Saving Sanctuary Cities

THERE IS YET ANOTHER nefarious right wing movement afoot (will they never end?); to use any means necessary, including federal power, to force America's so called "sanctuary cities" to cease and desist allegedly giving sanctuary to undocumented, illegal immigrants. Right wingers, you'll notice, ostensibly in favor of something they call "smaller government", are nevertheless always willing, able, and ready to beef up federal government action whenever it suits their agenda. Also, there is their tendency to couch their projects in vague, misleading terms, like "sanctuary cities" and "small government", a term those in favor of sanctuary cities also misleadingly use. The term "sanctuary city" refers to those cities which have chosen to refrain from using local law enforcement to apprehend undocumented, illegal immigrants, and to instead leave it exclusively to the feds, whose jurisdiction it ultimately is. Let the feds handle it as they see fit. Its their problem, and besides, local law enforcement is already seriously overtaxed, and cities financially stretched to the limit. In the United States, illegal immigrants are treated with contempt and exclusion, like legal immigrants and other minorities, and always have been. For them, there is no "sanctuary". The term "sanctuary" implies acceptance and protection, which is hardly what they have. Their circumstances are much more analguous to prison, or ostracization. The anti-sanctuary city doctrine traces the sanctuary movement to the 1980s, when President Reagan's direct opposition to socialist movements in Latin America brought a flood of refugees to America's cities, and inspired America's liberal community to protest by refusing to cooperate in rounding them up. Thus, conservative foreign policy caused the refugee problem, and conservative domestic policy criminalizes the refugees. If the United States would stop driving people out of their own countries, perhaps it would mitigate, at least somewhat, our urgent desire to drive them out of ours.