform. But when we’re talking about sanctuary cities, we’re talking about people who are here. So the questions might be a little bit different.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s certainly true. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about sanctuary cities with Shelley Wilcox in front of a live audience at San Francisco State University. And we’d love to have questions from that audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, maam. What’s your comment or question?

Megan
Hi, my name is Megan. I’m from Sunnyvale. And my question was, so sanctuary cities seem like they’re a good idea when you’re trying to control local issues, because who would know best of how to govern local issues than people who are currently there as opposed to the federal government, which could be distantly away? But what happens? Like is there a critical difference in the permissibility? If the sanctuary city is like a area that’s like a port or like, on the edges of the country where people are entering as opposed to places that are, like more internal in the US?

Ken Taylor
You mean, like, Texas, in Texas, as opposed to Wyoming? Or something like that?

Josh Landy
Or it could be San Diego.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. So what do you think?

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah, um, so could you tell me why you think there might be a difference?

Megan
Um, well, because an areas where the more immigrants are entering, they would have a larger role in affecting immigration policy.

Josh Landy
You might, and you might worry about incentive. Right. You might think, Well, look, this is a good place to come because you get good treatment. And I mean, that’s something that’s been endorsed.

Ken Taylor
That’s a Republican line. Look, I think. I don’t credit our president with many coherent thoughts. Yeah. Let’s just say that I try to be non partisan, but I just like I don’t but one thing I heard him say, I don’t think he has a really well thought out line. But there is a German with thought there. He says, Look, Democrats are for open borders. Well, most Democrats aren’t, some are, but most Democrats aren’t. And he says, if you’re for open borders, you don’t have a country. Now, what’s the kind of seed of a coherent thought, What is a nation it’s a polity, cooperative things bonding together for shared life. And as any kind of living thing, it’s a homeostatic thing. It does self preservation and self replication. And if I say, well, but anybody can come, then what is it that I’m preserving? It’s like the nation is always subject to reconfiguration in light of whoever decides to come here. So I like there is some kind of coherent thought to a nation as a self perpetuating self perpetuates its values. Its system. It’s right. So What about that?

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah. So I do want to separate the question about open borders, right from the question about sanctuary cities, because you absolutely do not have to support open borders policies in order to support sanctuary policies. That being said, I think, even if we could give a plausible argument, from the right to self determination, something along those lines, for the state’s right to have discretionary control over migration, that’s not going to be an absolute right. There are going to be some moral limits on that right.

Josh Landy
Especially if as Megan says, it’s a border town, where you might worry that decisions made by the locality are going to influence the nation as a whole more than if it’s a city in the center of the country may take it. That’s part of the concern. What do you think about that thought?

Shelley Wilcox
I mean, if the concern is that sanctuary policies, particularly on the border incentivize migration, I think that the situation is much more complicated than that. There are many causes both domestic demand for labor, a legitimate desire to live with one’s family conditions in sending countries that I think have a lot more to do with creating and perpetuating migration flows than does anything like a sanctuary policy, regardless of whether it’s in El Paso or whether it’s in San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir. What’s your comment or question?

Mohammed
Good evening. My name is Mohammed Ahmed Sufi. And my question is for Professor Wilcox. So you earlier do a distinction between civil disobedience and formed local communities and forms of resistance. Would you please clarify that?

Shelley Wilcox
Okay, right. Thank you for your question. So civil disobedience, we’re pretty familiar, right? Civil disobedience is often undertaken by an individual or a group of people, the goal of the action is to bring attention to an unjust policy and ultimately to try to change that policy. My understanding of collective resistance is a broader umbrella. One thing about civil disobedience, which we’ve already re pointed out is that civil disobedience does involve violating a law for the sake of changing that or a similar law, collective resistance doesn’t necessarily need to violate a law, I would say that collective resistance is undertaken for three goals, one being to express condemnation of a policy or law, another being to refuse to participate in a wrong, and the third to be to protect people from harm. And that’s what I think can happen with sanctuary.

Ken Taylor
Let me ask you about this, because I think this is an interesting and important distinction. So civil disobedience, though, even though it violates the law, and it does so consciously and aware and willing to accept to say, it sees itself as grounded in a deep respect for the rule of law, because the law can only be the law, what philosophers call the normativity of the law requires that the law command respect and not just be a stick, it has to command respect. Well, unjust laws, don’t command respect. And so if I’m civilly disobedient, I’m saying to you as the lawmaker, you haven’t done it, right. You haven’t lived up to the thing that makes the law normative. It doesn’t deserve respect. Yeah. Okay. When I’m just in opposition to the law. Right, this oppositional thing? I wonder, does it have the same commitment to the rule of law? Is it just I don’t agree with you, and therefore I resist you. Right. Right. That seems really different.

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah, that’s a great question. So if we’re going to talk about individuals committing or participating in acts of collective or individual resistance, we might not think that they necessarily have to have this fidelity criterion which we associate with civil disobedience. I certainly do think when we’re talking about public policy, as opposed to individual or group actions, there, there does need to be a general commitment to the law. That’s demonstrated by the very democratic process, right, which brings the sanctuary policy into law.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to philosophy. Talk me. What’s your comment? Your question?

Ofri
Hi, I’m Ofri, and my question is sort of broad for all of you. It seems like there’s a lot of talk about crime statistics that’s being banded on both sides of the line. But it’s unclear whether or not the increase in reported crime is what’s accounting for the overall increase in crime or how that exactly spells out.

Ken Taylor
I think crime is going down. Yeah, I think it’s demagogue who’s who talks about the increase.

Josh Landy
And I wonder about the rhetoric. I wanted to run something by your Shelly was wondering whether, you know, the proponents of sanctuary cities I include myself have a kind of rhetorical problem and branding problem, right, because framing it as sanctuary cities is framing it as an altruistic enterprise, which it is, but it’s also we should also appeal to people’s self interest. And some people are more reachable through you know, what if we call them smart cities or small government city, efficient city Safe Cities, you know, because crime is giving me that As you rightly said, statistics show immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes in the meantime, having a sanctuary we now call sanctuary policies encourages people to report other crimes to the police. Right. And so it makes our cities safer. So you know, what about rebranding?

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah. Well, I think you’re absolutely right about that. It also is the case that sanctuary cities are in general, safer than non sanctuary cities. Right. So we do have that going for us. And I do think that as you’re suggesting, the public safety argument, it is rhetorically persuasive, and it’s rhetorically persuasive, partly because it identifies a non controversial public policy goal and argues that sanctuary policies are needed to accomplish that goal, to the benefit of everyone regardless of their migration.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about sanctuary cities with Shelley Wilcox from San Francisco State University.

Josh Landy
Immigration isn’t the only domain where federal policy and local attitudes conflict. Think about marijuana laws, environmental regulations, abortion rights. Can thinking about sanctuary cities illuminate these other tensions between national authority and local agendas?

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Jack Adams Hall and the SF State campus. We’ll take more questions from our audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tiffany Austin
You’re so scared you want to scream, but you dare not make a sound if you want to hold on to your dream.

Josh Landy
Thanks once again to our live musical guests, the amazing Tiffany Austin Quartet. I’m Josh laddie. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re thinking about sanctuary cities with Shelley Wilcox from San Francisco State University. And we’ve got more questions from our live audience. Welcome to philosophy Talk, sir. What’s your comment or question?

Cameron
Hi, my name is Cameron Miller. I’m a student at SF State. And I was wondering, what do you think would happen if every city became a sanctuary city?

Shelley Wilcox
The world would be a better place.

Ken Taylor
Let’s follow up on that question. Josh said that if we had a sane, humane, effective immigration policy, we wouldn’t need sanctuary cities. Do you agree with that or not? Yes. So in the best world, there wouldn’t be this tension between national policy and local. Right, isn’t that right?

Shelley Wilcox
You know, in order to defend sanctuary policies, I don’t think we necessarily have to argue that the state does not have a right of any kind of immigration enforcement. So I could imagine that even if the federal immigration policy were just and that meant that some people were legitimately deportable. For instance, people who had been here for a week, right and didn’t have an asylum claim and didn’t have family and didn’t have a job, right. In those cases, we might imagine that we would still need public safety, justified policy more

Ken Taylor
about what what kind of world that would be like in which we have a reasonable policy with a nation agrees it’s just but we still just don’t me, help me fill out my imagination. Yeah,

Shelley Wilcox
here’s what I think are some unjust enforcement policies. One of those is arbitrary deportations that are indiscriminate about the length of time one’s been in the country, the ties that has one has their local community, the fact that they have legitimate asylum claim that may have been wrongly denied the fact that they were a veteran in the armed services, right? If none of that was taking place, then you might ask what do we need sanctuary policies? I think we would absolutely not need oppositional sanctuary policies. Right. But as long as the national government can justly deport individuals for right, cause we’re still going to need non cooperation policies to advance public safety.

Ken Taylor
I think I get it. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir. What’s your comment or question?

Devin
Hello, my name is Devin. I’m from Paso Robles. My question was that we’ve been talking about sanctuary cities is times when cities sort of choose not to enforce government policy. And when we like they believe that the government policy is unethical or immoral or something like that. under what situations our cities not allowed to disagree with government policy, are there conditions under which cities should not be able to disagree with government policy, even if they think it is immoral or unethical?

Josh Landy
Yeah, I’m not sure That brings us to a question we’re talking about a moment ago before the break, you know, we’re talking about other cases where you might think there are potential conflicts between local municipalities or states and federal policy, like drug laws, environment, abortion, you know, we might think, oh, you know, great for cities to hold out and have sanctuary policies. But we feel the same way if it were a matter of abortion, and conversely, someone who thinks that’s a great thing for abortion, might feel it’s terrible for sanctuary. So. So what do you think? Are there things that we can learn from your thinking about sanctuary cities, that we can apply to these other cases? Yeah,

Shelley Wilcox
I think one important feature of a legitimate persuasive justification for a sanctuary policy is that the policy itself it doesn’t violate individual rights. And I started thinking about this, right, because there have been anti migrant local policies, and there have been migrant protecting sanctuary policies. And we certainly want to be able to distinguish between justifications that would legitimate rights violations and those that wouldn’t. So I think that that’s a necessary criterion moving forward when we think about any time municipality asserts local authority, right, those policies must respect individual rights. And of course, you can tell where I’m going with this in the case of abortion restrictions, right.

Ken Taylor
Well, right. But I think there are some rights, I don’t know call them basic rights that own you’d have to be hardly human, not to acknowledge that human beings have a right to that bodily integrity or something like that. You’d have to be some kind of moral monster. Okay. But there are lots of claimed rights that people radically disagree about. Suppose the government says marijuana was a scheduled C drug or whatever. And the state of California says, No, it’s not. And, you know, the federal government says, war on drugs. California says no, no war on drugs. I mean, that’s a contentious thing. How helped me think about it, but it’s not so obvious. I said in the opening, and I believe this, everybody thinks they have a monopoly on righteousness. When it’s not until I do. I know, when it’s not so obvious where the righteous thing is, and we’ve got these conflicting sources of government power and authority. Let me think about that.

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah. I mean, there, we would have to look at the particular arguments, right. So we really want to look at why it is that the local body is a third asserting authority, or denying federal authority. So, you know, with sanctuary policies, we’re looking at the particular arguments, and you’d have to, we’d have to look at the argument

Ken Taylor
So we’d have to get really down in the weeds, is what you’re saying.

Josh Landy
I mean, that in the rights arguments are really complicated, right? Because you might think, reasonably, that security is a basic human right. And you might also think that an immigrant not living an undocumented immigrant not living in a sanctuary city might have officially the, you know, the ability to have security, but in practice, they don’t really have that they don’t have access to that that right. So is that is that just a over subtle argument? Or do you think that’s an important piece of this puzzle?

Shelley Wilcox
I actually do think that’s an important argument. And it extends beyond the right from physical security to other constitutionally protected rights, like a right to public education, the right to emergency medical care, right. So as long as officials who are are working in emergency rooms or school administrators, or teachers or doctors, right, have the authority to be operating as ICE agents, then people’s rights to those services will be denied.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk. What’s your comment or question?

Eric
Hi, my name is Eric. And I was born in Walnut Creek. At the top of Philosophy Talk, professor Wilcox, you talked about how we have this privilege as citizens that I had no say in where I was born. And yet, that gives me so much in common with someone, maybe an Indiana who I have never met as opposed to the people who I live with. And I see every day who I share my entire community in our environment with and everything except that accident of citizenship. And so how can it not then be an imperative to reach out to the people in my own sphere in this circle? And maybe I can’t act in conjunction with someone in Indiana, but I can act in the best interests of my own neighbors. How can that not become paramount?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, good question.

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah. You know, I think we’re in agreement. And I think I would go a step further to say it’s not only acting in the interest or acting in solidarity, it’s recognizing someone’s strong moral right, as a member of the community that has no morally relevant difference from me. their right to be here, and to remain with their families and to be protected by the city’s laws.

Ken Taylor
So but let’s push back on this just a little bit to take Eric’s question in a slightly different way. Look, the world has a huge migration problem. And I hate to tell the younger people in here, it’s going to get exponentially worse. Now, here’s something you could believe nations are kind of obsolete, because nations are these things that say, I get to say, who’s a member of me. But if you do that, in a world in which some huge percentage of the world’s people are unsettled enough to be somewhere, and you’re not going to just lock them out. Okay, so the people who are already here, but what about the people who want to come here? How much do I owe them? Right? Especially when it’s like a lifeboat situation, right? Where huge swaths of the earth are not going to be fruitfully habitable in what do you think about that?

Shelley Wilcox
You know, if you could legitimately show right that admitting additional refugees would come at the cost of public order, right, then I would say, okay, maybe that’s a legitimate break.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir. What’s your comment or question?

Megan
My name is Megan. I’m from Marin. I was wondering if the housing crisis and limitation of resources in San Francisco and other metropolitan areas pose a threat to its sanctuary status? Or is it an incentive for cities to declare it sanctuary status?

Shelley Wilcox
Yeah, I think that’s a really important question. I oftentimes hear resistance to Sanctuary policies in two different sort of related avenues. And their concerns about fairness, both of them, one’s a concern that some authorized migrants right have waited in line, and unauthorized migrants are skipping the queue. And so that’s unfair. But I also hear this concern about resources being limited, and sort of presumption right that we ought to take care of our quote, unquote, own first, I think that resources are as limited as we as citizens, allow them to be. Right. So these are political decisions. There is not a lack of money in San Francisco. Right. It’s a lack of political will. Right. I also think, as I sort of intimated, I think undocumented individuals who are part of our communities have every bit as much right to whatever resources are being distributed as I do. I don’t think the fact that I happen to be born in the United States is magic. I think the fact that I live here that this is my community that I contribute to it, and so on, I think that’s the thing that gives me a right. So whatever limit to resources they are, they ought to be divided fairly. And I don’t think citizenship status when we’re talking about people who are integrated in the community. I don’t think that’s a morally relevant, legitimate way to distinguish who gets more and who gets less.

Ken Taylor
So surely, this is a great conversation. But give me one last bit of insight. One takeaway that you’d want to leave us with?

Shelley Wilcox
The takeaway is that there are a number of excellent arguments for sanctuary policies, some of which depend on arguments for the common good, some of which depend on arguments that appeal to individual rights.

Ken Taylor
So on that optimistic note of philosophical wisdom, I’m going to thank you for joining us has been a great conversation.

Shelley Wilcox
Thank you.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Shelly Wilcox. She’s a professor of philosophy here at San Francisco State University and author of “How can sanctuary policies be justified?” The conversation continues at Philosophers Corner, at our online community of thinkers, where our motto—with no apologies whatsoever to Descartes—is Cogito ergo Bloggo, I think, therefore, I blog. And you can become our Partner in our community just by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
Descartes is turning in his grave. If you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, either hear on the radio, we’d love to hear from you. Email it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk. And we may feature it on our blog. Now, here’s a guy who finds his sanctuary and rapid talk—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The more I learned about Canada, the less cool Mounties came to be. The image I had was Sergeant Preston, and his amazing dog, King, roaming the wilderness, looking for trouble, usually in the form of some owl-hoot stealing a prospector’s nuggets. Well apparently, Mounties don’t go around in the red coat, jodhpurs, and flat-brimmed hats all the time. They wear suits, sometimes live in Toronto, and are as prone to the pitfalls of corruption, bureaucracy, rivalries, and strongly held political opinions as the next cop. One of the problems I have with ICE is I see them as sneaky guys, hiding in full riot gear in the Hall of Justice hallways. Some guy with a Spanish surname comes charged with a traffic violation, or murder. ICE is there, checking out witnesses, the friends and family, snatching them up if they’re illegal, and shipping them back to Guatemala. Well, so-called illegal immigrants come in kinds—people who just snuck in, who came in to work with their cousin, looking to work construction under the table, farm workers, dish washers, cleaning ladies, maids, drug smugglers. Yeah, some problems, but where would we get cash only cheap labor without “aliens?” Just on my block, I got trash hauling next door and concrete pouring four doors down. I will bet at least some of those workers are not actual citizens of this proud nation. There’s your crime wave, America. Go get em Ice. Why Sanctuary Cities? Well, ICE gets in the way with their raids and self importance and whatnot of local cops trying to do THEIR jobs. They have better things to do than hold your water, ICE. They got killers to bust, speeding tickets to issue. And how we gonna get to trial, when the witnesses don’t show up, because ICE is checking everybody’s papers in the hallway. Then there was the Kathryn Steinle shooting in San Francisco back in 2015. Illegal immigrant Jose Garcia Zarate was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges. So legally, he was just another idiot with a stolen gun, citizen or no. He said he’d just found it in a bag on a bench and when he picked it up it went off. The gun itself had been issued to a Bureau of Land Management agent, and stolen from a backpack in his car. Sue him, I say. Just before this, Zarate had done a stretch in San Bernadino for entering the country without the proper documents, his fifth illegal crossing, which indicates just how seriously we treat this issue. The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department had requested the Bureau of Prisons to turn him over to San Francisco cops to face a 20 year old marijuana felony charge. When he arrived in San Francisco, however, the marijuana charge was dropped. But then ICE requested that he be kept in custody until immigration authorities could pick him up. Which would be, um, I dunno, soon, whenever. Now San Francisco, as a Sanctuary City, would only detain if the immigrant had committed or was wanted for violent felonies. Zarate had neither, and was released in April 2015. The shooting of Kathryne Steinle happened on July 1. The County Sheriff lost his job because of all this, Ted Cruz thumped for Kate’s Law because of it, which would have outlawed sanctuaries, but never went anywhere. And Zarate was also acquitted of gun possession charges because, according to his testimony, it went off when he picked it up, and he threw it into the Bay. Does a couple seconds count as possession? He is still in prison though, on more federal charges. Which means he too, like so many others, has not yet been deported. So who wins? Not Kathryn Steinle. But, it must be said, Sanctuary Cities do not offer sanctuary, in the sense that you can hide in the church from the angry mob, or posse, or zombies. It’s just fodder for turf wars in the great game of law enforcement. Who gets money? Who gets the jails? Who gets the armored vehicles? Who gets the snazzy new bullet proof uniforms? Most important, who gets the guns? Well, everybody, I guess. Everything else is just cheap labor, cash on the barrelhead, sh, don’t tell the tax man. So will ICE ever get a teevee show, like the FBI, or DEA, or Scotland Yard, or Swat, or Cobra, or the Mounties. I doubt it. The very name strikes fear into the heart of the guy you’re paying under the table to do your dry wall. I really don’t see the future in that. Don’t know where it will end. The illegal immigrant population is plummeting, partially thanks to Trump’s half baked efforts. So cheap labor is growing scarcer, I assume. I don’t think any of us, not even sanctuaries, can afford a home remodel right now. I gotta go

Tiffany Austin
Holding hands at midnight ‘neath the starry sky, nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, Copyright 2019

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producer is Tina Pamintuan. Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Momo Khattak, Conchita Perales, Kevin Fields, and April Rudnick

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Asta Sveinsdottir, Jen Waller, Arezoo Islami, the SF State University Philosophy Club, the Department of Philosophy, and the College of Liberal and Creative Arts.

Josh Landy
And thanks to our musical guests: Adam Shulman on piano, David Ewell on bass, Leon Joyce on drums, and Tiffany Austin on vocals.

Ken Taylor
The Senior Producer of Philosophy Talk is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Our Marketing Director is Cindy Prince Baum. Dan Brandon is the Technical Director.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University, and the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ken Taylor
The views expressed (or mis-expressed_ on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Ken Taylor
The conversation continues on our website — philosophy talk dot O-R-G, where you too can become a Partner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. Thank you for listening.

Ken Taylor
And thank you for thinking.

Tiffany Austin
Nice work if you can get it, and if you get it, won’t you tell me how.