It’s a longstanding MAGA critique of mass immigration: the idea that the status quo amounts to a lifestyle subsidy for the class of Americans who frequent upscale eateries, get their kitchens renovated and hire nannies, landscapers or cleaning ladies.
And, for better or worse, a month of unprecedented immigration enforcement in Washington seems to be bearing out that critique.
However catastrophic the impact on targeted capital-area immigrants has been, the highest-profile local economic impact of the blitz so far has been on restaurants, food delivery services, home-improvement contractors, even moving companies — precisely the industries that cater to the capital’s elites. That’s a consumer base unlikely to garner much political sympathy in the broader country.
“You’re talking about the activities of relatively affluent people that have been subsidized by Congress” via liberal immigration laws and enforcement, said Mark Krikorian, a longtime advocate for radically slashing the number of newcomers. “There’s not going to be a lot of tears shed over people having to pay 20 percent more for Uber Eats.”
The effect is indeed dramatic — most of all on immigrants who have seen their lives upended, and the neighbors who’ve witnessed troubling scenes of masked federal agents hauling people into unmarked vehicles.
But the impact on consumers is starting to be felt, too. Contractors say they are having trouble getting people to work jobs in D.C., delaying home-improvement projects and driving up costs for clients. Restaurateurs say even some duly documented workers are frightened to come in, leading to shrunken menus for diners. As moped-riding delivery drivers have become targets for ICE, wait times on food delivery apps have risen.
After a neighborhood group-chat erroneously reported that agents were rounding up nannies at a local park last month, parents in the tony Forest Hills neighborhood rushed to the playground to make sure their kids’ babysitters were okay — exactly the sort of workday interruption you’re trying to avoid by paying for child care.
“My workers are afraid,” said Luis Reyes, who owns several Washington dining spots. “Some of them quit. If you see the news, they detain people, even with permits. Some of them said they’ll come back when things cool off.” Reyes said he’s stopped opening one floor of his four-story Lauriol Plaza restaurant in the nightlife-heavy Adams Morgan neighborhood.
“I tell them, ‘Maybe another time,’” said a Maryland-based home-improvement contractor who told me that he’s saying no to District clients looking for help on things like painting projects. “I don’t have any guy who wants to work in Washington, D.C.” Workers have been especially spooked by high-profile incidents where masked ICE agents pulled over contractor vans on their way into town and detained the occupants.
An owner of a boutique D.C. building firm, which only takes on a few projects at a time, explained that the lack of workers caused the firm to pull out of a $400,000 gut-remodeling kitchen project. “If you don’t have labor, then you’re foregoing projects,” the owner said. “That’s the opportunity cost. But also, so many of the subcontractors are taking on risks, and the prices are going to go way up.” (The contractors asked not to be named to protect their workers.)
According to Yesim Sayin, who studies the city economy at the D.C. Policy Center think tank, this is all terrible news for the municipal economy, coming at a moment when federal job cuts have made the tax base ever more reliant on hospitality and real estate. “All these actions with ICE are like putting additional weight on something that’s about to break,” she said.
But the identity of the most prolific consumers of the impacted industries is also likely to shape the politics around the immigration surge.
Early this week, Trump crafted a social media post threatening to “federalize” the department if the city’s police didn’t resume its cooperation with ICE, which lapsed last week after the end of the administration’s 30-day police takeover. City laws, which were superseded during the takeover, prohibit local police from certain kinds of immigration enforcement. Either way, the federal forces sent to the District by Trump aren’t subject to those rules.
Though some advocates told me they hope the administration will ease up once people see the economic damage caused by yanking so many people out of the workforce, I wouldn’t bet on it: The sector of the Washington population that has spiffed up gentrified neighborhoods via fancy kitchen upgrades or dived into the capital’s booming multicultural restaurant scene may well represent the demographic most despised on the Trump-era right.
“Mass immigration has allowed the evolution of a kind of Gulf-sheikhdom lifestyle,” Krikorian said. “In the UAE, only a handful of people there actually are citizens, and everybody else is in some kind of tenuous status serving them. I guess that’s one way to organize a society, but that’s not the kind of republic of social equals that we should aspire to.”
According to White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, some 1,000 arrests on immigration charges have happened in D.C. since the takeover. “Law enforcement is doing an outstanding job removing these threats from D.C. communities,” she said. “The focus of this operation has been stopping violent crime committed by anyone, regardless of their immigration status.” Most ICE arrests in the region are of people who didn’t face other criminal charges or convictions.
Basic economic theory would hold that, when an industry is having trouble attracting labor, it will raise wages or improve recruitment and training — perhaps to a level that Krikorian says will attract American-born workers who have dropped out of the labor market. The old view among the labor left, and the current view on the anti-immigration right, is that if a bunch of yuppies who already pay $20 for a bowl of ramen start having to pay $25, it’s no crisis.
At the very least, that’s a good anti-immigration political refrain in the many parts of the United States where $400,000 seems like a price for an entire house, not a kitchen renovation.
Of course, it’s foolish to assume that local Washington’s outrage over Trump’s law-enforcement takeover has anything to do with its downstream effects on the labor pool. Some eight in 10 residents disapprove of the surge, a proportion that includes plenty of folks who don’t hire landscapers. Videos of neighbors confronting apparent ICE agents have gone viral because people find the spectacle shocking and ominous, not because they worry it’ll interrupt their next kitchen remodel.
And on the economy writ large, Sayin — like many economists — doesn’t buy the idea that getting rid of immigrants will automatically lead to some situation where rising wages and benefits lure people into jobs they haven’t wanted. Even if it did, the transition would be fatal to a lot of businesses in tight-margin industries like dining, not to mention disastrous for the local governments that need to maintain the tax base today, not in some ideal future.
According to data from the city’s chief financial officer, food service represents 56,000 jobs in Washington, about 7 percent of the total. The industry contributes about $7 billion to the municipal economy industry — money that supports services that aren’t just used by yuppies.
Now, the anxieties about a changed labor market are shaping business decisions that will affect things even for places that haven’t seen a lot of disruption in the past month. Case in point: Andy Shallal, the prolific, politically active Washington restaurateur whose Busboys and Poets restaurant has grown to eight locations across the region. Shallal told me he hasn’t seen much effect on his own workforce, other than a couple of employees who abruptly stopped showing. But he said the potential sea change to America’s immigration environment had caused him to rethink longer-term business plans.
“Our industry is heavily dependent on immigrants on all levels,” said Shallal, himself a naturalized citizen born in Iraq. “Especially in D.C. you’d be hard pressed to find a white person who wants to cook” other than at the most elite dining spots. The prospect of doing without this labor force, he told me, “certainly makes me very cautious about opening new places. I had in mind opening other places, and now I’ve put that on hold. It sends a chilling factor that makes people think twice before doing business.”