With Donald Trump about to to take office for another term and anti immigrant hysteria ramping up again, I look back on my decades of working with people from all over the world and my mostly positive experiences with them.
I am about to retire for the second time. I spent forty years in the restaurant business mostly as a chef until my legs gave out on me and I could no longer spend ten or twelve hours at a clip on my feet. After I “retired” from restaurants I started my second career in car sales. The two businesses are similar in several ways, long hours and lots of pressure. The biggest similarity though is there are lots of immigrants. Men and women from every corner of the globe and for the most part they are decent, honest hard working people.
In the early seventies when I started cooking pretty much all of the back pf house staff were your suburban white guys, many of them still in high school and most of them were shit at their jobs. They came in late of simply didn’t show up, they left work unfinished, they drank the leftover beer that came back to the dish room and some would suck all the nitric oxide out of the whip cream cans.
Things began to change in the mid decade when the first refugees from Viet Nam arrived. It didn’t matter whatt their background was, they would do whatever shit job they were assigned and did it well. When they left one job they would go to a second and sometimes a third job. They lived sometimes ten to a house and would take shifts sleeping in beds.
One woman who I became quite close with was a four foot ten dynamo who had escaped during the fall of Saigon. She threw her two older children onto a boat and then jumped in herself holding her three year old son on her back.They spoke no English save a few words of American GI slang. When I took a job running the kitchen she came to work there as a full time second job. Her son was my lunch cook and her daughter worked in the kitchen on weekends.
Another young Vietnamese kid came in after his high school let out for the day and worked as a prep cook. About a year ago he tracked me down to let me know that he graduated college and now owns a Seven Eleven as well as a florist business. He wanted to tell me that I had instilled a lot of confidence in him by trusting him with some of the more complicated prep jobs and he also wanted me to know that he really began to enjoy the “crazy music” we always played in the kitchen (’80’s punk and new wave). I think I was more moved by that than anything else anyone has ever said to me.
Eventually the Vietnamese began to move on to bigger and better things. Two of the doctors I see now are children of Vietnamese refugees. We have a large shopping center nearby that is entirely filled with Viet shops and restaurants. They are true American success stories.
Around 1980 a squat little guy from Guatemala named Jorge showed up looking for a job, we hired him as a dishwasher and before long almost the entire back of house staff was a Central American. Once again, they worked multiple jobs, lived in cramped group houses and did whatever shit job they were given without complaint. Most of them were in the country illegally. When the Social Security number we were given came back as bad they would show up a few days later with a new one. Most of my early hispanic employees became citizens and many of them are successful business owners.
One of the last kitchens I ran, I was the only native English speaker there. I never learned more that a few words of kitchen Spanish because I felt it was more important that my employees learned English.
I started in the car biz in January 2013, I had zero experience in sales and knew next to nothing about cars except how to drive one and put gas in the tank. The first thing I noticed was that I was one of the few natural born Americans working in sales. My co-workers were African, Middle Eastern, Persian, Asian and Hispanic. After a brief training period the new hires were given our schedule, one of my new friends, an American woman who had worked for the US Government for about ten years and had been riffed took one look at hers and promptly quit. We were expected to work six days including weekends, one weekday off but then had to work one day open till close to cover the people who were off. Having worked in restaurants where long days and almost no weekends or holidays off was the norm, I didn’t see anything that concerned me. My lady friend having had the cushy government schedule could not imagine anything other than a Monday to Friday eight hour day.
I spent about a year at my first dealership and had only a couple of months where I did not have to dig into my savings or borrow money to make ends meet. The turnover in the sales staff was insane and the GM countered by constantly flooding the floor with new hires, most of whom would only last as long as their first commission check (Are you shitting me? This is all I get after all that work??) Still it was the foreign born salespeople who worked the long hours with very few complaints and were for the most part the big earners.
I moved to another dealership in 2014 (Toyota, Lets Go Places!) and discovered how badly I’d been taken advantage of at the other place, I sold the same number of cars my first year and made twice as much money. Many of my new co-workers were from Eastern Europe from what had been the old USSR, they were all smart and hard working and many had been promoted to finance or sales managers. None of them were the stereotypical sleazy car salesman and many of them were making six figures purely by long hours and hard work. One big difference with my new job was that our GM valued good employees and did what he could to retain them. Most of my foreign co-workers had become US Citizen Citizens or were working at it and knew how fortunate they were to be here.
Not to say that I haven’t had bad experiences with immigrants; I almost came to blows with a little Persian guy who blatantly poached one of my customers which is a big no no. It had nothing to do with where he came from, he was just a weasel.
One guy, an Indian who came here on a student visa and never left was constantly bad mouthing the country. He got himself a good education, married an American woman and eventually started a small business but had nothing good to say about the country. I am about as liberal as they come and I know the USA is far from perfect but don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
One thing most people who come to this country have in common, they are chasing the American Dream as our immigrant ancestors were. They will take whatever shit job they can get and work harder at it then any two natural born Americans would. I spent a couple of weeks when I was young working on a small farm. One day I spent eight hours digging up potatoes and even though I was young and strong my back was in agony from all of that stooping and carrying bags of spuds. The people who want to expel the migrant farm workers should prepare for sky high produce prices if the farmers can even find people to work ion the fields.
Our immigration system is broken as we all know and politicians on the right can only come up with draconian measures to “fix” it while the left wants to let anyone who wants to come in and we can fix it later. We need people on both sides of the aisle to stop using immigration as a wedge issue and really work on coming up with a solution. Immigrants are the life blood of this country and anyone who wants to come here and work hard and obey the laws should be allowed in. How that can be achieved is way above my pay grade but whoever is running the government needs to realize that and if they can’t or won’t do that we need to elect people who will.
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Photo: iStock
