Abstract
Asad L. Asad's Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life provides an ethnographic account of whether, how and why undocumented immigrants and their children manage institutional surveillance by engaging or evading it. The author conducted in-depth interviews of Latino Immigrant Families with mixed legal status (undocumented, permanent, naturalized, and born citizens) in Dallas County, Texas and ethnographic observations in Dallas Immigration Court between 2013 and 2018. These observations are placed within the historical context of immigration laws, regulations, and policies, along with the changes under the administrations of Obama, Trump, and Biden.
Asad's book stands out among the dominant accounts that people evade institutional surveillance, fearing punishment, and that their avoidance is a strategy for self-preservation. For Asad, such an account “represent[s] just one lens into the complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment” (p. 12). Rather than just aversion fearing punishment and deportation, the author argues that undocumented immigrants manage surveillance through the twin strategies of institutional engagement with and evasion of state institutions such as regulatory and service institutions. To understand the complex dynamic determining migrants’ engagement with institutional surveillance despite the risk of deportation, the author explores the “situational context” of immigrants’ multiple social roles and responsibilities. Specifically, each chapter of the book uncovers migrants’ legal status, social role, and responsibilities—it includes “prospective migrants” (Chapter 1), “immigrants as individuals” (Chapter 2), “immigrant parents” (Chapter 3), and “petitioning immigrants” (Chapter 4).
As Asad shows, the legal status with which Latinos enter the United States is a reflection of the hardships and inequality that motivate cross-border migration but continues to shape their lives at the destination by constraining their work opportunities and access to public goods (healthcare, education, and public assistance). It is the need to navigate these hardships that force them to adopt the strategy to engage or evade institutional surveillance in their interactions, which the author calls managing surveillance. For Asad, surveillance is mutual, and besides the state's surveilling institutions, the undocumented immigrants, though disempowered, also constantly monitor the application of immigration laws, regulations, and policies and how they apply to them. At the same time, the awareness of being watched by state institutions leads them to adopt self-surveillance over their behaviors during their interactions with policing, employment, taxation, and accessing public goods. By following Foucault's understanding of surveillance as punishment and reward, Asad regards them as “mutually constitutive.” While migration scholars have predominantly explored the former, Asad focuses on both to explain the “surveillance's dual functions” (p. 132).
Asad employs interactionist theory to understand why undocumented immigrants engage with the state despite the fear of surveillance and ultimately deportation. He shows that these engagements are selective, balanced, and determined by migrants’ multiple social roles as immigrants, workers, parents, community members, and so on. Migrants’ engagement thus strives to “minimize negative interactions” (paying traffic tickets and avoiding investigation and arrest) and “maximize positive interactions” (paying taxes and good parenting) (p. 18). Asad explores migrants’ engagement by employing Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey's conceptual understanding of legal consciousness “against the law” and “with the law” (p. 95). In the former, undocumented immigrants perceive the state institutions as dangerous as it could lead to deportation, hence need to be avoided. In the latter, they recognize the state institutions as allowing them certain roles and purposes. For instance, Alma evades immigration officers patrolling the border to enter the United States. Once entered, she uses false identity documents to acquire a job because immigrants are denied work authorization. She does so despite being aware that this is a criminal offence that could get her arrested and possibly deported; however, it is counterbalanced by paying income taxes. Similarly, though not eligible for health insurance, she is not disqualified from pre- and postnatal care, and her citizen children were eligible for health services. It is her hardships that lead her to engage with healthcare for her U.S.-born children, while also avoiding it whenever possible to minimize the risk of being referred to the police or child protective services.
Asad's Engage and Evade is an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of sociology, political science and law, which makes a significant contribution to the fields of migration and surveillance studies. Most importantly, the author is hopeful and recommends “immediate reforms” in institutional surveillance and “more substantial, long-term changes” to address the inequalities based on legal status (p. 33). Though the book limits itself to families it certainly opens doors for future scholarship on “managing surveillance.” Anyone interested in crime, law and deviance and surveillance and punishment should definitely add this book to their reading list. It is especially valuable for students venturing into research, as the author took the pain to offer a detailed account of their methodology, data collection, and analysis in the appendix.