August 1, 2022
In 2007, community organizer Soni received news of a horrific case of forced labor in the United States: 500 migrant workers from India, who had paid $20,000 to secure jobs rebuilding oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, were living in deplorable conditions in a camp surrounded by armed guards. With Soni's help, they escaped and marched on Washington, DC, to demand justice. Told within the context of the increasing use of forced labor in the United States today; a 35,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 31, 2022
In this revelatory debut, Soni, founder of the labor rights nonprofit Resilience Force, recounts the civil rights crusade of 500 workers from India who were recruited to work for Signal International, an American oil rig builder, under the false promise of a green card. In 2006, the workers arrived at the Mississippi “man camp facility,” which consisted of “sardine-can” housing trailers, inedible food, and broken-down bathrooms. The next year, Soni helped hundreds of the workers organize an escape from the camp, only for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to try to deport them. Taking a page from the civil rights movement, Soni and 60 workers marched in protest from Mississippi to Washington, D.C., where they staged a 31-day hunger strike. The workers also filed a class action lawsuit against Signal that concluded in 2015 when a federal jury found Signal guilty of committing labor fraud and trafficking, among other charges. Soni writes with empathy (“Jacob was carrying the burdens of his coworkers, and now I was carrying his”) and conviction (“Our march would be a traveling act of civil disobedience”). This is a searing account of the harrowing road to justice. Agent: David Larabell, CAA.
December 1, 2022
Harrowing account of a latter-day revolt of people who were essentially enslaved--in 21st-century America. Following Hurricane Katrina, the shipbuilding steelyards of Mississippi's Gulf Coast needed welders and pipe fitters. India had many such workers, and a local so-called immigration lawyer teamed up with a couple of recruiters, one a former police officer, and, for a hefty fee, promised green cards to anyone who traveled to America. As immigrant rights activist Soni writes, one of those workers, who had spent years as a laborer in the United Arab Emirates, saw through the scheme, realizing that "any seasoned migrant worker knew that America let in only those with elite educations." Still, with promised wages approaching $54,000 per year, he bit, landing in a work camp where the pay was not as promised, the food was execrable, and the treatment of workers was straight out of the antebellum South, complete with an updated version of a slave catcher. Said one overseer, "Our Indians have been dropping with sickness like flies." Because the workers' complaints were ignored, some decided to orchestrate the "great escape" of Soni's title and, with the author's help, organized a protest that took them on a march on Washington to demand justice. Writing with a sharp sense of irony, Soni recounts how the Department of Justice flubbed the initial investigations while Immigrations and Customs Enforcement actively colluded with the Mississippi shipbuilders against the workers. Soni and the workers hit plenty of dead ends as they tried to enlist the support of the liberal lions on Capitol Hill since "we were stuck in the minds of their congressional staffers as another 'Interest group.' " In the end, even though the workers exposed "one of the largest human trafficking schemes in US history," no charges were brought against the company or the scammers, a maddening conclusion to Soni's agile account. A searing expos� of corporate criminality and its governmental enablers.
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December 1, 2022
In the mid-aughts, hundreds of Indian welders and pipe fitters saw ads promising well-paid jobs in the U.S., with accompanying green cards, an opportunity typically reserved for migrants with advanced degrees. The recruiter's fee was steep--$20,000--but still, this sounded like a dream come true, and workers' families took out loans to pay the fee. Mississippi- and Texas-based oil company Signal International was in the midst of expanding and was seeking cheaper workers than they could find in American unions. Working with a recruiting team that made millions, the company hired the workers on H-2B visas: temporary visas that could never be converted to green cards. By the time community organizer and author Soni received a call for help from one of Signal's "man camps," the workers' original visas had long since expired, and they were captives of the company and of the debts waiting for them at home in India. Interwoven with the author's own story of visa instability, The Great Escape illuminates the lives affected by human trafficking and the complexity of U.S. immigration bureaucracy.
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Starred review from December 1, 2022
This riveting memoir dives into the story behind one of the largest civil rights movements in recent U.S. history. Labor organizer Soni (founding dir., Resilience Force) helped hundreds of skilled workers from India escape from prison-like work camps and draw international attention to a form of human trafficking. This is a must-buy primary source depicting what a modern civil rights movement looks like in the United States. Soni details the corrupt and labyrinthine systems of U.S. immigration and Washington, DC, lobbying in accessible and gripping prose that is informed by hundreds of hours of interviews, years of directly organizing the movement, and thousands of pages of documents produced in the ensuing court cases. Beyond the research, this book stands out for its startlingly complex and intimate portraits of the immigrants, lawyers, immigration agents, and civil rights leaders encountered in these pages. The author reveals the way in which politics are woven into people's lives and daily realities, telling his own immigration story in the process. VERDICT This book will appeal to students of U.S. immigration and civil-rights history, as well as anyone who loves a beautifully told story.--Willem Marx
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