Ritu Jha–
“It happened after Hurricane Katrina. I got a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night from a man who was too scared to tell me his name. But he told me that he had just arrived from India, and was the victim of an astonishing crime. They were rebuilding oil rigs for an oil rig company. Mississippi and Texas. I am a labor organizer and my business card was flying all over the region. I was talking to hundreds of workers, immigrant workers. Somebody must have given someone a card that gave it to this man,” said Saket Soni, the labor organizer, activist, and the author of The Great Escape.
indica caught up with Soni at the South Asian Literature and Arts (SALA) Festival 2023 where he talked about the story of The Great Escape, a book that tells a story that you usually don’t hear about. The book is the story of one of the largest cases of human trafficking in modern US history.
‘The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America‘ is a novel that takes its readers through the trials and tribulations of Indian immigrants who dream of living in the US. The eye-opening, emotional page-turner exposes the treatment meted out to immigrants and the fallout from globalization. This astonishing narrative of 500 foreign workers from India lured to the US under false pretenses and entrapped in near-slavery conditions is written by Saket Soni, a labor leader who devised a plan to free the immigrants and ultimately win these people citizenship.
“The man who called me — along with 500 other Indians from Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, some from Bihar — had been brought from India to the US under false promises and forced to work in a labor camp in Mississippi in 2006. The book is the story of how I helped them escape. That’s why it’s called The Great Escape and how they eventually found their freedom and how they were reunited with their family,” Soni told indica.
The deplorable conditions in which the immigrants were forced to live in had astonished and shocked Soni.
“The first time I spoke to one of the men, I imagined that it was maybe three people in the basement of a restaurant. We’ve seen that in California and that’s what I was imagining. That worker and two others, the first three who called me, agreed to meet with me in a church because they were allowed only once a week to leave the labor camp and go to church. They told me if I came to that church, they would wait for me in a room. I went there expecting three people. When I opened the door of the church, there were 100 people, I was shocked. When I helped them escape, I was expecting the Department of Justice to investigate because there are laws in the country that protect people like that. But I was shocked again because what I didn’t know then was that there were corrupt agents with their own ties to the oil rig company — Signal International, and so they were part of the reasons that the workers were confined.”
Battling hurdles and standing by the wronged immigrants had proved to be an extremely challenging task for Soni. “The workers were under enormous pressure from their families, and their families were under enormous pressure from money lenders. The workers had borrowed $20,000 each for the promise of a green card. The rogue recruiters went to India and promised the workers green cards and good jobs and said that the only catch was that they would have to pay $20,000 each. To reach the US the worker and their families had taken loans from banks, sold their jewelry, and emptied their pensions, some had even taken their fathers’ pensions and sold their wives’ ornaments to amass the money. But when they arrived, the promises proved to be false. There were no green cards. They were on temporary visas for eight months. And in eight months, they weren’t earning enough to pay the debts that they had incurred. They were kept in pitiable conditions and most of the time they were given frozen rice to eat.”
Soni engineered their escape and hid them for a long time, and then they were all part of a public campaign to get justice. “There are a lot of workers in India who dream of better lives in the US, and then they come into the IT, and tech industries or into the construction industry in the Middle East or many other parts of the economy only to find themselves exploited. It’s happening even now. What I’m hoping is that this book tells a story that inspires people to change the way they treat immigrants,” Soni said.
While Soni began working on human trafficking rescue cases after the Hurricane Katrina in 2006, the non-profit organization Resilience Force was formed in 2017. “I’ve seen workers from India faced with similar fates in the food industry, in restaurants, workers who work in seafood factories, shrimp and fish factories. Workers in the healthcare system, teachers, nurses, domestic workers, and farm workers too. We get reports from across the US. Right here in California, there are reports of workers being exploited in many industries,” he added.
“Human trafficking is a growing business and a lot of people profit from it and a lot of workers are exploited. Many smart and savvy businessmen connected to various industries create schemes that offer promises and then those promises are broken. It is a growing problem,” Soni told indica.
“Human trafficking is when someone is transported from one place to another usually because of a false promise or through fraud. Someone is transported from one place to another and then when they arrive to work, they find out that the promises are false and then they’re put in a situation where they are not free to leave that work.”
In this book, Soni tells the story of those Indian workers who were promised green cards when they would come to the United States on green cards if they paid. “But it turned out that promise was false.
There were never any green cards and they couldn’t leave their work in the US because they were under enormous debt. That’s an example of human trafficking. What I discovered was that India is very bad at holding anyone accountable and that people run free. The Indian agent who created the trafficking scheme to dupe the 500 workers was able to operate his business. That was one big discovery.”
Soni is now focused on the solution and prevention aspect. “We want to build awareness, and we’re working to make sure that when these abuses come to light, that there’s real accountability, real punishment.”
Apart from working on human trafficking prevention, Soni’s organization also works in other sectors where the workforce is being exploited. “In California, we have lots of fires and we also experienced flooding recently across the country. There are lots of hurricanes, floods, and fires because of climate change. I work to protect the workers, mostly immigrants from India, Honduras, and Mexico, who are rebuilding all the homes and cities after those disasters,” he said.
Is there a solution to human trafficking? “The solution is really to make sure that not just the agents, but that the top companies that utilize the workers are held responsible.”
