After Hurricane Katrina, widespread flooding caused significant damage to roads, power lines and other utility systems across several states. Tasked with rebuilding American cities, many companies turned abroad. One company, Signal International, a marine and fabrication firm based in the U.S. Gulf Coast, recruited around 500 Indian workers under the short-term H-2B guest worker visa program. Company recruiters, and even one company-affiliated lawyer, falsely promised the workers citizenship in exchange for their labor. Eighteen months after their arrival, the workers would find out what Signal International already knew: Their visas, by law, could not become green cards.
Under the impression that they would become U.S. citizens within nine months, the men were not only willing to work harrowing jobs for a meager salary, but also viewed the ability to do so as a privilege. However, undocumented immigrants have rights, enshrined in our constitution, to a safe and equitable workplace, to due process and to education. But with such an internalized sense of exile, who will convince immigrants that these things — that America — belong to them? Until migrant workers claim these rights as their own, they remain outsiders in a country that depends on their labor.
Immigrants do not call America great for the same reason American-born citizens can call it great. They did not grow up with schoolboy memories of mock elections, memorizing the branches of government and reciting part of the Gettysburg Address. Instead, America is often realized as a purely capitalist entity — a machine that immigrants wholeheartedly consent to be wrung through if it means money will come out of the other end.
Many of the Signal workers surely dreamed of their future lives as Americans, freedom at the end of this grueling machine. Further deductions from paychecks, abusive foremen and restricted freedoms after hours, however, began to shatter their hopes that the path would be so straightforward. When some of them dared to seek legal counsel through the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, Signal attempted to deport several of the men. The men retaliated in the early hours of March 8, 2007, when hundreds of Signal workers from the facilities in Pascagoula, Mississippi and Orange, Texas escaped their camps in protest of the deportations. For the first time, their agency — not silent endurance — was the vehicle for their dignity.
This newfound sense of agency led them to Saket Soni, an Indian-American labor organizer, who helped transform their protest into a national campaign. Under his guidance, the workers marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., testified before Congress and filed groundbreaking lawsuits that exposed Signal’s scheme to the world. What began as a walkout from guarded labor camps became one of the most significant labor trafficking cases in U.S. history, culminating in a historic $14 million settlement and a public apology from Signal International itself. A less obvious yet equally powerful achievement, however, is how the men shed their sense of exile through claiming the language of American democracy as their own.
I was introduced to the Signal case through “The Great Escape,” Soni’s book about the men’s ordeal. Soni paints a vivid portrait of the men’s families, their childhoods, and aspirations prior to arriving in the U.S. Throughout the book, I remained painfully aware of what was at stake through their work: love, honor and dignity.
Politically, these values — love, honor, dignity — are easy to manipulate. They persist beyond the deregulation of workplace protections as inflation rises and industry executives come knocking. This makes it difficult for undocumented workers to find the language they need to advocate for themselves. Yet it is precisely in finding this language that their exile begins to dissolve, replaced by a claim to the America they had long been denied.
The worker’s evolution from shameful compliance at Signal to complete ownership of their struggle through engaging with the U.S. legal system is, for me, one of the most profound parts of their story. By Thanksgiving of 2010, many of the men’s families were finally able to join them in the United States. Soni writes that when one of the men introduced him to his wife, she exclaimed: “You’re the one who sent my husband’s file to the USCIS. And after that, you and he went to the EEOC. And then you brought him to the AFL-CIO! And then you went into the DOJ. And fought with the ICE, which is inside the DHS!” The men had become so intimately familiar with the U.S. legal system that their wives could recite every acronym behind their battle.
Although most would receive their citizenship years after receiving their T visas, they were American from the moment they protested outside the gates of the Pascagoula facility. Saket Soni guided the men throughout the legal process, through long depositions and interviews with DOJ officials, but he reiterates that the most crucial part was for the men to have the language to advocate for themselves, for their families, and for their freedom.
In today’s political climate, one can only wonder how a case like this would settle. The price of dignity for immigrants in America has never been higher. But organizing migrant workers starts with giving them the legal language to fight for their rights and helping them attain them. The Immigrant Coalition of Rhode Island’s website hosts countless organizations in the greater Rhode Island community that are dedicated to providing legal services, support for immigrant families and campaigning for social and economic justice. Those of us raised with complete pictures of our nation’s history — of justice, protest and change — must continuously share what it truly means to be American, for the sake of those who already are, in every sense, American, yet have long been made to feel otherwise.
Camila Valdes ’27 can be reached at camila_valdes@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
