Asad Asad, Stanford University

About the Seminar

Subnational policies that facilitate immigration enforcement disproportionately threaten Latino immigrants in the United States, but whether and how this threat dynamic manifests to impact these individuals’ life chances varies across quantitative and qualitative studies. We distinguish between institutional and social contexts of immigration enforcement and propose that limited attention to the social context in part accounts for this variation. Whereas the institutional context describes localized policies that increase immigration enforcement’s statistical risk, the social context describes its localized salience in daily life—which need not correspond to the institutional context. Our empirical case is the birthweight of infants whose mothers are Latina immigrants. We merge multiple datasets on the institutional and social contexts of immigration enforcement with data on the universe of births to Latina immigrant mothers across U.S. localities between 2012 and 2017. Across multiple model specifications, we find evidence that institutional and social contexts exhibit distinct associations with infants’ birthweight outcomes, with immigration enforcement’s social context especially relevant for infants born to the Latina immigrants most vulnerable to immigration enforcement.

About the Speaker

Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His current research agenda considers how institutional categories—in particular, citizenship and legal status—matter for multiple forms of inequality. His book, Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton University Press), examines how and why undocumented immigrants worried about deportation nonetheless engage with institutions whose records the government can use to monitor them. Additional research projects focus on the effects of immigration enforcement on health, the role of the federal judiciary in immigration enforcement, and the capacity of immigrant-serving organizations to counter the inequalities of the U.S. immigration system.

Seminar Format

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom Registration Link . Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar.

COVID-19 Information

MPRC public events for Fall 2023 will be a mix of in person and online via Zoom.  For in person events, all event attendees must follow current protocols