Jesus Gonzalez, a 33-year-old Venezuelan migrant, spent a recent day learning his way around a New York City commercial kitchen together with a dozen other cooking class students.
The scene at City Harvest in Brooklyn, hosting the five-week course “Culinary Career Pathways for New New Yorkers,” launched in April by the nonprofit group Hot Bread Kitchen, which trains New Yorkers for jobs in the food industry.“Without immigration, the U.S. labor market would be in deep trouble, because native workers are not able to fill job openings,” said Zeke Hernandez, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.
Some economists argue that it’s not just immigrants who benefit from the jobs they fill. Immigration raised the wages of U.S.-born workers with a high school degree or less by 1.7% to 2.6% between 2000 and 2019, wrote Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and Alessandro Caiumi, a graduate student at the same university, in a“Native workers and businesses would both be significantly worse off without immigrants in the labor market,” Hernandez said.
Abe Monzon, senior director of talent at Union Square Hospitality Group, whose large restaurant portfolio includes Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, said graduates of the program could expect to get full-time jobs as prep cooks that pay up to $20 an hour. Potential recruits at his company would be expected to show they were comfortable working in a team and that they knew their way around a kitchen.
Williams is herself a graduate of Hot Bread Kitchen. She emerged from its program in 2018 and secured a job with the hospitality company Restaurant Associates, which operates restaurants at some of the country’s premier cultural venues and corporate facilities. This includes 33% of agricultural jobs, 36% in clothes manufacturing, and nearly a third of hospitality jobs. For the most part, he said those jobs go unfilled by native workers.
All of that changed in 2015, when he said his mother was kidnapped and held for 13 days. A criminal outfit demanded a ransom of hundreds of thousands of dollars that the family agreed to pay. “They threatened my life and they made threats against me and my family,” said Patricia, who now lives in a shelter in the Bronx with her family.“I saw these people on the show and I wanted to live that experience,” she said. “Since I've been a little girl, the kitchen has been my whole life.”There also is Victor Gonzalez, a 36-year-old Venezuelan native who worked as a waiter there and in Colombia before migrating to the United States.
Restaurant Associated is one employer that may be recruiting some of the program's graduates. The New York City-based company operates cafes and restaurants at cultural venues, stores and corporate headquarters across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Times, Tiffany and Co., and the U.S. Open.