The glitz and glamour of rising through the ranks in the restaurant industry isn’t what it used to be. Long hours, low pay and a series of other cultural and economic factors have made lower-tier restaurant work a much less desirable path than it once was, leaving many kitchens chronically understaffed.
One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where a cook can expect to make between $10 and $12 per hour, and the median rent runs upward of $1,200 a month, living in the city is a near impossibility. As a result, people end up living far from the restaurants where they work. Add to that how late dinner shifts can end, causing people to arrive home well into the night.
Top it all off with the fact that culinary school graduates are often working through significant amounts of debt, and the burden can be insurmountable.
And here we see the insidious result of bringing in Mexicans (and other furriners) who are willing to work for less than what constitutes a fair wage for the work. For awhile, restaurants were able to enjoy easy profits. There had to be a time/day when the chefs in American restaurants were mostly Americans. Then we opened the doors to the immigrants (legal and illegal) who were willing to work for less, thereby pushing Americans out of that type of work.
So now we've run out of Mexican chefs, and Americans aren't interested in working for peon wages. Now who could have predicted
that? It seems to me that the restaurants have created their own problem. Now they need to pay more to get chefs, and to pay more they'll have to raise prices because there isn't a lot of margin to absorb a significant uptick in kitchen salaries.
But let's be honest. What's all this talk about culinary school graduates? There just aren't a lot of Mexicans who graduated from any culinary school, either here or in Mexico. The restaurants haven't been hiring Mexicans because they graduated from the CIA (no, the
other CIA, the Culinary Institute of America). No, they've been hiring Mexicans because they'll work cheap.
Break out the violins.
It's time to build that wall, and start deporting large numbers of illegals. Once we get back to where the majority of the work force is comprised of legal workers, maybe the economy can begin to correct itself and we can get back to being the United States of America instead of the United States of Mexico.
