The Wisconsin Restaurant Association and the National Restaurant Association urge the House and Senate to work together to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Why Comprehensive Changes are Needed:

• The U.S. immigration system doesn’t reflect America’s need for workers. Our economy provided 134 million jobs last year, yet the government makes only 10,000 green cards available for service-industry workers each year. Over the next decade, the number of jobs in the foodservice business will grow one and a half times as fast as the U.S. labor force. At the same time, the number of 16- to 24-year-olds in the labor force — half the restaurant industry’s workforce — will not grow at all.

• Congress’s approach must be comprehensive. There’s only one way to facilitate a sustainable workforce for the American economy while ensuring our national security and prosperity. Congress must pass comprehensive legislation that does four things: strengthen border security, establish a workable program to verify job applicants’ legal status, create a temporary-worker program to meet labor demands when there aren’t enough U.S. workers, and develop a plan to address the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States.

• Targeting the nation’s employers is not the answer. While the government claims stepped-up enforcement through no-match letters will discourage future illegal immigration across our nation’s borders, in reality, all they are doing is eliminating a sizeable portion of the workforce without providing any legal avenue to hire foreign-born workers to do jobs that Americans are no longer taking. We encourage the White House and members of Congress to view employers as partners in economic growth and job creation instead of as adversaries in the immigration debate.

• Employers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Because of Congress’s failure to act, states and localities are passing their own immigration laws — some that conflict with federal requirements, others that go far beyond federal requirements. Confused and frustrated employers face a sea of changing and conflicting requirements. The Department of Homeland Security’s no-match regulations add one more element of confusion.

The restaurant industry is an industry of opportunity that employs a diverse cross-section of people from different backgrounds and cultures. Immigrants are fundamental to the success of the restaurant industry, as entrepreneurs, as customers, and as workers. 

The restaurant industry, like this country, was built on the dreams of immigrants.  Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have come to the U.S. and started a career in restaurants or opened their own small businesses - which are the building blocks of a strong economy. 

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Since 1933, the Wisconsin Restaurant Association has been dedicated to the promotion, protection and improvement of the foodservice industry.  The Wisconsin Restaurant Education Foundation’s mission is to promote food service as a professional career path; attract and educate future industry leaders; and provide quality training for those already working in the industry.