Miguel has endured a lot to be able to make food for the people of Charlotte, North Carolina. As one of the city’s thousands of undocumented workers from Mexico, he once spent over a week in the Texas desert after crossing the border. He hasn’t seen his children for over three years.
But he loves the process of creating food, and has memorized the time it takes to prep each ingredient, and his goals for how to do it quicker. The kitchen has become his refuge – one of the only places in the city that he’ll even go, now that his continued existence in the US is increasingly tenuous.
“I’m in already, there’s no going back,” Miguel says.
Charlotte’s kitchens and food businesses are full of stories like Miguel’s. This is a city where the tourist authority tells visitors to “eat your way around the world”, a wealth of international cuisine that – as across much of the south – relies on the influx of Latino migrants.
You can easily find pupusas from El Salvador, tortas from Mexico, or baleada, the bean-stuffed quesadilla from Honduras – and of course the immigrant labor force works across the spectrum of cuisines, not just their own.
There are about 7,000 undocumented people in Charlotte’s county estimated to be working in hospitality, such as restaurants, bars and hotels, according to the Migration Policy Institute. (The national figure is around 1.3 million.) This suggests roughly one in ten people working in hospitality positions across the city are likely undocumented, according to 2014 American Community Survey data. And that’s not to mention the people who work in the city’s food supply chain: the state’s farms and fields employ another estimated 17,000 undocumented people, according to MIP.
It’s not impossible that restaurant food in a city like Charlotte could have involved an undocumented worker at every stage – from field, to truck, to processing facility, to distribution centre, to kitchen, to the waiter placing down a plate.
This was apparent on the national Day Without Immigrants protest in February, when workers went on strike to show how the country would be affected if the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigration intensifies. Charlotte restaurants and grocery stores closed in support, including the chain Compare Foods – one of 250 Charlotte businesses across all industries to shut down in solidarity with the workers.
One kitchen manager, Chris, who employs undocumented workers and whose business was closed the day of the protest, said the food industry and local economy relied on not just undocumented workers, but undocumented diners. “The protest impacted my pocket but it also impacted the pocket of North Carolina, the pocket of Charlotte,” he says. “My employees are immigrants and my customers are immigrants – my business depends on them.”
As owner of the food manufacturing business B. Roberts Foods, retired businessman Robert Shore had a clear view of how undocumented immigrants kept the city fed. The company has since been bought out by new owners, but he describes how workers in the Charlotte warehouse cooked and prepared food for retailers when he was in charge.
Shore purchased the business in 2004 and inherited a 50-person workforce. All of the employees were Hispanic. He says they reminded him of the workers who helped run his family’s farm in rural North Carolina: they got work done as efficiently as possible, he said, and treated each other like family .
In 2013, the government audited the business and established that about 40% of the 240 or so employees were undocumented. Shore was forced to let them go; otherwise, he says, they would have been deported. He describes the experience “gut-wrenching”.
“It just points to the fact that there are so many people who are contributing so much to our society, including paying taxes, and we’re just leaving them on a ledge,” he says.
Undocumented immigrants have few routes to legal status, and what routes do exist are narrow. But many businesses depend on undocumented workers, which is why many industry groups – including those in construction and food – support the expansion of the US’s temporary work visa program. But work visas are most easily available to “highly skilled” workers through the HB1 visa program – which the Trump administration has limited.
The other option for employers is the HB2 visa program, which allows for temporary visas for agricultural work and other “low-skilled” jobs. Donald Trump used this program to hire workers at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In explaining this decision in February 2016, Trump said: “I want to protect our borders. I also want to protect our businesses. They have to come in legally, and then they go back. Certain areas, in really successful areas, where we can’t get help, many people do that. That’s a good thing. Otherwise, you hurt your business.”
There aren’t many of these visas available, however. The non-agricultural temporary visa, H-2B, is capped at 66,000 people – and there are 10.1 million undocumented immigrants old enough to work in the US.
One of those is Miguel, who is so worried about being deported that he only leaves his house to exercise, run errands and go to work. “I don’t know if I’ll run into them [ICE agents], or they’ll run into me,” he says.
Miguel was first brought to the US as a child by his parents, who worked in California’s fields. He returned to Mexico at age 14, learned how to prepare food and had two children. After they were born, he made the dangerous desert border crossing back into the US to raise money for his children, who he hopes can someday join him. “They’re the reason I’m staying here and I’m not giving up easily,” he says. He waits for messages from them all day. “My kids are growing up without me and I’m growing up with them – it’s the hardest thing.”
His entry into the US was harrowing, and involved crossing the border into Texas with a group of family and friends. They sprinted away from a border agent on patrol, ran to a river, then scrambled up a mountain, where they could see the border fence and army of agents and helicopters surrounding it.
For more than a week, he said, the group walked up and down desert mountains, tired, thirsty and hungry. At one point Miguel stopped, convinced he wasn’t going to survive after losing track of how many mountains they had climbed.
Restaurant kitchens are filled with these stories. One of Miguel’s coworkers hasn’t seen their own children since they were babies either. Those babies are now teenagers. In another Charlotte kitchen, a manager describes an undocumented staffer who regularly worked overtime and double shifts because he was trying to pay off a kidnapping ransom for a family member.
“They don’t know the word ‘breaks,’” says Chris, the manager. “They just know the word ‘sacrifice’, they know the word ‘hard work’, they know the word ‘loyalty’”.
Their dedication – or desperation – also leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation. Supervisors can threaten deportation if they complain about long hours, wage theft or unpaid overtime. Employers also use their workers’ immigration status as an anti-union tactic.
“It’s been well-documented in reports and litigation that employers often use workers’ lack of immigration status, the fact that they’re undocumented, as a way to chill their efforts to exercise their rights,” says Haeyoung Yoon, director of strategic partnerships at the National Employment Law Project.
Undocumented workers looking to file a labor complaint must weigh that decision against the possibility of deportation and being separated from their family, friends and communities. “I think the reality now [under Trump] is much harsher, much more repressive and terrifying,” says Yoon.
Undocumented people aren’t just harvesting and preparing the city’s food, they are also buying it. Omar Jorge Peña, partner and general counsel of Compare Foods Supermarkets, says that without the undocumented population, his business would lose important customers.
“It would cause us to, unfortunately, have to drastically reduce our operations,” he says. “That would mean less employees, less sales tax, less economic activity, really in a lot of neighborhoods that need it.”
Undocumented people “are our customers,” he says. “They spend money the same way documented immigrants do, the way native-born Carolinians do.”
As Trump’s crackdown intensifies, Charlotte’s undocumented population – who already live and work in the city’s shadows – is under increased pressure to stay quiet. Miguel deals with the fear by focusing on his work, hoping that by making food he is helping the community.
When he gets scared of being deported, he thinks back to the time on the mountain where he nearly gave up. “‘You’re in, let’s go,’” he thinks to himself. “And I continue.”
Some names have been changed.
A City Without Undocumented Workers concludes next week with an investigation of Charlotte’s education system.
Read part one of the series here.
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