Download The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America

1
The
Great
Escape A True Story of Forced
Labor
and
Immigrant
Dreams
in
America
Description
AnbspNewYork TimesnbspNotble Book of 2023
Shortlisted
for
the
2023 Moore Prize The astonishing story of
immigrants lured to the United States from India
and trapped in forced labor8212anquoteyeopening
quotquotmus-readquottold by
2
the visionary labor leader who engineered their
escape and set them on a path to citizenship (The
New York Times Book Review).nbsp8203 In late
2006, Saket Soni, a twenty-eight-year- old
Indian-born community organizer, received an
anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant
worker in Mississippi. He was one of five hundred
men trapped in squalid Gulf Coast 8220macamps,
8221surrounded by barbed wire, watched by guards,
crammed into cold trailers with putrid toilets,
forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice.
Recruiters had promised them good jobs and green
cards. The men had scraped up 20,000 each for
this 8220oportunity8221to rebuild
hurricane-wrecked oil rigs, leaving their
families in impossible debt. During a series of
clandestine meetings, Soni and the workers
devised a bold plan. In The Great Escape, Soni
traces the workers8217extraordinary escape,
their march on foot to Washington, DC, and their
twenty- three-day hunger strike to bring
attention to their cause. Along the way, ICE
agents try to deport the men, company officials
work to discredit them, and politicians avert
their eyes. But none of this shakes the
workers8217determination to win their dignity
and keep their promises to their families.
Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting
tale of twenty-first-century forced labor, Soni
takes us into the lives of the immigrant workers
the United States increasingly relies on to
rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape
is the gripping story of one of the largest human
trafficking cases in modern American
history8212an the workers8217heroic journey
for justice.