Asad L. Asad

Since the mid-2000s, the federal government has embedded immigration enforcement within institutions like healthcare, education, and the labor market. Surveillance theories suggest that undocumented immigrants will avoid these institutions to prevent creating records that law enforcement can use to apprehend them. Yet most undocumented immigrants have lived in the U.S. for over a decade and regularly interact with these institutions. Asad's work shows that institutional categories' relationship with social control is situational, shaped by the contexts — cities, states, and time periods — in which they operate.

Standard proxies of social control — such as policies and enforcement actions — do not always predict Latino citizens' and noncitizens' health. Asad argues that salience, or at-risk populations' collective awareness of the threat of state sanction, helps explain this disconnect. Using public- and private-access Google Trends data to measure salience, he shows that salience — directly, and indirectly via policies and actions — shapes health outcomes in a racially stratified system, from psychological distress to infant birthweight.

Why does the immigration system's capacity for social control persist even after legal or policy reform? Across projects on international migration to the United States, federal and immigration judges' enforcement decisions, and advocates' efforts to challenge the system or mitigate its harms for immigrant families, this line of inquiry investigates the structural features that make control durable. Using multiple methods, Asad shows how reforms often reproduce control because they leave intact the very system they aim to change.