I was particularly interested in your article, Professor Amos. First, I was interested in the temporality of the reporting. You had built a relationship with Um Nour from reporting trips in 2008, but much of the article takes place in one night. My first question is what does building and maintaining a relationship with a source over several years involve and look like? In terms of the night itself, how do you pitch the project to your source? Much like in the Hassler article, your focus on prostitutes is interesting for the way that although the migrant prostitutes are on the margins of society, a deep focus on them actually reveals a lot about the wider society on whose margins they live. For example, by following Ahmed around, Hassler is able to momentarily explain Cairo’s tipping culture, which more vividly elucidates the broader nature of society for a non-Egyptian reader. This technique reminds me of a profile of an RUC police detective in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing. Radden Keefe explains and demonstrates in his own choice of interviewee that the RUC would target people in menial roles who were connected to the IRA, for example, Gerry Adams’ driver, rather than trying to get Adams himself. My next question is how you come to make judgments like the following: “One last look? Enough eyeliner? Another pat of powder? Anxiety also filled the room, because of the deals that would have to be concluded later in the evening.” This quotation describes the bathroom in which the women are doing their makeup. Particularly when there is a language barrier, is this the kind of thing you just have to trust your judgment on or was this made more apparent to you in conversation about the scene with Um Noor?

 

With regard to the Ben Taub piece, I read it when it first came out in 2021. I remember being blown away at the time by the level of detail. There are many questions the article raises for me. First, how does one decide to set off investigating this kind of thing and then how does one actually go and do it? Did the story come to him or would he have had an inkling doing other reporting? I’m also curious how he would have built trust with people who inhabit a very murky world.

 

Finally, I was interested in the Goudeau chapter. It’s striking that the US immigration system used to be so explicitly based on race. As Goudeau points out, there were millions of people from around the world in majority non-white countries who could have benefited from coming to the US, but the US was only interested in European immigrants. I was struck by the US sympathy for the student rebels in Hungary and thought the example raised a number of parallels with today. The US is interested in refugees that “deserve” settlement because of some kind of alignment with US foreign policy interests. For example, in recent years both Ukrainians and Afghans have received special access to the US, whereas Syrians have not.