My book-length field research projects include:

*My first book, "What's Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic" (Duke University Press 2004), follows the lives of resourceful Dominican women who capitalize on the sex-tourist boom to meet, feign love, marry, and move overseas with foreign men. They use the local sex-tourism industry as a stepping-stone to international migration.

*I recently completed a book on life after trafficking into forced labor: "Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States" (Duke University Press; forthcoming 2013). The book presents stories of life in and after forced labor. Building a new life in a new country is difficult in the best of circumstances; what if one's introduction to the United States is through forced labor? The book moves away from the sensationalistic portrayals of trafficking in the media to focus instead on the ordinary tasks and chores of resettlement. Life after forced labor is a series of private daily struggles and successes; usually not the stuff of public press conferences and headline-grabbing news. The book dwells on everyday "lifework" and recounts the ways formerly trafficked persons spend their days and nights -- far from the media spotlight -- quietly reclaiming their lives and making the United States their home.

"Life Interrupted" also argues that forced labor could be prevented if low-wage migrant workers exercised greater labor protections and did not fear being deported if they report abuses. Individuals designated "trafficked" are just one part of a much larger story of everyday exploitation of migrant laborers in the United States. Trafficking into forced labor is on the extreme end of a continuum of abuse of undocumented migrants.

*Currently I am conducting field research on the effects of local, state and national immigration policies on families and communities: "Shattered Families: Detention, Deportation and the Assault on Immigrants in the United States." The current migration regime protects and assists only the most exploited persons (trafficked persons), while other exploited migrants are cast as criminals. This new project on families and communities coping with the threat of -- and the experience of -- deportation picks up where "Life Interrupted" leaves off. After spending years of research with the "exceptions" to the U.S. deportation regime (trafficked persons), as a scholar-activist on migrants' rights I have been eager to call attention to the vulnerability of undocumented --and deportable -- migrants.