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This essay focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt's work insofar as it relates to US racism, imperialism, and migration. While Arendt denied that US migration policy and racism were linked or even similar to exercises of racialized sovereignty, totalitarian tactics, and mass displacement in Europe, I suggest that her analyses help us to understand important racialized dialectics between prison and camp, citizen and stateless, and external displacement and internal displacement. In effect, this essay suggests that many of Arendt's analyses of racism, migration, and camps are more relevant to US history and contemporary US reality than she did or would have admitted. Arendt's work importantly suggested that the stateless were so rightless that they lacked even criminal rights. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the rightlessness of refugees in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreigner and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt's binary also indicates an adherence to crypto-normativity, despite her professed antifoundational approach to political issues. Together, her theoretical strengths and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex circumstances experienced today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first identifies the necessity for sanctuary as a form of protest against the discretionary and often absolute forms of power shaping the current immigration system, particularly as it affects undocumented immigrants. Although the plenary power doctrine has removed legal personhood from immigrants at the federal level since the late 1800s, immigrants' rightlessness and vulnerability to detention and deportation has grown since Trump was elected. It distinguishes between a sanctuary city and church-based sanctuary, holding that the latter fits more ancient conceptions of sanctuary. Faith-based sanctuary is also more radical than sanctuary cities, challenging sovereign power over immigrants who are largely rightless. The discourse of "earned citizenship" holds that undocumented immigrants must make amends to U.S. society and pay back taxes as well as earning the trust of the American public. In contrast, church-based sanctuary exposes the faulty logic of such claims, educating the public about the undocumented individual's existing ties to the community and his/her contributions. In humanizing the legal non-person, church-based sanctuary practices explode conventional binary between citizen and foreigner, problematizing claims of merit on the one side and lack of deservingness or alien status on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]