Peonage in New Orleans.

• Author: Van Dusen, Christine
• Position: Viewpoint essay

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Sabulal Vijayan wishes he could have turned down the promise of a better life: a job in America, a permanent residency green card, and a way out of pipe-fitting for a pittance in the sweltering heat of the United Arab Emirates.

But the pull of the recruiter's promise was too strong. So, Vijayan sold the only valuables he had--his wife's gold bangles and chains from their wedding--to generate the $3,000 needed for a first payment. This, he was told, would gain him passage to New Orleans for a pipe-fitting job with Signal International, a firm based in Pascagoula, Mississippi. For additional fees, he could bring his wife, son, and daughter to the United States in due time. This appealed to him because his wife and two children had to live without him in India for months, even years, while he worked in the United Arab Emirates.

But Vijayan, forty-one, says he encountered a very different reality in New Orleans. There was no green card. The job was temporary. The fees, and his debts, mounted. He lived in a Pascagoula labor camp, where men slept twenty-four to a room so tightly packed that it was difficult to move between the bunks. There was no privacy, he says. The housing complex had a single, guarded entrance. The workers were subject to surprise searches of their belongings. Complaints were met with threats of violence and deportation.

Vijayan eventually found himself in a bunkhouse bathroom with a razor blade, as his pursuers, Signal's armed security team, banged on the door, anxious to take him to the airport and send him back to India.

"I could not go back home. With empty hands, I couldn't go back," Vijayan says. "I decided it was better to kill myself than go back."

Vijayan says he was being deported for complaining about working conditions.

Vijayan and nearly 500 other Indian men believe they were cheated of their life savings and forced into peonage. They detail their allegations in a class-action lawsuit filed in March in federal court against Signal, U.S.-based recruiter Global Resources, immigration attorney Malvern Burnett, and recruiters in India. (An attorney for Michael Pol of Global Resources has said his client did not mislead anyone. The Indian recruiters could not be reached. Burnett declined to comment for this story, and his attorney has said he will not comment either.)

The charges include violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2003, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt...