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I had wondered how they got so much damage repaired after Hurricane Katrina. See the story of the Indian workers fooled into paying $20,000 each for good jobs and green cards at npr.org/2023/01/23/1150…
"...On the living conditions in the labor camp in Pascagoula, Miss.
Conditions were atrocious. There were no apartments, there were no dec…
I had wondered how they got so much damage repaired after Hurricane Katrina. See the story of the Indian workers fooled into paying $20,000 each for good jobs and green cards at https://www.npr.org/2023/01/23/1150684455/human-trafficking-katrina-india-great-escape-saket-soni
"...On the living conditions in the labor camp in Pascagoula, Miss.
Conditions were atrocious. There were no apartments, there were no decent living quarters. The men lived 24 to a single trailer in a company "man camp" — that was actually what the company called it. And this "man camp" was built above a toxic waste dump. ...
They could come in and out of the labor camp. Usually they were taken on chaperoned visits where they were surveilled by a company official, put in a company van, taken to Walmart to buy groceries and other things and [brought] back to the camp. They were heavily surveilled. And while they were theoretically allowed in and out, they could never do it without a company official with them. The more important thing was their fear of deportation kept them in the camp. For some amount of time, they were in the camp legally and on these legal visas, but after a certain time, their visas lapsed. But the company kept using them on these 24-hour shifts that they would rotate on, the day shift and the night shift. And they couldn't leave the labor camp because of their own fear that they would be picked up and deported if anyone discovered that they were now undocumented.
On how the workers were charged rent to live in squalid conditions
The senior vice president who had the idea to build the labor camps thought that workers would be only too happy to get up, roll out of bed and be able to walk to work. This is a man who had never been to India, but somehow he thought that compared to conditions in India, these workers would be "happy campers." That's the way he put it. The company ended up charging the workers enormous amounts of money deducted from their paychecks to pay for the millions of dollars it took to construct the labor camps: $1,000 a month..."