Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life by Asad L. Asad, Sociology

Books in Brief

June 14, 2023

Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life

Asad L. Asad wearing a white collared shirt and black sport coat standing in front of Stanford's Main Quad and the cover of his book, Engage & Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life — Asad L. Asad. Photo by Harrison Truong for Stanford University. Book image courtesy of Princeton University Press.

“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.”