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This webinar features a discussion of author Saket Soni’s The Great Escape, which tells the astonishing true story of a group of immigrants trapped in the largest human trafficking scheme in modern American history. Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of modern-day forced labor, The Great Escape — named a 2023 best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, and Amazon — takes us into the hidden lives of the foreign workers that America relies on to rebuild after climate disasters.

Join us for a dialogue with Saket Soni, a labor organizer and human rights strategist working at the intersection of racial justice, migrant rights, and climate change, and New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman. Cornell Law School professor Stephen Yale-Loehr moderates the discussion, in which our panel will put this tale of human slavery into the larger context of our broken immigration system.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• A gripping tale of forced labor and liberation that NPR called “a true story that reads like a novel”
• What it takes for immigrant workers to make the promise of democracy real
• The origin of the immigrant workforce rebuilding after climate disasters
• How this story fits into larger immigration controversies

SPEAKERS

Saket Soni
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, Resilience Force

Sarah Stillman
STAFF WRITER, The New Yorker

Stephen W. Yale-Loehr
PROFESSOR, Cornell Law School

This webinar is cosponsored by the Migrations Initiative and Cornell Law School.