The practice of sanctuary—giving refuge to the threatened, vulnerable stranger—may be universal among humans. From primate populations to ancient religious traditions to the modern legal institution of asylum, anthropologist Linda Rabben explores the long history of sanctuary and analyzes modern asylum policies in North America, Europe, and elsewhere, contrasting them with the role that courageous individuals and organizations have played in offering refuge to survivors of torture, persecution, and discrimination. Rabben gives close attention to the mid-2010s refugee crisis in Europe and to Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States. This wide-ranging, timely, and carefully documented account draws on Rabben’s experiences as a human rights advocate as well as her training as an anthropologist. Sanctuary and Asylum will help citizens, professionals, and policy makers take informed and compassionate action. A Capell Family Book

Co-founder of the Women's March makes her YA debut in a near future dystopian where a young girl and her brother must escape a xenophobic government to find sanctuary. It's 2032, and in this near-future America, all citizens are chipped and everyone is tracked--from buses to grocery stores. It's almost impossible to survive as an undocumented immigrant, but that's exactly what sixteen-year-old Vali is doing. She and her family have carved out a stable, happy life in small-town Vermont, but when Vali's mother's counterfeit chip starts malfunctioning and the Deportation Forces raid their town, they are forced to flee. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to her tía Luna's in California, a sanctuary state that is currently being walled off from the rest of the country. But when Vali's mother is detained before their journey even really begins, Vali must carry on with her younger brother across the country to make it to safety before it's too late. Gripping and urgent, co-authors Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher have crafted a narrative that is as haunting as it is hopeful in envisioning a future where everyone can find sanctuary.

Sanctuary cities, or localities where officials are prohibited from inquiring into immigration status, have become a part of the broader debate on undocumented immigration in the United States. Despite the increasing amount of coverage sanctuary policies receive, the American public knows little about these policies. In this book, Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien delve into the history, media coverage, effects, and public opinion on these sanctuary policies in the hope of helping readers reach an informed decision regarding them.

Linda Rabben tells the story of sanctuary as it evolved over thousands of years around the world, from its origins in primate populations, to its elaboration in ancient religious traditions, to modern asylum laws and to current threats to immigration and human rights.

This book traces the ancient concept of sanctuary. It examines how the contemporary sanctuary city movement contributes to a hostile asylum regime by holding asylum seekers in a suspended state where rights are indefinitely deferred. At the same time, it explores myriad subversive practices challenging this waiting state.

The death of twenty-one Salvadoran refugees in the Arizona desert in 1980 made many Americans aware for the first time that people were strugglingÑand dyingÑto find political asylum in the United States. Tucsonan Jim Corbett first encountered the problem while attempting to help a hitchhiking refugee. What came of that act of altruism was a movement that spread across the country, challenged the federal government, and brought the refugee problem to national awareness. Corbett first worked within the law to help refugees process applications for asylum, but the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service soon began a program of arrests; then he began to smuggle refugees from the Mexican border to the homes of citizens willing to provide shelter, making hundreds of trips over the next two years; finally he enlisted the support of the Tucson Ecumenical Council and persuaded John Fife, pastor of the Southside Presbyterian Church, to open that building as a refuge. When legal action against Corbett and the others seemed imminent, Southside became, on March 24, 1982, the first of two hundred churches in the country to declare itself a sanctuary. Convictions of the Heart takes readers inside the santuary movement to reveal its founders' motives and underlying beliefs, and inside the courtroom to describe the government's efforts to stop it. Although the book addresses many points of view, its primary focus is on the philosophy of Jim Corbett. Rooted in the nonviolence of Gandhi, the Society of Friends, and Martin Luther King, Corbett's beliefs challenged individuals and communities of faith across the country to examine the strength of their commitment to the needs and rights of others.

New formulations of globalisation have radically altered how people conceptualize the movement of people, ideas and capital throughout the globe, with questions of securitisation and transnational sentiment re-shaping long-standing Western concepts of asylum and human rights. Questioning the manner in which the reception of sanctuary in modern Australia changes migrants' sense of belonging, this interdisciplinary volume focuses on the disjuncture between receiving sanctuary and feeling secure in one's self and community. With emphasis on the formation and expression of migrant and refugee cultures, the book deliberately blurs the distinction between migrants and refugees, in order to engage more directly with the subjectivities of lived experience and social networks. Presenting research from the fields of sociology, media studies, politics, international relations and history, Cultures in Refuge places explores the manner in which notions of asylum and refuge affect the processes of articulating and negotiating identities.