In Engage and Evade, Asad L. Asad offers a provocative intervention that challenges the popular and scholarly understandings of institutional surveillance on undocumented immigrants. In the public imagination, undocumented immigrants endure the omnipresent possibility of deportation and thus hide in the shadows of society. Asad's compelling book argues instead that “surveillance is as much about the fear of societal exclusion as the hope for societal inclusion” (p. 5). Through interviews with Latino immigrant families in Dallas County, Texas, quantitative analyses of the American Time Use Survey, and ethnographic fieldwork in the Dallas immigration court, this book analyzes how the management of surveilling institutions, the interactions between various actors and immigrants, and the resulting production of formal records, can aid or punish immigrant families.
Chapter 1 describes the lives of prospective immigrants to illustrate how immigration surveillance affects the decision-making process of migration and the immigrants' initial interpretations of surveillance. Chapter 1 introduces a type of long arc of surveillance developed throughout the book, although Asad does not describe it as such. Given specific structural conditions in their countries of origin, Asad contends that unique forms of social, material, and psychological deprivation influence migration. Furthermore, the immigrants' social and material resources impact modes of entry (cross-border or visa entry) to the United States. Modes of entry, in turn, establish how immigrants will interact with various institutional actors within the United States.
Chapter 2 continues the arc of surveillance with regulatory institutions, including policing, employment, and taxation. Asad argues that undocumented immigrants selectively engage by avoiding negative interactions with police and amplifying positive interactions through employment and taxation. Undocumented immigrants will adjust their mindsets and behaviors with their perceived expectations from authorities. They entirely avoid interacting with police, by obeying traffic signals and driving responsibly for example, and/or solely worry about particular types of interactions, such as those resulting from unpaid traffic citations. Through employment and taxation, they also respect the law by filing their taxes and paying their share to the economy. Undocumented immigrants understand surveillance tools, which they hope will prove their moral lives and lack of criminality. Chapter 2 is the strongest chapter, demonstrating that through the management of everyday surveillance, undocumented immigrants actively minimize their exclusion and maximize their inclusion in society.
Chapter 3 proceeds by analyzing how parenthood presents new tensions with service-based institutions, such as healthcare, education, or public assistance. Illegality imposes significant restrictions, especially in the labor market and socioeconomic mobility. Undocumented parents hope to protect their young children from these constraints. Their social roles as parents become consequential and they selectively engage with institutions for their children's welfare. Undocumented immigrants again align their behaviors to perceived expectations, despite concerns that acquiring public assistance for their citizen children would preclude future legalization opportunities, or that their inactions may trigger their deportation by other regulatory agencies. Asad reconciles this “complex dynamic” (p. 131)—whether to act as undocumented immigrants or undocumented parents—by arguing that “legal status matters—sometimes independently, sometimes interdependently, and sometimes successively—depending on situational context” (p. 130). Indeed, how undocumented immigrants manage everyday surveillance depends on the “unit of analysis…, context of enforcement …, or outcome” rather than a wholesale institutional evasion or dependence (p. 131).
Chapter 4 concludes the arc of surveillance, culminating in melancholic outcomes. After years of institutional engagement and the production of formal records, Chapter 4 showcases if and how surveillance may benefit or further harm immigrant families. Asad illustrates how affirmative and defensive petitions provide formal societal membership, or legal citizenship. Unfortunately, few immigrants qualify. Formal records matter for affirmative petitions, but legalization reconfigures immigrants' lives through new forms of institutional visibility. In defensive petitions, organizational and structural features of immigration court and immigrants' social and material resources often prevented any forms of relief. While formal records play a role, they are insufficient to overcome the structures of immigration law.
Engage and Evade provides significant sociolegal contributions. First, it signals and solidifies a turn to the micro-sociological analysis of migrant illegality. Unlike similar studies, such as Legal Passing (Reference GarcíaGarcía, 2019), Asad analyzes situational contexts, role alignment, and co-present interactions, rather than the performance of self, as the meaning-making elements of surveillance and institutional engagement. Second, Asad substantiates the “double-edged” and “twin dynamic” of surveillance as both punishment and reward (p. 6). The conclusions are generative and will interest scholars of legal cynicism, legal consciousness, and legal violence. Lastly, Engage and Evade focuses on the quotidian dimensions of social life and how various legal structures define the incorporation processes of undocumented immigrants and their family members. Engage and Evade is a must-read for immigration scholars.
I will conclude with some critical observations. First, the sample primarily includes adolescent or adult immigrants. Immigration scholars have argued that age at arrival leads to asymmetrical experiences with institutions, but the book does not explicitly foreground the importance of age at arrival. Secondly, the book demonstrates the societal exclusion of undocumented immigrants, but the meaning of societal inclusion remains elusive. What exactly counts as societal inclusion and membership if legalization, as argued in Chapter 4, fails to remedy the hardships of illegality? Engage and Evade assesses deportability and regularizability (the possibilities of deportation and regularization or legalization) rather than inclusion and exclusion (see Reference RuszczykRuszczyk, 2021). Lastly, the title conveys the core of the argument, but Asad's analysis highlights some limitations. He argues that “institutional engagement and evasion can represent two sides of the same coin” (p. 94). However, throughout the book, Asad utilizes the phrase “selective engagement” to illustrate both evasion and engagement. Evasion, at times, represents an opposing force to engagement. The term “engagement” captures a wide variety of activities, and its capacious boundaries, at times, encapsulate evasion as well. In other words, evasion acts as a sub-type, rather than the inverse of engagement, and therefore the same singular side of the metaphorical coin. Asad's phrase of selective engagement, however, resolves this binary.
Nonetheless, my critiques do not limit the valuable, nuanced, and insightful contributions of Engage and Evade. This important book will surely support the societal inclusion of undocumented immigrants by illuminating and interfering in the inequalities of laws and policies.
