Restaurant owners worry mass deportation of immigrants could devastate the industry

Mariel Terone’s family-run seafood restaurant in Venice, Florida ran as a success for 20 years, but when a long-time employee of her establishment was arrested for being in the United States illegally, Terone said her business felt his absence immediately.  

“The way that the restaurant suffered because of this one employee was wild. I mean, we had to hire three people to replace this one person while he was gone,” Terone said. “So, think about if these deportations do start.” 

According to restaurateurs around the country, dining establishments are heavily reliant on immigrant labor, and with Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation, such measures of labor loss could severely cripple the restaurant industry. 

Terone’s employee, who she requested to remain anonymous to protect his identity since she spoke on his behalf, wound up being deported back to Mexico, but she knew she could not leave him there. So, her family hired an immigration attorney and spoke in his case as character witnesses.  

With the legal assistance of Terone and her family, the employee returned to the states, but told Terone he considered going back to Mexico, as it “wasn’t worth living in fear.” 

Deportation fear is a common experience amongst foreign-born citizens, and in a Pew Research Center study conducted in 2022, four out of 10 Latinos reported being worried that they or someone they know could be deported.

During Trump’s first term, Terone told her employees to keep a low profile. 

“We would just tell them, ‘Put your head down, don’t attract attention to yourself,’ because it was scary. It was [an] unknown,’” she said. 

Terone grew up in the restaurant industry and regularly worked alongside immigrant employees and has never taken their contributions to the business for granted. 

 “These immigrants would come in, they’d work, they didn’t complain, they’d do the dirty work, they’d do the dishes, they’d take the trash out. If the toilet overflowed, they were the first ones to go help clean up a mess,” she said. 

Although Terone’s family restaurant is no longer in business, she said that her work with migrants helped her understand them on a more personal level. 

“People just don’t get it unless they know these people, and they’re hard workers and they’re so kind,” she said. “I think if you’re just watching the news and hearing about it, you don’t understand that these are just people that want a good life.” 

Dan Hunter of Queens, New York has been a chef in dozens of restaurants and owned eight of his own, and he said immigrant communities have always been interwoven in aspects of his culinary career. 

“I mean, they’re integral,” Hunter said. “I’ve been working in restaurants in New York, New Jersey, California [and] Vermont and I don’t know a restaurant that doesn’t have immigrant help [and] labor.” 

According to a 2024 data brief by the National Restaurant Association, 21% of restaurant employees are immigrants, but that figure does not account for the number of undocumented employees.  

Restaurateurs are constantly in need of consistent labor, and a survey by restaurant software provider Toast found the industry to have close to an 80% turnover rate in the past decade. Because of this, Hunter said most owners will take any help they can get to keep their business afloat, citizen or not. 

“If you have a restaurant and you’re open every day, and you need to be open the next day and your chef quit, or two of your servers quit, or your dishwasher quit…you need to find someone, and the first 10 people that walk into your restaurant are undocumented and you know it,” Hunter said.

While Hunter no longer works in the day-to-day operations of a restaurant, he knows that the industry cannot survive without immigrants in the labor pool and predicts the cost of the dining experience to skyrocket if Trump’s plan is implemented. 

“If labor costs, in general, [are] about 20 percent of a business and all of a sudden you have to go out and only hire non-immigrant labor, whether it’s legal or illegal, your labor costs will go up and your prices will go up,” he said. “I mean, no owner of a business, I don’t care if you have one unit or a thousand units. If your costs go up, you will pass those on to the consumer.”  

Hunter is still connected with restaurant owners he’s met throughout his career, and he said there are conversations about the concerns of labor loss amongst them.  

Hunter said his colleagues are a very nervous group of owners that fear the possibility of going out of business and tend to move quickly when conflicts arise as a method of self-preservation. 

Kwaku Nuamah is a peace, human rights and cultural relations professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He said that, while he does not believe Trump will be able to realistically move forward with his plans, people “always have to be concerned when there is a potential to disrupt the labor force.” 

Nuamah said that he can’t imagine deportation on a large scale to be accomplished humanely and that it would be difficult to do so without disrupting businesses. 

“This is still a country of laws, and so you can’t just deport somebody. You have to first of all establish that they are here illegally and that requires processing,” Nuamah said. “What you’re probably going to end up with is a lot of people going underground and working in the sector anyway, which would then afford them even less protection.” 

Nuamah said that even if deportations were to take place at the scale Donald Trump wants it to, it would be extremely expensive to do so. 

“That’s a cost to the employers in the restaurant sector… because they have to now do investigations to verify people’s documents and all that stuff,” he said. “Small restaurants don’t have that extra capacity, and they don’t have the extra resources to hire investigators.” 

Aside from the amount of work required to follow through with mass deportation, Nuamah said that there are other ways to better handle the issue of immigration. 

“If you really, really want to solve the problem of illegal immigration, you look at the root causes. Those root causes include these broken countries, where people cannot make a living,” he said. “You cannot solve one problem by episodic, performative actions that excite your base but create a bigger problem. And a lot of those people who are cheering this policy on will actually suffer.” 

When The Wash posed the question of how mass deportation could affect the restaurant industry on Reddit, an owner of a Thai restaurant from Houston, Texas came forward.  

The owner requested anonymity to protect themselves and their employees, and said their establishment has been targeted in the past due to being a majority immigrant staff. The owner said many people they know in the industry are “supremely nervous” about deportation. 

“From a business perspective, all of our progress stops. We can’t finish any projects anymore because our employees are now distracted. You know, the focus is no longer within the restaurant,” the Thai restaurant owner said. 

Behind California, Texas is the second most popular destination spot for migrant populations, with 5.1 million reported in 2024, according to World Population Review. 

Even though Houston is 670 miles away from the Mexico-United States border, the Thai restaurant owner is still concerned about being approached by border patrol. 

“We’re in Houston. We’re not as close to the border, but the border patrol has come up even further than they were before,” the Thai restaurant owner said. “But they’re coming up to, like, San Antonio, which is several hundred miles away from the border.” 

The owner said they have tried their best to reassure their employees that they are safe, but that it is hard to shake the fear of the unknown. 

“They’re worried about their families now, they’re worried about their livelihood, they’re worried about the light being shown on them in any kind of way,” the owner said. 

The Thai restaurant owner said that concerns of safety amongst the staff are also heightened by Texas’ leadership and described Gov. Greg Abbott as being “pretty anti-immigrant.” 

“This is the first time that I think [Texas leaders are] taking very, very public steps to do something about [immigration]. And so, our staff are concerned,” the owner said. 

In terms of how the Thai restaurant owner plans to navigate through the possibility of labor loss, they said they don’t have a clear answer on it right now. 

“I had more answers during [Trump’s] first term. I don’t have any answers [to] this one,” the owner said. “I’m mostly just telling them right now that there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing has been passed. You know, it’s a simple bluster. We’ve heard it before.” 

Ashton owns a Mediterranean restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts and asked The Wash to be identified on a first-name basis for safety reasons. 

Migrant workers are a cornerstone 

Ashton said he was concerned and upset by the thought of losing employees due to mass deportation and described migrant workers as a “cornerstone” to his establishment. 

“A lot of our employees are not here legally, and there’s a real issue if we lose all of them. Like, we just won’t be a business,” Ashton said.  

While Ashton said he can’t speak for every city, he said that without foreign-born workers, the industry would not function in the same regard. 

“I mean, it’s everyone from dishwashers, prep cooks, to line cooks, to chef de cuisines, like, without them… I can only restate it so many times. Without them, we just would not be an industry.” he said. 

Ashton could not put words to how he feels about the proposed deportation policy and is worried about how it could affect members of his family. 

“I’m having a hard time, and I can’t imagine how difficult it is for people that do not have agency in the same way that I do,” he said. “I’m also just navigating the immigration system with my wife, who is not legal. So not just for my employees, but in my personal life. It’s a whole thing.”  

Robert Smalls is a Jacksonville, Florida native who often dines at ethnic restaurants and said mass deportation would first increase his dining costs, but that its impact on him would be trivial compared to migrant workers. Smalls called the deportation policy “selfish.” 

“I understand that mass deportation [and] what these individuals are going through is very rough and kind of unimaginable for them because they’re just trying to find a better life. I say selfish because I have the awareness to understand that I only have to deal with a price increase. I don’t have to deal with my whole life being imploded,” he said. 

Smalls said that if mass deportation were to take effect, how often he dines out and which restaurants he could visit would be circumstantial, but that he would still support the establishments he could. 

“It depends on the individual situations of the people affected because there’s some spots that I go to that are primarily immigrant owned and ran,” Smalls said. “So, if they are able to, [and if they] and their families are able to stay and be stable, I’d probably frequent those areas more because the other areas will either be a little more expensive or closed down.” 

Jayesh Rathod is a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law in D.C. and said that migrant workers are not held to the praise they once were during the pandemic. 

“Many immigrant workers were seen as heroes and their role in society and in the workplace was reframed to being essential workers, right? And somehow, in the context of the most recent presidential election and all the political rhetoric surrounding it, we’ve lost sight of the important role that these folks play in society.” Rathod said. 

It is not clear how or when Trump plans to move forward with his immigration policy, yet Rathod said that deportation would be felt disproportionately around the country, and some states may not be as forceful with pushing immigrant populations out.  

“New York City and Washington, D. C. have major restaurant industries that rely heavily on foreign workers, but those are also areas where the local police are likely to be least cooperative with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and perhaps in terms of the social climate, the immigrants are going to feel safe,” Rathod said.  

Immigrant workers are often viewed solely as employees. But Rathod said it is important to humanize them and acknowledge them as members of society. 

“We need to also consider that these are not just workers, but people who are part of our society and have relationships and connections,” he said. “By stripping them away, we’re not just having an economic impact on our wallet industries, but also real-life human impact on a whole network of loved ones, many of whom are likely to be U. S. citizens. That’s something we need to think carefully and seriously about as we work with different policy decisions.”