Abstract
According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants resided in the USA as of 2022. They lived in approximately 6.3 million households that comprised 22 million individuals, with half of these individuals being US-born or lawful immigrants (Passel and Krogstad, 2024). Many undocumented immigrants are members of mixed-status families, have US citizen children, are gainfully employed or own businesses, pay various forms of taxes, and manage their households by paying monthly bills, buying groceries, and sending their children to school. Given these realities of everyday life, completely avoiding interactions with service- and regulatory-oriented institutions is seldom a viable option. In fact, although seemingly counterintuitive, many make a conscious effort to do so, which is the focus of Asad L. Asad's exceptional book, titled Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life.
Asad leveraged several methodological approaches, including in-depth interviews over multiple periods with 60 participants, analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey, and ethnographic observations of immigration court hearings in Dallas to assess how and why Latina/o immigrants with multiply situated social roles—for instance, as parents of young children or as noncitizen workers—selectively engage with or evade institutional surveillance. Asad guides readers through the reasons Latina/o immigrants, including those who are at real risk of deportation, may counterintuitively seek out and actively submit to various forms of institutional surveillance. In short, Asad finds they do it to secure a better life for their children; however, they also do it to conform to what they perceive as commonly held perceptions of ideal citizens worthy of societal membership, with the hopes of someday regularizing their immigration status.
Asad strikes a remarkable balance between engaging with high-level sociological theory, using rigorous empirical research methods, and highlighting the voices and humanity of his study participants to provide a nuanced and realistic account of how Latina/o immigrant parents actively and selectively engage with and evade institutional surveillance. I particularly valued his focus on how the primacy of participants’ immediate social roles affects this process, depending on the context. Moreover, drawing on the symbolic interactionist tradition, Asad calls attention to the meanings they ascribe to these processes. I appreciated this approach, because this type of meaning-making often remains obscured in most quantitatively oriented studies, including those with which I have been involved in my work.
I was also struck by how many of Asad's participants managed institutional surveillance out of prudence or as a form of self-discipline, thereby operating as a form of informal social control. At the same time, I also wonder whether actively engaging with various sources of institutional surveillance, be it working closely with service providers such as teachers, social workers, or healthcare providers, or meticulously keeping records such as paystubs, tax returns, vaccination booklets, school report cards, and paid parking tickets, for instance, may also serve as a source of empowerment for some—that is, the power and ability to control certain aspects of their lives that otherwise feel particularly precarious due to their immigration status.
Given the broader political climate, Asad's insights are especially relevant now. The current administration seems to be trying to fulfill campaign promises to carry out mass deportations, end birthright citizenship, and has even considered denaturalizing naturalized US citizens. Clearly, undocumented immigrants face risks, and members of mixed-status families will be impacted. In addition, the administration has started targeting legal permanent residents and student visa holders, removing some US citizens from the country, and deporting immigrants to third countries where they were not born. Asad's work provides potential insights into how some of these recently targeted immigrant groups deal with various forms of institutional surveillance in these uncertain times.
Asad's findings can also help us understand how members of immigrant families might respond to changing local policies. The broader anti-immigrant political climate leading up to the 2024 election contributed to the implementation of punitive policies at the local level, which could ultimately embolden street-level bureaucrats working in the institutions Asad discusses in his book. I could not help but reflect on his work when considering a ballot initiative that passed in my home state of Arizona in the fall of 2024. Proposition 314, titled the ‘Arizona Immigration and Border Law Enforcement Measure,’ was largely based on Texas's S.B. 4 and passed with 63% of the vote. If enacted, the measure will significantly impact how Latina/o immigrants in Arizona interact with institutional surveillance. Here is what Arizonans can expect under this law: Proposition 314 criminalizes noncitizens entering the state from abroad except through official ports of entry; it allows local law enforcement to arrest noncitizens crossing the border unlawfully; it grants state judges the power to order deportations; it mandates the use of the E-Verify program to verify immigration status before accessing public benefits; it makes it a felony for individuals to submit false information to employers or to apply for benefits fraudulently; and it makes selling fentanyl a felony if the dealer knows it was not manufactured in the USA and causes another person's death. Indicative of its breadth, Engage and Evade implicitly touches on every aspect of this proposition: immigrant criminalization; the shift of immigration enforcement from federal to local agencies; institutional surveillance; and even the persistent trope of the ‘deviant immigrant’ by implicitly linking undocumented immigration with drug smuggling and the fentanyl overdose crisis.
If the proposition is upheld, we will need additional research, such as Asad's work, to better understand how these measures affect immigrant engagement with regulatory and service institutions in Arizona. Ultimately, I worry that this effort will further erode trust between local officials and immigrant communities, thereby undermining public safety. Given these notably draconian and restrictive measures, I anticipate that immigrants in Arizona will increasingly attempt to evade regulatory and service institutions altogether. This matters because sociologists have repeatedly demonstrated that local contexts of reception have notable implications for how immigrants and their children integrate into US society.
Given its broad scope, Engage and Evade should be of interest to not only immigration scholars, but also institutional theorists, as well as those interested in law and society, the sociology of deviance, and social control. Furthermore, Asad's triangulation of research methods, coupled with his detailed, realistic, and honest methodological appendix on the challenges qualitative researchers often confront in the field, in my opinion, makes his book an excellent fit for graduate-level research methods courses. I cannot recommend this book enough.
