As in ages past, it exploits the vulnerable with little power, poor options, and few friends.

In other words, immigrants make great targets. Asians are not immune.

Saket Soni is an Indian-American labor organizer and human rights strategist working at the intersection of racial justice, migrant rights, and climate change.

In The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, he exposes a modern day slavery operation disguised as a Mississippi oil rig construction business. Here's the recipe:

1. Get contracts to do construction work
2. Hire recruiters to find cheap but skilled labor
3. Go to India and “promise" (wink wink) green cards as a path to permanent residency
4. Collect US$20,000 upfront fee knowing full well it puts families in severe debt
5. Fly workers to Mississippi under temporary work visas
6. House them on company property, in trailers, behind barbed wire, patrolled by security, charging high “rent" for poor food and overcrowded rooms
7. Leave them no choice but to keep working to pay off rent in America and loan shark debt in India
8. For extra measure, get yourself friends within ICE and local politicians to protect your back

America needs labor and immigrants want to work. Anti-immigrant politicians pretend neither is true, so our policies do little to protect immigrant rights.

In other words, immigrants make great targets. Asians are not immune.

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