“Exile & Sanctuary”: The Politics of Hospitality
History of the Sanctuary Movement in the US
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season of Illuminations programming draws from the performing arts and UC Berkeley scholarship to explore the theme of “Exile & Sanctuary.” Hospitality has long been a fundamental ethic across cultures, yet in modern times, it has become a flashpoint of political debate. The Sanctuary Movement—born not from progressive politics but from conservative Christian values—offers a surprising origin story for today’s struggles over migration, refuge, and belonging. In this conversation, we examine how the act of offering sanctuary shifted from a moral obligation to a contested “liberal cause,” and what this history reveals about the power and limits of hospitality in a divided world.
This video features Leti Volpp, PhD, UC Berkeley’s Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice; Angela Marino, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Stephanie Zonszein, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Political Science; and Alex Saum-Pascual, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and member of the Executive Board for Berkeley Center for New Media.
For more on our 2025–26 season and our Illuminations programming, visit calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Leti Volpp:
There’s a saying: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. We are here because you were there.” In other words, we have migrated to the metropole from the colony because you were colonizing us in the past.
Angela Marino:
So if you’re Campesino and you’re in exile from a condition of violence, you might try to find sanctuary within the United States, but you’re in the heart of the beast looking for sanctuary from the very machinery all the way around that’s never facing what it actually did to cause that immigration in the first place.
Stephanie Zonszein:
For the displaced, even after living in a place for different generations, they’re still confronting the fact that they do not have full access to participation in society, the economy, politics.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
If we are understanding sanctuary as providing safety and protection to somebody who is endangered or feeling any kind of prosecution, it seems like the moral thing to do. It’s common sense. The problem comes when we redefine those people seeking exile as enemies or villains.
THE SANCTUARY MOVEMENT
Leti Volpp:
So the origins of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s began because members of religious communities saw that there was terrible violence in Latin America. In particular, the United States was helping arm and fund very repressive regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. And in the process, almost a million people fled and came to the United States. At the same time, once those Guatemalans and Salvadorans applied for asylum, the rate of approval was between 1 and 3%, while the average rate of approval of asylum generally was about 30%.
Angela Marino:
I remember… a young man coming to my house when I was a kid, and hearing the story of what the paramilitary in El Salvador supported by the United States had done to their family members. It was torture. It was dismemberment. It was the most atrocious cruelty. And that kind of violence that was produced by the state was a condition of exile and sanctuary that was never heard about really in the mainstream of U.S. political discourse or political cultures. It remained something that people have fought for in the interfaith community to bring forward for as a Sanctuary Movement.
Leti Volpp:
So there was this, I think, very well-founded perception, which was that the United States essentially supported these military dictatorships that were producing all of these refugees, who then were not being recognized as actual refugees when they came to the United States. So members of religious organizations started feeding people, sheltering people, transporting people, providing them with legal aid, and there were a number of people who actually were criminally prosecuted for their activities as part of the Sanctuary Movement. So I think their linguistic similarities—obviously colonial regimes bring a language with them that they force the people they’re colonizing to learn, and it becomes the language of colonial administration. There become immigration pathways that exist for people from former colonies that shape why people go to the so-called metropole from the colony.
THE POLITICS OF HOSPITALITY
Stephanie Zonszein:
Starting perhaps in the 1990s, just at the end of the Sanctuary Movement… Before this, we had the two parties taking very similar positions in terms of immigration policy, so both parties would be wanting to give more rights to immigrants who were already in the U.S. But in the 1990s is when we see these two parties diverging in their policies, voters now starting to understand then immigration policy and immigration in general as something that is politicized: If you support the Democratic Party, then you’re liberal, and then you’re supporting more inclusionary policies If you’re supporting the Republican Party, then you’re not.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
I think “hospitality,” like any other word, can be activated to mean many different things that serve different intentions and with different power structures behind. So, when polarization is thriving and creating a certain battle over meaning, “hospitality” will be a word that can be activated to mean its complete opposite even.
Leti Volpp:
To whether or not I think of sanctuary as essentially a liberal act, I feel like it’s a human act. It’s a humane act. It’s recognizing that the stranger is the neighbor, is potentially the loved one.
Alex Saum-Pascual:
You could think of that as “liberal politics,” but if you’re thinking about just aiding people to escape possible death, it just seems the moral thing to do. There’s nothing inherently “liberal” about that.
