How was your Michelin-starred dinner last night? Was the chile-ajo-mole sauce a revelation? The chestnut soufflé impossibly airy? The socarrat on the paella simply perfection?
If so, you probably have the hands and skills of an immigrant to thank for that flawless experience. But if the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and the highly publicized raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have their intended outcome, your future dinner plans might be in serious jeopardy.
It’s estimated that 22 percent of all food-service workers in the U.S. are immigrants, with up to half that number thought to be undocumented. The statistics are even higher at earlier stages of food production. Who do you think picks the tomatoes, harvests the eggs, and slaughters the cows? Hint: It’s not the guys rushing Sigma Chi.
The president’s anti-immigration stance was a cornerstone of his winning campaign. If stoking fear—in immigrants both documented and undocumented, to say nothing of the chefs and restaurateurs who rely on their labor—was a side effect he hoped for, mission accomplished.
Because the restaurant industry is nervous. The potential for dire consequences is so great that many chefs famous enough to go by one name were unwilling to talk (even off the record) about the impact that ICE raids could have on their businesses. To protect the chefs who did speak to me, I won’t identify them, except to say that theirs are the restaurants in major American cities with loyal customers, long waiting lists, and many-starred reviews.
“The teams are terrified,” including those who have become U.S. citizens, one told me. “Many are legacy employees who have been with our company for 10 years or more. They have a spiked sense of fear that they will get removed from the country or separated from their families.”
Another added that their crew of largely Hispanic workers are “genuinely petrified. They’ve shared the horrific stories—and they are all horrific—of how they got here, but they all say that this is scarier. The other day, the staff was looking to see where they could hide in the walk-in. One employee is a grandmother, [in this country] for 20 years. They have all been paying taxes.”
While there have been few reports of ICE raids on restaurants, chefs and operators are taking precautions as directed by their attorneys and industry-advocacy groups, as much out of concern for the welfare of their staff as for the health of their establishments. “If my restaurant loses 30 percent of its workforce, I have to shrink the number of covers,” one chef explains. “It’s a house of cards. Restaurants feed other industries—vendors, purveyors, farmers, ranchers. If we have to downsize, they will, too. This can have a serious, almost catastrophic effect on the economy.”
Another owner was even more blunt: “We and everyone else would never be able to stay open if all restaurants got raided and all illegals were sent away. It would all crash.”
In January, the New York City Hospitality Alliance circulated a detailed guide titled “What To Do if ICE Knocks on Your Door,” written in partnership with the law firm Fox Rothschild. One operator used the guidelines “to teach management, and management in turn are teaching staff. But we are keeping this on a low profile.” Another told me, “Our managers were disappointed that we weren’t reassuring them that everything would be okay, but we cannot promise what we can’t deliver.”
It’s worth noting that everyone I spoke with said the same thing about their staffs: Every employee is on the books, no one gets hired without proper ID, no one is paid under the table, and everyone pays taxes. In other words, these people are contributing to the U.S. economy and government coffers. They’re contributing to the Social Security they may never end up receiving.
What’s also true is that no one can be totally certain whether those “proper” IDs are legitimate. “We know what we know, but we don’t know what we don’t know,” says one restaurateur. “You can get a Social Security number on the streets that’s good enough to get through the onboarding company.” Another notes: “These people are not criminals—they are just here illegally.” Indeed, what gets too little attention in the larger immigration conversation is the fact that being undocumented is not a criminal offense.
One chef adds: “A lot of Americans don’t want to do these jobs, to wash dishes for $18 an hour, to do the scrappy, hands-on, long-hours job” that working in a kitchen requires. Andrew Rigie, executive director of the N.Y.C. Hospitality Alliance, concurs. “Immigrants are not taking jobs from Americans,” he says. “I have never heard an American say, ‘I couldn’t get a job as a porter or a dishwasher at a restaurant because an immigrant took the job.’ ”
Of course, deportations are nothing new. One chef told me his staff, most of whom have worked at his restaurants for more than a decade, were not very concerned because “the deportations were worse when Obama was president.”
“The immediate concern,” says Rigie, “is related to the rhetoric from the Trump administration. But the truth is that the decades-long failure of the government to enact immigration reform has created these problems.”
Given how critical to our food culture immigrants are, it’s unbelievable that the path to citizenship and legal status isn’t easier. I say this as the proud product of immigration—and the culinary industry. My grandfather came to America from Italy, ran a speakeasy during Prohibition, and opened a restaurant in 1939. His son, my father, became an assistant U.S. attorney, then served as a local prosecutor for decades and a state judge of workers’ compensation. My brother still runs the restaurant that has been a pillar of our community since it opened.
“Immigrants are the backbone of the restaurant industry,” notes Rigie. “Which helps make it so wonderful and delicious.”
Something to consider the next time you’re debating whether you can score a Thursday reservation at the new Thai, Peruvian, or Korean hot spot you’ve been so desperate to try.
Pavia Rosati is the founder of the award-winning editorial travel website Fathom and the newsletter Way to Go. She lives between New York City and London, and she will travel for a four-hour lunch.
