Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage

Asad challenges the conventional notion that undocumented immigrants in the United States hide in the shadows, fearful of all forms of institutional authority. Rather, he persuasively argues, many engage selectively and rationally with both law enforcement and service institutions such as schools, hospitals and health clinics, and organizations that provide social assistance. Immigrant parents seek to gain access to these services for their children; they also accumulate records of good, moral behavior to eventually make the case for their own formal permanent residency or citizenship status. Life in their adopted homeland is an ever-shifting balance between feeling excluded and feeling included, between anxiety and trust. Asad derives his ethnographic evidence from intensive interviews with 28 Latino immigrant households in Dallas, mostly undocumented and of Mexican origin, whose families include 97 children born in the United States. The author rigorously validates his conclusions with U.S. government survey data. Asad’s detailed policy recommendations, which stem as much from his moral belief in “the freedom and equality of every human being” as from his empirical research, would make it much easier for the approximately ten million undocumented immigrants in the United States to finally become naturalized citizens.