New York City’s restaurant industry — long powered by immigrant labor — is being hit hard by President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, according to a new report from the nonprofit One Fair Wage.
In “An Industry of Immigrants: Restaurant Industry Impacts of Mass Deportation,” the organization estimates that roughly 4,800 restaurant workers have left the city since March 2025.
That figure, drawn from national labor-force data and extrapolated for New York’s foreign-born restaurant workforce, underscores what many owners and workers already see: fewer hands in the kitchen, shorter hours, reduced menus, and in some cases, closures.
The exodus of restaurant workers is resulting in “a mounting labor shortage that threatens not only small neighborhood restaurants but the city’s entire food economy,” Rayan Semery-Palumbo, director at One Fair Wage and the Living Wage for All Coalition, told Documented.
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“The promise to ‘protect American jobs’ has become a policy that destroys them. When immigrant workers leave, restaurants don’t hire Americans — they shut their doors,” he said.
According to the report, the U.S. foreign-born labor force declined by about 5% between March and July — a drop that, when applied to New York’s restaurant sector, translates to thousands of missing cooks, servers, and dishwashers. Nationally, 22% of restaurant workers are immigrants, Gallup polling shows. In New York City, that share is nearly three times higher: 60% of restaurant and food-service workers are foreign-born, and it’s likely that one in five are undocumented, according to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in 2023.
That dependency makes the industry acutely vulnerable to immigration enforcement and economic shocks. Restaurant jobs are disproportionately held by women, people of color, and low-wage earners who often live paycheck to paycheck. Many are paid sub-minimum wages that, in some states, can legally fall as low as $2 an hour — leaving them dependent on tips or public assistance such as food stamps and Medicaid. As those programs face cuts and ICE raids spread fear, workers find themselves confronting instability on multiple fronts.
Semery-Palumbo likened the restaurant industry to “the canary in the coal mine” for the broader economy. “People just want to be able to go out to eat and enjoy themselves when everything else is hard,” he said.
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He added that restaurants have long served as “one of the few ladders of upward mobility” for vulnerable workers — a place where newcomers can build skills and stability. “Going after these workers is really cruel,” he said. “Mass deportation doesn’t protect American jobs — it empties American kitchens.”
In the end, Semery-Palumbo said the issue reaches beyond economics.
“New York’s restaurant industry has always been the Ellis Island of the city’s economy,” he said. “Protecting workers in that industry is really about what kind of city we want New York to be — one that thrives because people come here to work hard and make it better, or one that lets fear and exclusion define it.”
As enforcement intensifies and policymakers debate next steps, the stakes are clear. “Our restaurants feed the country,” he said. “Immigrant workers feed our restaurants. The math is simple — and so is the morality.”
