As the alien registration deadline of April 28 came closer, Mohammad Naim, an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, said his life became that of a fugitive. He felt like a criminal, would often be startled by anybody who stared at him. He hesitated to talk, but after intermittent bouts of silence, admitted grudgingly that he often left for the day from work late evenings through the back door of the restaurant on Hillside Avenue in Queens where he worked part-time as a bus boy and a cleaner.
“Sometimes I felt I was someone like from the films you have (Hindi films),” he says, in halting, heavily accented Hindi, outside the restaurant he works at, balancing his weight from one foot to the other. “But I am not some hero, you know.”
That conversation took place almost a month ago. Today, Naim no longer works at the restaurant. He has disappeared. His owner says he does not know where he went. One day he just did not turn up for work. The owner is reluctant to talk; he is brusque and dismissive, suspicious of questions.
According to the New York-based Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York (ROCK), an organization that is trying to organize non-union workers and push for legislation for fair worker practices, there are around 156,000 restaurant workers in New York City, including all the five boroughs. South Asian workers comprise around 2.5 percent of that workforce; some 3845 persons from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, work as bus boys, banquet workers, cart waiters, cleaners, chefs and sometimes all of the above jobs in a single day. The majority of the workforce are from Latin America (some 40 percent), followed by U.S. nationals (24 percent) and from Africa.
“Post September 11th some 13,000 restaurant workers in the city lost their jobs; there was a dearth of jobs,” said Saru Jayaraman, the executive director of ROC. “But with the INS registrations, the situation has changed. Now there are jobs, but no takers for it. A lot of South Asian workers, especially from Pakistan and Bangladesh have left.” She talks of a Bangladeshi restaurant worker who was earlier employed at the ill-fated Windows of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center, who has now decided to pack his bags and leave for back home, and not go through the hassle of registration.
Naim in the brief minutes he spoke, after much cajoling, had talked of maybe going to Canada if he was forced to leave. He did not want to go back to Bangladesh. Going back to “a life of nothing” was incomprehensible to him, he said. “There are no jobs there, what will I do?” he had asked.
All across the city, at South Asian hole-in-the-wall eateries, shabby looking take-out restaurants who survive on a week to week profit and at medium scale restaurants, there is a sense of panic and fear of financial ruin and bankruptcy.
First, it was September 11th; now the INS’ Alien Registration program. After the mass exodus of Pakistani workers, it is now the turn of the Bangladeshi community to exhale painfully and run with what they can carry with them, leaving dozens of restaurants in a quandary of worker shortage.
There are no more workers to do menial jobs like cutting fish and chicken, cleaning dishes and scrubbing floors at paltry wages, only a few chefs who know the right mixture of spices in a mutton or lamb curry.
There is also a panic situation amongst the illegal Indian workers. They try hard to scotch rumors that India will be to be added to the registration list next, but fear the worst.
Saurav Sarkar, with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, an organization that provides free services for the immigrant Asian community, says that the dire situation seems like a “roundup.” It has turned into desperate times for small businesses, he says.
“People are very frightened in the country,” said Sarkar. “There are stores and restaurants closing down rapidly.”
Sarkar reads out names of business establishments, within a few blocks of each other in Coney Island, to have wrapped up business in the last couple of months; in the list are at least three restaurants and a grocery store owned by Pakistanis.
“I don’t foresee many illegal South Asian workers in the restaurant business in the future,” predicts Sarkar.
Roopa De Choudhary, a social worker with the Bangladeshi community and filmmaker,
says in the recent past, some Bangladeshi workers in restaurants have turned to trundling vending carts, in order to avoid exploitation and in the hope that it will help avoid being deported.
“The South Asian restaurant workers in the city are like bonded labor; they work crazy hours, work under totally unsanitary conditions and face psychological trauma. But this is the breaking point: be humiliated and deported or run away. It is awful,” said Choudhary.
She says she has tried to reach out to several of the illegal immigrants she knew of earlier, to try help them. She has not heard back from any of them. They have probably left, she says.
More than two dozen restaurant owners interviewed for this story in three boroughs of the city—Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi—admitted that they have lost workers in the last couple of months—a few have lost entire staff—and that it is increasingly becoming difficult to get specialized staff to maintain quality in service.
“Workers now want to get a proper visa like H1B,” said one owner of an Indian restaurant. “There is a great sense of insecurity amongst the workers.” A Pakistani owner says he is now trying out African and Sri Lankan workers as a last resort.
Although community leaders differ on the numbers, INS statistics say the total number of Bangladeshis living in the United States illegally is 84,000. Of that, 3,000 are undocumented women and children, and exempt from registration, leaving 81,000 to go through the rigors of registration and most probably deportation. According to conservative figures, some 50,000 Pakistanis have already fled the country. Many are in hiding. There are an estimated 200,000 illegal Indian immigrants in the United States.
Attorney Suneeta Dewan, based in New Jersey, and a senior member of the Indian American Lawyers Association, says that for small restaurant business to survive, the government has to change its policy and be more humane in its approach toward illegal immigrant workers.
“The economy is bound to collapse if there are no workers left to run the sweatshops, the small restaurants,” she says, and adds: “there are five million undocumented workers in the country. How many plane loads of people can you send back home?”
Dewan suggests propagating a new amnesty program that would give time for the government to do background checks on illegal immigrants, but not necessarily force them to be deported.
Wall-Street based immigration attorney Anand Ahuja who also has an office in Queens, says that one of the problems that plague illegal restaurant workers, and make their life miserable has been misinformation, and becoming prey to con-men who have posed as lawyers and duped them of hard earned money. It is a vicious circle of exploitation he says, right from working in the restaurant to now being on the run from the INS.
However, Ahuja says that one good thing that will come out of the strict regulations deportations is legal workers in the future will be likely paid minimum wages.
Some workers told in interviews that it is common for owners to give only food and boarding and maybe five dollars a day for work to new workers who are desperate to stay on in the country in the hope of a better future.
“The US was accusing other countries of labor exploitation while illegal immigrants were working for next to nothing wages right here. In time, after the registration system and when there is a more sophisticated tracking system in place, the workers will get their rightful due (of wages),” said Ahuja.
It is also quirky that the registrations and workers shortage come despite assurances from the top city government officials, including governor George Pataki and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer who have in the past maintained that New York City welcomes workers from all over the world and there would be no discrimination if they did not have legal papers.
Surprisingly, a call to the Mayor’s office, confirm that the officialdom still go by the same rule, albeit with a pinch of irony.
“The Mayor (Michael Bloomberg) support the workers in the city and has said that they should go to the police if there is any discrimination of any sort,” said Lark Anton, spokesperson for the Mayor. However, to a query, Anton stresses that it should be clarified with the police department if they would turn illegal workers in to the INS.
Some South Asian restaurant owners, on Lexington Avenue, have employed only family members in the business and are surviving grimly. One restaurant owner who made a profit of around $20,000 showing cricket matches during the recent World Cup, says that there is also fear and trepidation among Indian workers to be seen working in Pakistani or Bangladeshi owned businesses.
“It is fine to write that we are serving Indo-Pak-Bangla cuisine,” he said. “There is not such a sense of unity within the three communities however.”
Most South Asian restaurants in the city have hoardings outside their shops that proclaim boldly their multi-ethnic and multicultural outlook; the name ‘Indo-Pak’ or ‘Indo-Pak-Bangla’ is a common suffix to the fare offered. It remains to be seen how long the charade is going to last. Meanwhile the exodus continues.
This article was written as part of the Ethnic Press Fellowship of the Independent Press Association-New York.
