New Books in Latino Studies · Marshall Poe

Engage and Evade in 2025: Asad L. Asad on Latino Immigrants in America

April 12, 2025·52 min·4 clips

Undocumented immigrants pay into Social Security using false numbers and will never collect a dollar of benefits — and according to Asad, this is the main reason the Social Security system remains solvent.

1. New Books Network host Caleb Zakrin interviews Stanford sociologist Asad L. Asad about his 2023 book "Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life." 2. Asad is an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University and the son of Palestinian immigrants who grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 3. The book's central thesis challenges the academic framework that undocumented immigrants are perpetually hiding — Asad found that many families actively engage with government institutions in the hope that compliance will benefit them. 4. The fieldwork began in 2013 as part of a larger study of housing choices by Kathy Eden at Princeton and Stefanie DeLuca at Johns Hopkins; Asad joined the Dallas team and found that 28 of 36 Latino families had at least one undocumented member. 5. Unlike prior immigration studies that drew subjects from legal aid clinics or immigration courts, Asad's sample was recruited door-to-door from residential neighborhoods, capturing the full messiness of everyday life without pre-selection for legal involvement. 6. Asad returned to Dallas in 2018 under the first Trump administration to follow up with the same families, finding that while enforcement felt different, the underlying local logic of who was targeted had not yet shifted as dramatically as national rhetoric suggested. 7. He argues that the enforcement infrastructure now being used was built under Obama, expanded under the first Trump administration, unchanged by Biden, and is now being activated again — making immigration enforcement a bipartisan policy that both parties have agreed is the primary tool for managing undocumented people. 8. The Trump administration's distinctive contribution, Asad argues, is to unsettle the predictability that families had internalized: the heuristic that compliance with the law meant ICE would not target you. 9. Asad describes the deportation of men to El Salvador who had tattoos of autism awareness symbols and support for their parents, and frames this as an extreme example of enforcement without regard for rights or dignity. 10. Undocumented immigrants learn to engage with the IRS by obtaining false identity documents, called seguros tuecos, to file for work, then paying taxes using those numbers — and the IRS updated its systems to accept name-SSN mismatches and ran community presentations explicitly mentioning possible immigration benefits for tax compliance. 11. One respondent named Maite called the IRS helpline directly with 10 to 15 questions about whether she should file taxes and concluded she should — a story Asad uses to illustrate how institutional engagement is taught through networks. 12. Asad confirms host Zakrin's point that undocumented workers pay into Social Security using false numbers and will never collect benefits, and states that Social Security's solvency depends on precisely these contributions. 13. Undocumented parents begin interacting with welfare institutions when they become pregnant: nurses and social workers enroll them in the Children's Health Insurance Program during ER visits, since the government has an interest in the well-being of the unborn child who will be a U.S. citizen. 14. Over time, undocumented parents accept SNAP benefits for their children not from desire for public assistance but to pre-empt a CPS referral that could trigger child removal — a form of family separation distinct from deportation. 15. Asad outlines four reasons people migrate in his sample: employment, education, humanitarian flight, and what he calls 'real life' reasons, including family pressure and even escaping a bad relationship — which he argues are equally valid as the more foregrounded hardship narratives. 16. He notes that for many Mexicans, migration to the U.S. is facilitated by over 100 years of established networks of movement, and the physical distance from Mexico to Texas can be shorter than moving from California to New York. 17. On future research directions, Asad argues that local governments and institutions will be the front line of immigrant rights defense in the near term, noting that Dallas operates as a more welcoming blue island within an otherwise hostile Texas context. 18. He redefines 'sanctuary city' as simply any policy that limits some police collaboration with ICE, arguing the word is often a misnomer and that such policies operate on a spectrum rather than a binary. 19. The conversation is structured as a chronological walk through the book's chapters, with Zakrin raising topical questions and Asad providing sociologically grounded answers with extensive use of respondent stories. 20. Researchers studying immigration policy, surveillance, welfare access, or undocumented communities in the U.S. will find this episode analytically rigorous; listeners seeking narrative storytelling may prefer other formats.

As heard by us

A humane look at how undocumented families navigate surveillance while trying to stay on the right side of the rules.

The episode treats undocumented Latino immigrant families as people making careful day-to-day choices under surveillance, not as a talking point.

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Why you'd press play

Listen if you want immigration talk that starts with lived strategy, not slogans.

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