The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America by Saket Soni (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

The U.S. Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A year later, it was “a construction site of postwar proportions.” Over a million houses had been destroyed and crippled oil rigs needed either repairs or outright rebuilding from scratch. To hire skilled American labor meant paying union wages--welders, pipefitters, plumbers, and electricians didn’t come cheap. But there was a pool of experience that waited to be tapped--workers on Middle Eastern oil rigs who came from India, all of them easily lured by the thought of getting a U.S. green card. Not only would they be a source of cheap labor, they were a way to make some fast money. These men would pay anything to bring wealth and security home to their extended families and to give their children the opportunity to live well in America.

Five hundred Indian workers paid $20,000 each in response to an ad that promised “Permanent Lifetime Settlement In USA For Self And Family.” In two years or less, they would be given green cards. Their parents borrowed the money, sold their land, mortgaged their lives to give their sons this chance. Almost ten million dollars went to the men who made this swindle a success. 

When the workers arrive in America, they are shunted into labor camps where they paid $245  a week for a bunk in “a sardine-can trailer. They wait in line for their turn to use the toilets and showers in another trailer and then queue up to get breakfast in the cafeteria. The toilets overflow, the showers leak water that soak the walls and floors, the bread is moldy, and the workers get sick. They complain about the conditions but their main concern is when could they expect to receive their green cards. Nobody has answers for them and their complaints are met with a force of hired goons. They’re threatened with deportation if they don’t submit to the conditions of the camp. Then one of them hears about an Indian in New Orleans whose job is to help workers. He calls a number on a business card and reaches labor organizer Saket Soni.

A man still in his twenties with immigration difficulties of his own, Soni is a man who isn’t afraid to take desperate measures. Slowly and carefully, he arranges a solution that deserves to be in a movie. In the two camps that housed the five hundred workers, one located in Mississippi and the other in Texas, the Indian workers walk out of the gates that bar them from the world outside.

Soni makes the case that human trafficking has been reinvented in 21st century America. The five hundred men had been recruited through fraudulent means, with the recruiter keeping their passports as insurance that none of them would back out of the arrangement. Once they were on the job site, their impressive debt incurred in hopes of obtaining a green card kept them in involuntary servitude. They had to pay off that debt before they could return home.

When appeals to the Department of Labor go unanswered, Soni ventures into deeper drama--a march from New Orleans to Washington DC, a hunger strike to call attention to the workers’ case. But this is America where politics run deep below every surface. When it becomes known that ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had been blocking their case from the very beginning, the workers and Soni himself are certain their cause was a hopeless one.

This book is a crash course in immigration policy, labor issues, and the intertwining of business interests with government agencies. Both a human tragedy and an example of how justice can prevail in spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles, The Great Escape rivals any fictional thriller for sheer nail-biting scenarios--but in this case they all happened in real life. Although this group of workers ended up with what they’d been promised, who knows how many more are being defrauded without recourse in this country, every day?~Janet Brown