Exploited in America

THE GREAT ESCAPE: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America

Author: Saket Soni

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Pages: 352

Price: $28

I recently got hooked on Goliath, the courtroom drama starring Billy Bob Thornton about a down-and-out lawyer who takes on an evil, all-powerful company. The show paints a bleak picture of what it takes to eke out justice in America today. In an era of vast inequality, justice is still possible, the show tells us, but only if you have an obsessive, monkish hero willing to risk everything in a years-long fight with no expectation of financial reward in return.
 

The Great Escape, by Saket Soni, a labour organiser who assists exploited migrant workers, paints a similar picture of the odds of winning against the system. “Organizers fail, most of the time,” he writes. Nonetheless, this book manages to be an uplifting story about his fight against Signal International, a company that brought hundreds of welders and pipefitters from India to Mississippi and Texas in the mid-2000s and kept them in semi-captivity in an unscrupulous bid to save money.
 

Soni is as methodical as a prosecutor. First, he establishes the workers’ humanity. Then he lays out the crime against them. The book starts with love stories that introduce us to some of the men and explain why they’re so desperate for work. Aby, a motorcycle-riding Christian from Kerala, resists his arranged marriage, right up to the moment he tries to break off the engagement over the phone and falls in love with his bride-to-be during the call. Hemant, the handsome son of a police commissioner in New Delhi, asks for his high school sweetheart’s hand in marriage — only to be told to make something of himself first. Murugan, from Tamil Nadu, searches for a banker’s daughter who lives in a north-facing house, following the advice of a marriage specialist who read his horoscope. Finally, he finds her and asks her to marry him. He knows she’s the right bride for him when she convinces her father to take out a loan on his home to help pay $20,000 to a recruiter, a labour broker and an American lawyer who is organising a visa for Murugan to work in the United States.
 

By Chapter 5, we are rooting for these men and their families. We understand why they leaped at the advertisement in the newspaper that offered a chance to “migrate to US.” The job comes with a green card, they are told, which would allow them to bring their wives to the United States within nine months. Each man borrows a small fortune from relatives and loan sharks to pay the illegal fees they are being charged for the opportunity to work in America. They are instructed to lie in their interviews at the US Consulate about having paid fees — or else their visas will be denied. They are also warned not to mention the promise of a green card. Those with qualms about lying have nowhere to turn. By this time, they are already so deeply in debt that they have no option except to get their visas approved and work to pay it off.
 

Once the men arrive in Mississippi, the labour camp where they are being housed is unsanitary and overcrowded. One man faints on the job from lack of food. They’re allowed outside only for weekly trips to church or Walmart. Worst of all, there’s no sign of the green cards.
 

The book sweeps us swiftly into the tension of early organising efforts in the camp. An Indian worker named Jacob demands one simple thing from the company: A cup of tea. Eventually, he wins the right for the workers to appoint a cook from their own ranks, a victory that shows what can be gained by pressing collective demands. But soon the company announces that it will deport some troublemakers in the camp, including Jacob. One man grows so distraught at the thought of returning home empty-handed that he slits his wrists.
 

This desperate act triggers a chain of events culminating in a mass escape from the camp, orchestrated by Soni after weeks of secret planning. The rest of his book depicts his struggle to have the men recognised as victims of human trafficking, which entitles them to a special visa that allows them to reunite with their families and, eventually, to apply for green cards. The fight takes years and includes an epic march from New Orleans to Washington, D C, a hunger strike, meetings on Capitol Hill and an admission of defeat — before an unexpected twist changes their fates forever.
 

The one quibble I have with  The Great Escape is its failure to grapple with the thorniest question at the centre of this saga: Should these Indian workers have been brought to the US in the first place? Soni rails at the hoops immigrant “strivers” must jump through to work legally in the US. But as a labour organiser, he acknowledges that Indian labourers brought to the US undercut the wages of American workers who had once built a middle-class life from the same work.
 

He does no soul-searching about the guest worker programme itself. It’s an odd omission, given that the tale of the Indian workers was recounted as early as 2007, in a report called Close to Slavery, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which documented exploitative practices endured by guest workers of many nationalities in many industries. It turns out that the only thing that made the experience of the Indian welders and pipefitters unique was that they found a champion in Soni, who taught them how to fight the system — and win.

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