Restaurant operators are losing ground in their long, steady campaign to secure real immigration reform. There are a lot of reasons why immigration reform has been blown off course: grandstanding presidential candidates who oppose it, self-appointed citizen border patrol posses, and xenophobic state and city laws. There are also such issues as the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a do-nothing Congress and, of course, the permanent pain spawned from a certain day in September nearly six years ago.
Immigration reform has gone from being a potential solution to the industry’s labor shortage to an ongoing national-security crisis.
Given that the industry is estimated to employ 1.4 million undocumented workers from among the 12 million illegal immigrants believed to be in the United States, restaurateurs’ advocacy for quicker, easier, more humane ways to mainstream illegal immigrants was understandable.
If not for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, chances were pretty good that at least Mexican nationals—who make up 57 percent of the nation’s illegal immigrants, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—were going to get some form of amnesty if they had no criminal records in this country or their native one.
But acts of terrorism changed all that, as elected officials and spy agencies viewed the attacks not as criminal acts, but as national-security breaches enabled by porous immigration controls.
Beginning this month, Homeland Security takes over a job the Social Security Administration used to handle. After notifying employers that they may have employees with fake Social Security numbers on the payroll, Homeland Security will give employers 90 days to rectify the discrepancy or fire the worker. If they don’t, they face fines as high as $25,000 per employee.
I initially thought that the nation’s scariest and most dysfunctional law enforcement agency threatening employers with fines if they don’t become junior G-men would have made big national restaurant employers bellow in furious anger.
But I was wrong. Of the 15 or so giant restaurant chains I called for reaction, those that did not blow me off or give me platitudes said something along the lines of: “Whatever the National Restaurant Association says is also our corporate position.”
What’s the answer, in an industry where word-of-mouth is the leading source of hourly job referrals, when one day Pablo, Patrick, Persia, Pierre, Ping, Pia or Pasha asks: “Hey, boss, I know a good, honest guy from the old country who’d be great to work here, but his papers ain’t straight. If you hire him, you gonna give him up?”
It’s OK not to talk to me. But what are you going to tell them?
