Asad's path — from a Google search to tenure
I had never taken a sociology class when I decided to apply to sociology PhD programs.
As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I studied political science and Spanish. Having been a high school policy debater, political science seemed like the natural path for someone interested in law and public policy.
But I eventually realized that I enjoyed research, especially work that brought together my interests in law and policy with my Spanish-language training. My undergraduate mentors, including Professors Kenneth R. Mayer and Kathryn Bishop Sánchez, encouraged me to look for graduate programs where I could study the effects of U.S. immigration law and enforcement on Latino immigrants and families. Long story short, a quick Google search led me to discover sociology, and I applied to graduate programs shortly thereafter—mostly on vibes.
While waiting for admissions decisions, I enrolled in a sociology of immigration course during my final semester of college, partly to make sure I had not made a terrible mistake. Almost immediately, I was hooked. Sociology gave me a vocabulary and tools for studying how immigration law shapes immigrant integration, and why its effects extend beyond the people formally subject to it. I was relieved that I had applied to Sociology PhD programs. I just needed to get into one.
Sociology gave me a vocabulary and tools for studying how immigration law shapes immigrant integration, and why its effects extend beyond the people formally subject to it.
A few weeks later, just before that same class, I received a call from an unfamiliar number. I stepped into the hallway and heard Orlando Patterson tell me that I had been admitted to Harvard’s Sociology PhD Program. I was elated, although I could not celebrate for long because I had to return to class to discuss the day’s assigned book. When I sat back down, I looked at my copy of Black Identities and reflected again on how much I admired it. Then I turned it over, read the author’s biography, and realized that Mary C. Waters was a professor of sociology at Harvard. That more or less settled the question: I would go to Harvard and work with her.
From graduate school to today, my scholarship has used the effects of U.S. immigration law and enforcement on Latino citizens and noncitizens as a lens for understanding how institutional categories—like citizenship and legal status—relate to social control and inequality.
Since the mid-2000s, the federal government has increasingly embedded immigration enforcement within institutions such as education, healthcare, and the labor market. At the same time, most undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States for more than a decade and regularly
interact with these institutions, whether for themselves or their U.S.-born children. My dissertation research, advised by Mary Waters and supported by Filiz Garip, Mario Luis Small, and William Julius Wilson, began the project of examining how Latino immigrant families navigate institutions that may monitor them. My eventual book Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton University Press) completed it by combining repeated interviews with Latino immigrant families in Dallas, ethnography of Dallas Immigration Court, and analyses of the American Time Use Survey.
I found that Latino immigrant families selectively engage institutions that may monitor them while weighing risks against rewards. Families describe minimizing interactions that might expose them to sanction, such as driving without a license, while maximizing behaviors, such as tax compliance, that they believe may signal moral worth to authorities. Despite legal barriers to their own participation, they also remain involved in healthcare, schools, and public assistance on behalf of their children. They understood this selective engagement as a response to the expectations of doctors, teachers, and other authorities who monitor their children’s well-being. Some also hoped such conduct might one day demonstrate that they deserved membership as U.S. citizens, although this depends on the federal government providing such an opportunity. The book therefore reveals that surveillance operates through both the threat of exclusion and the promise of inclusion. It also shows that institutional categories do not always map on to experiences of social control in the ways punitive laws, policies, and actions might suggest; institutional involvement and noninvolvement are twin strategies for managing surveillance.
Recent research
My most recent research considers what might account for this gap between institutional categories and experiences of social control, with a focus on mental and physical health. I argue that salience, or how much the threat of state sanction registers in the collective consciousness of at-risk populations, helps explain this disconnect. To measure salience, I compile public- and private-access Google Trends data on enforcement-related searches across space and time. Across a series of articles, including several with current and former Stanford Sociology PhD students, I use multiple datasets to show that, in a system whose consequences are racially disproportionate, salience predicts Latino citizens and noncitizens’ health outcomes above and beyond standard proxies of social control, such as laws, policies, or enforcement actions. For example, we have found that increased reports of deportation fears among Latino U.S. citizens track salience; that immigrant integration can buffer psychological distress when immigration enforcement’s salience is high; and that infants whose Latina immigrant mothers were exposed to high salience during pregnancy experience more adverse birth outcomes than those with less exposure. Another research project draws on interviews with immigration advocates across the country to examine what changing the immigration system means—and how to achieve it.
I look forward to continuing to leverage the sociological tools I happened upon all those years ago as I bridge the sociology of law, immigration, and race/ethnicity to both diagnose and remedy preventable social problems.
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