September 7, 2010, 10:57 PM

What If Restaurants Stopped Hiring Illegal Immigrants?

By SARAH KERSHAW

In the 2004 film “A Day Without a Mexican,” all of California’s Mexicans suddenly disappear. The state wakes up to a world with no gardeners, nannies, strawberry pickers, maids, cooks, dishwashers. Through extreme exaggeration, the mockumentary makes point that without the Mexicans, the economy would essentially grind to a halt, and it satirizes those who want to send immigrants back across the border — or stop them from coming in. Presumably, if these abandoned low wage jobs were filled by legal workers making legal wages, everything would cost a whole lot more.

So in real life: What if the restaurant industry — one of the largest employers of immigrants, a good number of whom, it is no secret, are undocumented — had to do it all above board? (According to 2008 estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, illegal immigrants make up about 20 percent of the nation’s chefs, head cooks and cooks, and about 28 percent of its dishwashers.) That’s the intention, at least, of the Obama Administration’s intensified crackdown on employers that hire illegal immigrants, with businesses includingrestaurants now facing more scrutiny than they have in decades.

Some restaurateurs say that the cost of a meal would shoot up if they were forced to comply with immigration and labor laws.

“At the end of the day, the customer is going to end up paying for it,” said one TriBeCa chef and restaurateur I interviewed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to draw attention to his business. “We’ll have to pay higher wages, more taxes and then we will have to charge more.”

Are you willing to pay more for a steak because it’s cooked by someone with legal working papers who is making minimum wage? How much more? If every restaurant meal you ate went up by, say, 10 percent, would you eat out just as often?

If you knew exactly which restaurants followed immigration laws and which didn’t, would it affect where you eat?

And if you work in a restaurant with undocumented employees, how much more would your business be paying if all its employees were legally eligible to work? Will legal workers take jobs as dishwashers for minimum wage? Two dollars above minimum? How much would it all add to the cost of a check?