Sanctuary Cities: A Study in Modern Nullification?

Since Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, the sanctuary movement has gained prominence as a form of resistance to federal immigration policy. Sanctuary cities and states have attempted to frustrate the Trump administration’s immigration agenda by refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) efforts to remove aliens illegally residing in the United States. Academics, pundits and politicians have compared this resistance and non-cooperation to “nullification,” a doctrine typically associated with the South Carolina Nullification Crisis of the 1830s and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. This article rejects comparisons between the sanctuary movement and nullification as false equivalencies and explains why the sanctuary movement is not a form of modern nullification. Rather, it suggests the movement is better understood as being similar to “interposition”—a doctrine related to, but distinct from, nullification. In doing so, this paper will clarify the meaning of nullification and interposition by analyzing the developments of these doctrines. Part 1 of this article discusses the historical, theoretical and practical aspects of South Carolina-style nullification, and compares these to that of the sanctuary movement. Part 2 explores the development of nullification and interposition more broadly, with a particular focus on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Finally, Part 3 directly compares the sanctuary movement, nullification and interposition, and it connects the movement to the “anti-commandeering” doctrine articulated by the Supreme Court in the 1990s.

THE AMERICAN SYSTEM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BLACK COLONIZATION

From 1816 through to the end of the Civil War, the colonization of emancipated slaves in Africa and the American tropics occupied a prominent place in federal policy discussions. Although colonization has traditionally been interpreted as an aberration in anti-slavery thought on account of its dubious racial legacy and discounted for its impracticality, its political persistence remains a challenge for historians of the antebellum era. This article offers an explanation by identifying a distinctive economic strain of colonization in the moderate anti-slavery advocacy of Mathew Carey, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln. From the nullification crisis until the Civil War, adherents of this strain effectively integrated colonization into the American System of political economy. Their efforts were undertaken to both reconcile their respective anti-slavery views with a raw-material-dependent domestic industrialization program, and to adapt American System insights to an intended program of gradual, compensated emancipation.