Culture and Social Analysis Workshop presentation by Asad L. Asad, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.

(Co-sponsored with the Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop)

Abstract

 Scholars argue that how immigrants perceive the risk of deportation—the primary arm of the American immigration enforcement system—colors these individuals’ everyday experiences. Yet, this research overwhelmingly privileges the perspectives of the people and places most enmeshed in the system. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected over three years with Latin American households in Dallas County, Texas, this article instead explores how immigrants not selected for their deportation experience or legal status understand the enforcement system’s threat to their daily lives. Informed by conceptual insights from the sociology of risk, I uncover heterogeneity in how immigrants across legal categories perceive the threat of removal, as well as how they understand their position in American society. I find that structural incorporation—immigrants’ social position vis-à-vis the various institutions that govern access to the American mainstream—conditions perceptions of the risk of deportation in a paradoxical way: Deportation experience aside, those immigrants most incorporated into American society report the greatest risk of removal. I outline the social processes underlying these variegated risk assessments and, in so doing, suggest how the enforcement system implicates the long-term assimilation of U.S. immigrants. I conclude by offering alternative analytical approaches for studying marginalized populations.