How was your first book choice, Saskia Sassen’s The Mobility of Labor and Capital, formative for you in your research into immigrant labour networks?

This is the first book that approached undocumented migration from the perspective of the agency of the state as opposed to something that happens because people make the decision to cross the border illegally. So she’s the first that I’m aware of to bring up the question, who benefits from large-scale undocumented migration? And she looks at it from the perspective of the capitalist state. That really opened my eyes. That changed my way of thinking about migration, and unauthorised migration in particular.

In a 2006 Guardian interview Sassen says, “We are becoming a planet of urban glamour zones and urban slums.” How does immigration influence this picture of the global city?

I’d never heard that before. Immediately it makes me think of linkages between so-called glamour zones and urban slums. You have people who make the glamour zones possible – the people who change the sheets in hotels or serve fancy wine or stock bars – living in the slums. So it seems like you can’t have one without the other.

I was talking with a student of mine yesterday about the ways in which low-wage migrant labour has made wealth possible, particularly for middle-class women. I have just had a baby, and it brings home for me the idea that you can’t work and have a family if you’re a woman, in a lot of cases. So having female immigrant workers available to help you raise your kids becomes a really important part of being able to move into the middle classes and upper classes for a lot of urban workers in developed regions.

The last significant change in immigration policy in the United States came in 1986. Is US immigration policy keeping pace with Sassen’s observations on the international movement of labour and capital?

The answer depends on the way that you look at it. You can make the argument – and a lot of people have made the argument – that US immigration policy is not keeping pace, that it has stagnated, that it’s preventing the development of an international labour force to keep pace with the internationalisation of the rest of production. On the other hand, some people argue, that’s not the best way to read it. Actually, US immigration policy, by not doing anything, reproduces this illegal labour force, which has a specific role in capitalist relations.

Even Sassen makes this argument later. She says illegal labour is a particular kind of labour. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not an unhappy accident. It performs a certain function in developed nations. Then, by not having an immigration overhaul that has a path to legalisation for undocumented workers, that actually reproduces a labour force, an undocumented labour force.

In your second choice, For We Are Sold, I and My People, and the others you select, which are reports by anthropologists and journalists, we hear the voices of low-wage and undocumented workers usually presumed to be invisible or silent. Does the work of the anthropologist in this case take on a political dimension?

It’s something that anthropologists really struggle with. We have this legacy of thinking of ourselves as objective scientists. But, of course, when you work in a real world with rampant inequality it brings up lots of questions about what the anthropologist’s role is in exposing these inequalities.

I think any time that you are working with human beings who are embedded in political situations then your work is inherently political. I think that anthropologists are starting to embrace that, as opposed to trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist and that we’re doing some kind of neutral work. It’s very hard to be neutral when you’re looking at exploitation and persistent inequality.

Are there hints in Fernández-Kelly’s research in maquiladoras [factories] along the US-Mexico border that anticipate the shocking violence toward women that has occurred in Ciudad Juárez over past years?

One of the things I was struck with when I was reading her book is the dehumanisation of the women workers at the maquiladoras and how they’re not allowed to talk with one another. They’re often forced to take birth control. There’s a real argument to be made that this kind of large-scale dehumanisation sanctions in some way violence against these women. Unfortunately, maybe it’s not that shocking that people find these particular workers easy prey.

One of the things I notice in Fernández-Kelly’s and in some of these other works is the emotional register. Sometimes the women’s words seem to have come from a novel.

I think that one of the jobs of anthropologists and journalists is to help humanise segments of the population that popularly are often dehumanised. Immigrants, and undocumented immigrants in particular, are a really good example of this. So ethnography, by allowing people’s voice to be heard, humanises them. You figure out people have problems raising their kids, and we can relate to that. They get mad at their roommates – we can relate to that. Allowing the everyday problems, the everyday challenges and the everyday successes of these marginalised people to be heard is humanising.

The title of Ted Conover’s book, Coyotes, alludes to the so-called secret lives of immigrants. Conover is not an anthropologist, but a writer. How does he succeed at showing us these hidden lives?

He’s not an anthropologist only because he lacks the degree. In every other respect, I think, he’s a model of anthropological research. His work is widely used in anthropology courses, not only this book but also the work that he did in Sing Sing. I think of Ted Conover as what an anthropologist would be like if we didn’t have the IRB [Institutional Review Board]. He gets to do all of this crazy, cool stuff that if you’re working at a university they would never let you get away with. They would never let you sneak across the border and go on a plane with people and take them from place to place. But he can do that stuff because he has this freedom.

What’s really appealing to me about Conover’s work is that he has this access that’s just unparalleled. But also he has the freedom to write about it in this totally engaging way. He doesn’t have to go through the motions of framing his work in some theoretical body of literature. He just gets to the nitty-gritty. His work is so accessible and so interesting. This is a work that you’ll read and 10 years later you’ll remember these scenes of being in the airport and these guys trying to get on the escalator and they’re not really sure what’s going on. It’s really incredibly written.