Navigating the institutional maze of undocumented life

How can we make sense of an undocumented immigrant risking her life to cross the border undetected, yet voluntarily providing her information to public benefit agencies for her US citizen children? What about buying fake working papers, or papeles chuecos, under someone else's name, yet paying taxes to the Internal Revenue Service for that very work under her real name? In Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life, sociologist Asad Asad offers a comprehensive framework that can address such questions, explaining how, when, and why undocumented immigrants seek out some surveilling institutions and actively avoid others. Through interviews with Latinx immigrant parents in Dallas, Texas, ethnographic observations at Dallas Immigration Court, and analysis of American Time Use Survey data, he tells a convincing, important, and desire-centered story (Tuck, 2009) of how these immigrants balance their often-conflicting identities as undocumented immigrants, workers, and parents. Asad's argument spans three phases of undocumented immigration: the unauthorized entry; the day-to-day realities of living, working, and raising a family without legal status; and encounters with immigration officials leading to legalization or deportation. He begins with what at first appears to be obligatory context: Why do people enter the United States without even seeking authorization? Yet in addressing this well-worn question, he develops a sophisticated argument related to the "self-fulfilling prophecy of deprivation and deportability" (46). The deprivation of money, safety, and proximity to loved ones that typically motivates immigration, he argues, is precisely what makes it impossible to qualify for legal pathways which themselves require funds, time, and connections. Given their limited work options, undocumented immigrants must carefully manage their economic deprivation to avoid unpaid traffic tickets, taxes, or rent that could lead to referrals to court, collection, or Child Protective Services, and ultimately to their deportation. They are therefore coerced into engagement with agencies they might fear, including traffic court, the Internal Revenue Service, and public benefit agencies. Finally, undocumented immigrants hope that their clean records, tax payments, and loving parenting will eventually help them prove the "good moral character" often necessary to legalize. However, in immigration court, Asad finds only another version of the same self-fulfilling prophecy: the reasons many in removal proceedings are unable to submit successful relief applications have to do with the deprivation that put them in those proceedings in the first place. As someone who practiced immigration law with low-income, mainly Latinx clients for years prior to entering academia, I particularly appreciate Asad's understanding of immigration law—something not all sociology scholarship manages to convey. He references specific sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, delves into the details of extreme hardship waivers and unlawful presence bars, and carefully considers the gap between laws on the books versus in practice through immigration court observations. Asad also manages to capture the multidimensionality of his interviewees in ways that can be difficult to do when focusing squarely on legal matters. He makes sense of the hesitancy—seen as irrational by many in the legal profession—that some of my clients expressed about applying for legalization after years undocumented. He shows how immigration enforcement affects immigrants' lives even in areas where immigration agents are not a constant presence, and even after immigrants obtain citizenship and an immigration lawyer's work is done. What really comes across in Asad's book, then, is the view that immigration law constrains but does not define the lives of undocumented immigrants, who smartly—and often successfully—navigate the obstacles US immigration law throws at them every day. Asad's framework can account for many other institutional interactions on which he does not focus, including undocumented immigrants' registration for the military's selective service and state laws granting access to driver's licenses, in-state tuition, and state financial aid. Such applications also involve risk of information-sharing yet can further position undocumented immigrants as "good citizens" and shield them from negative consequences such as unlicensed driving convictions. Other extensions of the framework prove more complicated. For example, Asad briefly acknowledges the U visa, a pathway to permanent residence for victims of crimes who cooperate with law enforcement investigations, but states that none of his interviewees referenced it. In some ways, undocumented immigrants who report crimes to the police contravene a key finding of Asad's: while his interviewees engaged with service-oriented institutions such as schools, hospitals, and public benefit agencies, they actively avoided regulatory agencies such as law enforcement. (The exception, a woman who stops a police officer to verify that her case has been resolved, proves the rule: she wants to avoid any need for future interactions with law enforcement.) Yet the case of the U visa also deepens Asad's point that "institutional inclusion can itself reflect inequality" (25): undocumented victims of crimes engage with police not necessarily due to any sense of safety, but rather due to coercion. At the end of his book, Asad goes beyond low-hanging immigration policy recommendations, such as raising visa caps and granting immigration court public defenders, to urge more "everyday" reforms. The idea would be to make working, studying, driving, and getting medical care independent of legal status: granting social security numbers to undocumented immigrants, for example, or allowing them to buy into the Affordable Care Act's marketplace. Even these policy changes, however, feel nearly as elusive as immigration reform itself. A remaining question, then, is how we might limit the importance of legal status in everyday interactions even without policy reform. How, for example, can high schools and colleges better prepare undocumented students for careers without a work permit, from independent contracting to worker co-ops? How can healthcare agencies expand their services to the uninsured, independent of any changes to insurance regulations? How can communities offer affordable housing without the federal money that restricts their occupants? While we continue to document the injustices of current policies as well as advocate for change, it is incumbent upon immigration researchers and practitioners to envision and work toward solutions given today's realities. Within Asad's book lie practical entry points for such work.