Engage and evade : how Latino immigrant families manage surveillance in everyday life

This book includes bibliographical references and index.

Chapter 1. Deprivation and Deportability Chapter 2. Deportable but Moral Immigrants Chapter 3. Good Immigrants, or Good Parents? Chapter 4. Surveillance and Societal Membership

"Because immigration is such a recurring-and divisive-topic in the United States, it is easy to assume that we understand what it means for an immigrant to live under the specter of surveillance and punishment. It is easy to assume, as many scholars and journalists do, that undocumented immigrants live on the run from the authorities, constantly fleeing to the margins of daily life, staying in the shadows beneath the eyes of the law. And yet, while it is certainly true that immigrants are constantly faced with mechanisms of surveillance that function as tools of societal exclusion, this only tells part of the story. As Asad L. Asad shows, many people with a sanctionable status cannot-and, in some cases, do not want to-evade surveilling institutions or the formal records they generate: evading the institutions that keep formal records is a luxury that most immigrants (especially those with children) cannot afford. In Engage and Evade, Asad uses a wealth of interviews and ethnographic observations collected in Dallas County, Texas, bolstered and contextualized by original analyses of national survey data, to explore whether, how, and why immigrants engage with surveilling institutions. Presenting the stories of immigrants living in mixed-status families in which at least two members of the household have different legal statuses, and focusing especially on the experiences of immigrant parents, Asad argues that engagement with such institutions stems as much from hope for societal inclusion as it does from fear of exclusion. By paying attention to the ways in which immigrants make sense of, pursue, and use the records that result from these engagements, Asad reveals a variety of ways these individuals reinforce or resist their sanctionable status through the state's own surveillance"--

"How everyday forms of surveillance threaten undocumented immigrants-but also offer them the hope of societal inclusionSome 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 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"--