The dramatic true story of a group of Indian workers trafficked into the USA to work as welders for a major corporation – held against their will under the false promise of a green card, while their families back in India struggled under the debts of the huge loans they took out to finance the welders’ journey.
This book was extremely well-researched and told from the viewpoint of the (Indian-American) community organizer who stumbled on the situation and helped to get them out of it. It was a very unusual situation – not the usual thing you think about when talking about human trafficking. Even worse was that the US government (at least the ICE organization) was helping exploit these guys as well.
I’m not sure I liked the author so much, however. As a writer he tended towards building up situations (even minor ones) into as much drama as possible, and I felt like sometimes as a participant in this story he was kind of self-focused and humble-bragging a bit. The dialogue is reconstructed from notes, affidavits and testimony, and it felt artificial. Maybe because much of these conversations was translated from another language into the English that I was reading?
The best parts of the book for me were the scenes taking place in India, and of course all the food that the starving workers were dreaming about. I can’t wait to do some Indian cooking of my own to sate the appetite that this book raised. The author may want to look into food writing as well.
So good book, great story, and more than a little shocking. Come on, US government, you can do better than this.
Next, piling on the US government a little more, I am reading Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond.
