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More than 20 San Francisco restaurants have now joined the national Sanctuary Restaurants movement\u2014a joint project between Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and Presente.org created to help resist the Trump administration\u2019s\u2019 aggressive posturing on immigration.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to make sure your employees feel that they aren\u2019t going to be attacked,\u201d said Nati Ramirez, who owns Don Ramon\u2019s on 11th Street, the restaurant her immigrant father Ramon opened in 1982.<\/p>\n
Before opening his restaurant, Ramon, who immigrated in 1955 from Ayutla, Jalisco, Mexico with his wife Guadalupe, worked picking lettuce in the vast fields of California\u2019s central valley. Nati remembers her father\u2019s stories of how he would hide in fear in the large field tubes during immigration raids.<\/p>\n
Today, many of Nati\u2019s employees also live in fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but she tries reassure them to be hopeful.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to remember that the president can\u2019t change everything in a blink of an eye \u2026 and ICE just cannot come in,\u201d she tells them.<\/p>\n
Last month, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association (GGRA) joined Sanctuary Restaurants, and on March 20 at Don Ramon\u2019s, it hosted the first in a series of free workshops designed to educate and train small business owners and restaurateurs about how to prepare their employees and guests for potential raids and other possible harmful immigration policies.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur immigrant community is the backbone of that industry,\u201d said Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association (GGRA). \u201cRestaurateurs are immigrants; restaurant workers are immigrants; these issues are very critical to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanctuary Restaurants isn\u2019t a legal designation, but the San Francisco chapter has teamed up with various members of the civil rights legal community.<\/p>\n
Megan Sallomi, an attorney with the Lawyers\u2019 Committee for Civil Rights who specializes in immigrant justice, was one of the panelists at the March 20 workshop.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Sanctuary Restaurant movement is a response to fight back against a climate of fear and hate that\u2019s coming from Washington. And that fear is paralyzing, and it\u2019s having severe human consequences and economic consequences,\u201d Sallomi said.<\/p>\n
In addition to participating in the workshop, the Lawyers\u2019 Committee for Civil Rights also defends immigrants during deportation proceedings and helps them obtain legal status. During the panel, Sallomi spoke about the rights and responsibilities of small business owners and how they can protect their employees to the fullest extent of the law.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever we hear about increased ICE enforcement, there is always a risk that businesses are going to start discriminating against people for unlawful reasons,\u201d Sallomi said. \u201cObviously from a legal perspective, you can\u2019t hire someone who doesn\u2019t have authorization to work here … but what we don\u2019t want to see is businesses and employers start to discriminate against people because of their accent or their national origin, or their beliefs about them that may or may not be verified.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unauthorized immigrants accounted for approximately 9.4 percent of California\u2019s workforce (or 1.8 million workers) in 2012 according a report by Pew Research.<\/p>\n
In a separate study, Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, associate professor at UCLA, and Marshall Fitz, senior fellow at Center for American Progress, found that were \u201call unauthorized immigrants removed from California, the state would lose $301.6 billion in economic activity,\u201d and that the total number of employed people would drop by 17.4 percent. They also reported that conversely if unauthorized immigrants in California were legalized, 633,000 jobs would be added to the economy, and tax revenue would increase by $5.3 billion.<\/p>\n
Even though it\u2019s against the law to hire someone who isn\u2019t authorized to work in the United States, many employers do anyway.<\/p>\n
Immigration attorney and former president of the San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association Enrique Ramirez, explained the difficulty employers have in verifying whether their applicants are authorized to work in this country.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s too many requirements,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s too many double checkings. Sometimes they\u2019re required to check with CIS [Citizenship and Immigration Services] or ICE directly, and that information in and of itself is not current.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramirez, whose parents were immigrants, said the world has changed to become more interconnected and that explains the current demographics of the workforce in the restaurant industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the new America,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to look down south to our neighbors who have suffered quite a bit because of our own economic policies, and our own political policies, and that has fueled immigration into the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
The GGRA\u2019s affiliation with Sanctuary Restaurants and ongoing workshops have also received recognition and support from Assemblymember David Chiu.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur city, our state, our country is facing an existential threat about who it is that we are. We are a city and country that was founded by immigrants,\u201d Chiu said. \u201cBut we have a president, and we now have immigration agents, who have forgotten that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe as immigrants have held numerous business here in San Francisco,\u201d Nati said. \u201cWe aren\u2019t just the gardeners, we aren\u2019t just the baby sitters, we\u2019re not that immigrant that just comes and does menial chores. We educate ourselves, and we continue on with our dream.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[su_carousel source=”media: 33423,33425,33426,33427,33429,33430″ limit=”60″ link=”lightbox” width=”800″ height=”540″ responsive=”no” items=”1″] More than 20 San Francisco restaurants have now joined the national Sanctuary Restaurants movement\u2014a joint project between Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and Presente.org created to help resist the Trump administration\u2019s\u2019 aggressive posturing on immigration. \u201cYou have to make sure your employees feel that they aren\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":33427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":false,"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3929],"tags":[13127,5277,13113,5577,13125,13129,13115,11407,5663,7853,13131,13121,13111,3914,13117,13119,13123,13109,8025],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-33421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en","tag-citizenship-and-immigration-services","tag-david-chiu-en","tag-don-ramons-restaurant","tag-donald-trump-en","tag-enrique-ramirez","tag-ggra","tag-golden-gate-restaurant-association","tag-gwyneth-borden","tag-ice-en","tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-en","tag-lawyers-committee-for-civil-rights-en","tag-megan-sallomi","tag-nati-ramirez","tag-presente-org-en","tag-restaurant-opportunities-centers-roc-united","tag-roc","tag-san-francisco-la-raza-lawyers-association","tag-sanctuary-restaurants","tag-undocumented-immigrants","entry"],"yoast_head":"\n