As the pandemic eased last fall, restaurants from the Atlantic to the Pacific faced the seemingly impossible task of resuming growth without the labor needed to keep sales even where they were.
Yet hopes were buoyed by a comprehensive remedy put forth by the federal government: Stop worrying about the risks of an open immigration policy and throw the damned gates open. Let in the workers whom restaurants and other businesses said were essential to keeping the economy thriving.
And sure enough, the plan was adopted as national policy. The official directive was to admit foreign-born workers in unprecedented numbers at previously unimagined speed.
The problem for U.S. restaurateurs: It happened in Canada, not at home.
On this side of the border, calls for comprehensive immigration reform were sounded as routinely as cheers for the United States’ World Cup soccer team. The choir participants ranged from labor unions, once forceful opponents of permitting foreign workers into the country, to restaurants facing severe cutbacks in operating hours if employee recruitment didn’t ease.
Yet the noise failed to rouse significant action. A few steps were taken by the Biden administration to soften the harshest aspects of its predecessor’s bolted-door policy. But no stakeholder was sufficiently moved to call it fundamental reform.
Optimists noted that about 275,000 requests for U.S. work permits were processed during the fiscal year ended September 2022, or roughly double the number that were greenlit in the prior 12 months, according to federal data.
Canada admitted 450,000 potential new hires during 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available. And that was before the national government eased its admissions requirements. It projects arrivals for this year will hit 465,000, and has pledged to up that tally to 500,000 by 2025.
That’s for a nation with roughly one-tenth the population of the United States—and one-tenth as many restaurants and bars.
The numbers don’t add up to a better labor situation than the dire shortage U.S. restaurateurs face. The typical restaurant north of the border is running at about 80% of capacity because operators can’t find enough workers—often with a line of customers waiting at the door, says Olivier Bourbeau, VP of federal affairs for Restaurants Canada. The trade group is that nation’s counterpart to the National Restaurant Association in the U.S.
“Labor shortages will be in front of us for the next nine or 10 years,” says the Canadian industry’s chief lobbyist. “Therefore, we are working with government not only on short-term solutions, but mid- and long-term ones, like immigration. Because the demography will not change in nine or 10 years.”
Indeed, labor is the No. 1 issue for any business in Canada right now, adding volume to the call for immigration reform, Bourbeau says.
For the near term, the favored remedy appears to be boosting productivity through technology, but stepped-up immigration is a close second, he adds.
American operators are similarly embracing technology at an unprecedented level. But immigration changes have been more of a moonshot, a result of what observers and stakeholders readily say are pure politics. While there’s widespread agreement the U.S. immigration process is badly in need of reform, there’s far from a consensus on what those fixes should be.
“Everyone sees the problem in a different way,” says Sean Kennedy, EVP of public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Both sides say, ‘Unless you deal with my issue, I’m not going to even look at the other issues.’”
Even President Biden, an optimist who professes the U.S. can accomplish anything it aims to do, seems resigned to defeat on comprehensive immigration reform like the overhaul his administration has proposed. In January 2021, as one of his first legislative initiatives, the president aired a bill that would streamline the process for foreign-born workers to get a green card, the permit needed for them to work in the U.S.
“If we don’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border—and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers, essential workers.”
The proposal also would allow the administration to issue more green cards to work in areas with particularly shallow labor pools.
It also calls for ending the caps set on arrivals from particular nations, a move that would likely increase immigration overall, while seeking to strengthen control of the United States’ southern border.
“If we don’t pass my comprehensive immigration reform, at least pass my plan to provide the equipment and officers to secure the border—and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers, essential workers,” the president pleaded during his State of the Union address. (Dreamers are immigrants who were brought into the U.S. as children without the needed authorization.)
The two key areas of disagreement over immigration are how porous the U.S. borders should be and what to do about the estimated 11.4 million immigrants who are currently here but lack the documentation to work legally.
The restaurant industry is active in those discussions, according to the National Restaurant Association, which has set immigration reform as one of its top priorities for 2023.
“We’re asking for two things,” says Kennedy, noting that “one is the creation of a new guest-worker visa program—our immediate fix, our short-term fix.”
What amount to special work permits are available for skilled white-collar immigrants needed in fields like healthcare, technology and agriculture. “Industries like ours, we need a similar program,” says Kennedy. The creation of a portable visa program for cooks, servers and other restaurant workers could instantly swell the industry labor pool by 60,000 to 80,000 job candidates, he says.
Focusing specifically on workers for particular industries or types of jobs would neutralize some of the partisanship and high emotions that are triggered by talk of permitting more foreigners to enter the country. “That allows Congress to bypass some of the landmines of immigration,” says Kennedy.
“The larger solution is to work with senators like Kyrsten Sinema, like Thom Tillis, like John Cornyn, who might be willing to deal with real immigration reform,” he continues. The three—an independent, a Republican and another GOPer, respectively—have suggested they’re open to hammering out a sweeping overhaul of the system.
“Not everyone is going to get all of what they want,” says Kennedy. Yet the situation is sufficiently troubling that even lawmakers decidedly on the right might consider something “big enough to be comprehensive but small enough not to collapse under its own weight.“
He notes that partisanship and entrenched ideology were suspended long enough in the recent past for Congress to approve ultra-divisive issues like stricter gun controls and same-sex marriages.
“Congress has willfully whistled past the graveyard for at least a decade now on immigration.”
The association’s head of lobbying acknowledges that not everyone on Capitol Hill is convinced conditions are finally right for meaningful reform. “Congress has willfully whistled past the graveyard for at least a decade now on immigration,” Kennedy says. “The pessimists would say, ‘Congress is even more polarized. Nothing’s going to happen.’ The optimists would say, ‘The need from the labor perspective has never been higher. Now’s the time.’”
He puts himself in the latter camp: “We saw the beginning of a spark with the delegation of Sens. Sinema and Cornyn to the border,” a fact-finding mission the lawmakers took around the holidays, Kennedy says. “We know there is a working group of senators who are very interested in this. Addressing this issue is important to them.”
Like other stakeholders, the industry may not get its wish list. “In an era like now, restaurants will take victory anywhere we can get it,” says Kennedy. “Our industry is in such dire need of workers.”
What’s needed for the sort of comprehensive overhaul that Canada announced in November is a significant update of U.S. attitudes and processes, says Rebecca Bernhard, a partner at the labor law firm Dorsey & Whitney. Her specialties include employee immigration issues.
On the process side, “there’s this complicated, byzantine system that evolved during our industrial past,” she says.
Immigration caps are set by country, an approach that reflects bygone prejudices. And the approval process was purposely slowed by the Trump administration. Work applications and requests for asylum are still reviewed in a laborious, time-consuming process that can involve interviews and digging. The process can take years.
About 9 million would-be immigrants are awaiting approval for green cards or other sorts of work permits, according to federal statistics. That compares with a 2020 tally of 6 million.
“That just slows things down,” Bernhard says of the intense scrutiny. “Maybe we don’t need to interview every type of person. They could also speed up the process by using electronic admissions—that would be huge.
“I think I would take a look at the green card path,” she continues. “There are people who have already cleared some hurdles and are just waiting for that last hurdle. Can we get those people those green cards first?”
But, she acknowledges, that might take a fundamental shift in the attitude many U.S. lawmakers and citizens hold toward immigration.
“The U.S. tends to look as immigrants as competitors to American workers,” says Bernhard. “Canada, like many other modern countries, has understood the numerical population imperative, that there are not enough people to satisfy the labor market. People who study population growth have been warning us of that for awhile.”
“Canada, like many other modern countries, has understood the numerical population imperative, that there are not enough people to satisfy the labor market. People who study population growth have been warning us of that for awhile.”
The U.S. Congressional Budget Office has projected that immigration will be the only source of growth in the domestic population by 2042.
Bernhard believes that Canada and other nations who see a looming economic threat are purposely opening their doors wider because the United States hasn’t fully grasped that its labor plight is likely to worsen to the critical stage. They see the competition for workers spreading to an international plain.
“Certainly, the posture Canada has taken is intended to take advantage of the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigration,” Bernhard says.
More immigration reform may well be embraced by the nation to the United States’ north as the need for workers intensifies there, says Restaurant Canada’s Bourbeau: “When we talk about our labor shortage, we’re not even talking about growth. We’re talking just about getting our current needs."
He notes that some U.S. employers have figured out a way to take advantage of Canada’s situation.
“An interesting fact: We’re now seeing big U.S. companies hiring Canadians to work remotely,” says Bourbeau.