My partner Bob Amick and I own and operate five restaurants in Atlanta employing 300 people. Our employees are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They are cooks, dishwashers and service staff, all vital to a restaurant’s success.
We need Congress to repair the immigration system so it benefits our business and the economy. We need stronger border security and immigration law enforcement. Congress must also provide businesses a way to verify if new hires are legally eligible to work.
Most unauthorized immigrants are otherwise law-abiding, hard-working individuals whose work bolsters U.S. prosperity and sustains jobs. We should allow them to earn their way onto the right side of the law. Meaningful reform, however, must look beyond today’s unauthorized immigrants. The heart of reform is mending the immigration system so it works for America’s future, admitting the immigrants we need and preventing future illegal immigration.
Our restaurants pay well above the minimum wage, between $9.50 and $19 an hour. However, the U.S. labor force has changed dramatically. Today’s workers are more educated than the generation before and have other employment options. Often, there are not enough willing and able Americans to answer the labor shortage. The restaurant sector is not unique. Many indispensable industries rely on less-skilled immigrants. Without this workforce, these sectors would be severely hobbled or collapse.
The greatest problem is there is virtually no legal way for less-skilled foreigners without family in the U.S. to enter the country and work in year-round jobs. The two, existing, temporary worker programs for less-skilled workers are for seasonal labor on farms and at summer and winter resorts. There are virtually no permanent visas for less-skilled workers who want to settle in the United States.
Congress needs to fill this gap by developing a visa program for less-skilled, non-farm workers. Employers should hire Americans first and pay decent wages. If they cannot find enough U.S. workers, however, they should be able to hire foreign workers quickly, easily and legally. Any new program should also respond in real time to changing U.S. labor needs, growing in prosperous years when the economy needs more foreign workers, and shrinking in down times when more Americans are out of work.
Without a workable temporary visa program, the nation cannot hope to end illegal immigration. An overwhelming majority of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. today would rather be here legally. Without a legal way for less-skilled workers to come to the U.S. in the future, we will find ourselves in exactly the same predicament — wondering what to do about a new influx of millions of unauthorized immigrants.
Fixing our broken immigration system cannot be put off. If we do not create a legal way for less-skilled immigrants to enter the country and work, we will not restore the rule of law and will guarantee that millions more come to the U.S. illegally. The stakes could hardly be higher. We need Congress to act decisively and swiftly.
Todd Rushing is part-owner of Concentrics Restaurants.
