The Importance of Immigration

In my first job as a cook, I learned quickly that the dish washer, Fredo, was the top of the food chain. Whatever he wanted, he got. If you pissed him off, good luck getting clean plates and pans. He was a funny old man, with a wicked sense of humor and an intense work ethic. He would work six days a week cleaning the South Station bus terminal starting at five in the morning. At two in the afternoon, he would catch the red line to Harvard Square, lounge for an hour under a tree in the Cambridge Common, and would work from four in the afternoon until around eleven or midnight. He was a beast.

Fredo was from Columbia, and he spoke almost no English. What sucked was that I spoke almost no Spanish. We were still able to communicate though, much like the way I communicate when I’m abroad, through a lot of pointing, nodding, shaking heads, motioning, smiling, and frowning. Some days you would get home from work only to find a Chez Henri plate in your backpack or a pair of escargot tongs hanging off the strap, and you knew it was Fredo.

There were rumors that he had two huge mansions in Columbia, a wife, and a daughter. There was a point where I lost track of him, when I hoped that he had made it back to Columbia to live the good life with a family who loved him. But after years or months, I would eventually see him again and he would greet me with a big grin and a, “Hey! Chinito!”

When I worked at Moksa, I had the profound privilege to meet and work with Rinda, a Cambodian woman whose father sent her to America to work because she was the smartest of her siblings, and Suzu, the quiet workhorse from Nepal. They both would end up working with me at Night Market, as a lead line cook and sous chef respectively. To this day, I consider Suzu to be my guardian sherpa.

And then there was Jorge. One of my favorite employees of all time. Much like Fredo, he was an older Latino man. He moved slow, but somehow he always got things done faster and better than just about every other dish washer we had. He always had great stories about working for Big Boy’s out in California, or the woman he was shacking up with. He made every day working with him a joy, full of laughs and smiles.

These four people are just a few names in the enormous list of immigrants that I have worked with. Once you get past the shiny veneer of Top Chef and Chef’s Table, and see the industry for what it really is, you will see that immigrants are the cornerstones of the restaurant industry. Without them, or new influxes of them, the restaurant industry will die.

The work we do is hard. There aren’t a lot of Americans that want to do it. A lot of them want to be chefs without putting in the time to understand how the machine works. They don’t want to wash the dishes. They don’t want to clean the grease traps. They don’t want to peel garlic, unless it’s for someone with three Michelin stars.

It is my opinion that if Americans don’t want to do the work, we should let someone else take a crack at it. I understand that we live in a post 9/11 world and that we need to make sure that we’re not creating opportunities for those who would want to hurt people, however, there has to be a way to allow those who want to work and be productive members of society, or just the restaurant industry, into the country.

Without immigrants, we lose workforce, new ideas in food, and potential entrepreneurship. The United States was, as so many would like to forget, built off of immigrants. Immigrants came to the land and built new lives here. It just so happened that they were caucasian. Now is the time for people from all over the world to bring the idea of the United States being a melting pot of culture to reality, where the idea of equal representation is a reality, and not just a sound bite used in rhetoric.

It really is amazing how people lose sight of what immigrants and immigration brings to the table. I stand by all of my immigrant friends who want to make their lives here. I love the idea that people who don’t like where they are can go somewhere else, work hard, and make a life for themselves in places that they appreciate more. Shouldn’t we all live in a place that accepts us and allows us to work for the life that we want?