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During the late 2010s, pro‐immigrant activists in the politically progressive municipality of Mayville, California (pseudonym) mounted a campaign to enact a radically egalitarian sanctuary city policy (“sanctuary for all”) that would have changed the boundaries of urban citizenship. The campaign crafted compelling and resonant mobilization frames, constructed a broad and diverse coalition, won the support of large majorities of the public, and targeted elected officials who were all supportive of the rights of immigrant residents. Such conditions, according to literature on immigration politics and urban citizenship, should have resulted in success, but this was not entirely the case. Elected officials did open the policymaking process in response to pressure from activists, but a far‐reaching policy never emerged. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article develops the concept of the ‘bureaucratic field’ to explain how the distinctive and relatively autonomous power dynamics of a municipality shapes policy outcomes (despite advantages in the political field). The article concludes that without a robust theory of the bureaucratic field, contemporary theorists of social movements and urban citizenship cannot explain the disparity between highly advantageous conditions in progressive political fields and the paucity of transformative policy outcomes.

 

The concept of adminigration provides a much-needed lens in theorizing immigration enforcement, citizenship, and urban geographies. We define adminigration as the governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants. Our focus on adminigration involves three theoretical interventions: (1) bridging literature on immigrant bureaucratic incorporation and crimmigration to situate city-level administrative practices within immigration policymaking; (2) a focus on how localized definitions of membership, as enacted by cities, produce citizenship, legality, and illegality, and (3) the argument that these practices play out in space, resulting in variegated urban landscapes that are better characterized as a network than a level. We develop these points through a review of the literature on bureaucratic incorporation, crimmigration, citizenship, and the spatialization of immigration policymaking. To illustrate the utility of this framework, we conclude with a case study of adminigration in a California city that we call “Mayville.”