The Fact About Immigrants the Right Ignores
They do the dirty work
Have you stayed in a hotel room lately? Bought a head of lettuce? Ate in a nice restaurant? Enjoyed a round of golf on a perfectly groomed course? I’ve got news for you. All of these things are made possible by immigrants, many of whom are illegal.
It’s the open, dirty secret of our society. That head of romaine in your crisper drawer? A week ago an immigrant harvested it. From his or her hands to yours, directly. Two years ago I took a beautiful train ride down the California coast from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. It passed through the Central Valley growing region during harvest. Everywhere you looked in the fields there were figures bent over, working as fast as they could.
The night before I had stayed in a hotel in SF. I passed the women in the halls pushing carts full of bedding and cleaning supplies, gossiping in a foreign language. Downstairs in the restaurant kitchen, everyone speaks Spanish. The late Anthony Bourdain, in his first book Kitchen Confidential, noted that if you want to work in a restaurant kitchen in NYC, you need to learn Spanish.
Those kitchens in Manhattan are often in cramped basements beneath posh dining rooms. They are hot and the work is hard and relentless. So is the harvesting, the cleaning, the landscaping. And most of…
