Speaker Series: Asad L. Asad

Some eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families’ societal presence. Engage and Evade examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins.

Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer a rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions—for example, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs—that the government can use to monitor them. This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership. Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials’ high expectations, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion.

Calling attention to the fraught lives of undocumented immigrants and their families, this superbly written and compassionately argued book proposes wide-ranging, actionable reforms to achieve societal inclusion for all.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

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Asad L. Asad is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His scholarly interests encompass social stratification; race, ethnicity, and immigration; surveillance and social control; and health. Asad’s current research agenda considers how institutional categories—in particular, legal status—matter for multiple forms of inequality. His forthcoming book, Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton University Press), examines how and why undocumented immigrants worried about deportation nonetheless engage with institutions whose records the government can use to monitor them. Additional research projects focus on the effects of immigration enforcement on health, the role of the federal judiciary in immigration enforcement, and the capacity of immigrant-serving organizations to counter the inequalities of the U.S. immigration system.

Asad’s research has been published in several outlets, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Law & Society Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Social Science & Medicine. His work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Louis Wirth Award for Best Article given by the Section on International Migration, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Asad earned his B.A. in Political Science and Spanish Language and Culture from the University of Wisconsin, and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University.