Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America - author Saket Soni with Rebecca Solnit

The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America is Saket Soni's new book about his plan which wins the citizenship of 500 workers from India after being exposed to inhumane conditions while rebuilding New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He will be in conversation with renowned author Rebecca Solnit.

In 2006 Soni received a clandestine phone call from one of 500 men living in squalor in a Gulf Coast “man camp,” surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Each man and his family had paid $20,000 each to apply for this “opportunity” to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina.

Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of 21st-century forced labor, Soni takes us into the hidden lives of the foreign workers the US increasingly relies on for cheap skilled labor to rebuild after climate disasters. The Great Escape is the astonishing story of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history—and the workers’ heroic journey for justice.

Saket Soni is the co-founder and executive director of Resilience Force, the national voice of the resilience workforce — whose labor helps us prepare for, and repair after, climate disaster. He has testified in Congress, and his work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and TIME Magazine. A profile in USA Today called him “an architect of the next labor movement.” Saket is from New Delhi, India.

Soni will be in conversation with renowned author Rebecca Solnit.

Free admission. Doors at 6:30 - event at 7:00pm. Please be masked and vaxxed. Thanks!