A good big picture, an indecipherable small picture: this has always been a pet peeve of mine as a reader. Writers of sprawling, ambitious non-fiction books tend to commit this error often — of being so obsessed with the big picture that they end up making a series of egregious over-simplifications and losing track of the narrative’s emotional core. Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Malcolm Gladwell are frequently guilty of this folly. They are by no means terrible writers, but the kinetic energy of their own theses overwhelms the part of their brain that is supposed to ask critical questions such as, “Did I just consider unverified datasets to be peer-reviewed facts in order to boost my argument?”A fine balanceIt was a delight, therefore, to read Tanul Thakur’s debut book Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, which balances the broader socio-political picture with the pleasures and urgencies of old-school narrative journalism. Through the lives of three men — Kumar Pandruvada, Virgil Bierschwale, and Manu Mitra — Thakur, a noted film critic and an H-1B worker himself in a previous life, expertly deconstructs the cruelty and the dehumanising doublespeak of a visa/immigration system designed to perpetuate modern-day slavery.As the subtitle indicates, the gaming of the H-1B system forms the crux of the book. But there is no one set of rogue players muddying the waters here. There are cynical American politicians lobbying to further deregulate the IT sector. There are desi consultancies which promise H-1B visas to poor Indian students — looting their money, making false job assurances, and breaking American law in six different ways on an average day. Sample this passage describing how the New Jersey-based IT firm 4M operated. It would immediately “bench” newly arrived employees — IT industry jargon for having a job but no client work. “4M intended to commit both immigration and tax frauds. The law mandated H-1B employers to pay foreign workers soon after arriving in the U.S. and considered non-payment on the bench illegal. Such crimes produced penalities or arrests — or both. A desi consultancy seldom gave bench salaries, but still ran the payrolls, paying the taxes, to follow the law. It later recovered the same amount from the consultant. A benched H-1B worker decayed in a corporate cellar, where he paid the company to keep his job.”A standout characterWild Wild East is exceptionally cautious and meticulous about its facts and figures — so much so that nearly a third of the pages are occupied by notes and the index. This is understandable, for this is a hot-button issue currently and one of the loudest talking points for Republicans and Democrats alike. This is partially why I found Bierschwale to be the book’s standout character.Or perhaps because, as an Indian who went to engineering school, I have seen and spoken to many like Pandruvada or Mitra — young people whose desperation to leave India is exploited by bad-faith actors. There stories are no doubt remarkable — the chapter introducing Mitra’s violent “Hitler family” is outrageous in the best of ways — but they are by no means unique to the Indian eye.Bierschwale, however, is a different kettle of fish altogether. He considered himself a Republican, was fond of capitalism, and thought regulating or reining in large corporations is the work of socialist devils. He then switched aisles, voting for Barack Obama, only to be thoroughly disappointed by the Democrats as well. Eventually he realised that servicing corporate greed was the one truly bipartisan platform in America. Confronted by the slick bigotry of nativist and xenophobic commentators, Bierschwale chose instead to develop a nuanced understanding of the matter — and to build solidarity with the Indians stuck in this system. He began seeing them as fellow victims, not perpetrators, and it cannot be overstated how difficult it is to overcome decades of conditioning and reach this mature, conciliatory point in life.In the epilogue, Thakur writes, “The H-1B scam is so cruel that it doesn’t just ravage lives but also slaps the ‘racist’ tag on anyone criticising it. It works both ways: keeps blaming the immigrants, so you won’t criticise the corporations. That’s how the elites have won.”Through the stories of Bierschwale, Pandruvada and Mitra, Wild Wild East does a great job of pushing back against this large-scale gaslighting. Immigration-obsessed folks in both the U.S. and India would do well to read this book (and maybe write to their lawmakers afterwards, like Bierschwale did to Joe Biden).The writer is working on his first book of non-fiction.