Anthony Bourdain says if Trump becomes president, 'every restaurant in America would shut down'
Celebrity Chef Anthony Bourdain denounced Donald Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants if he becomes America’s next president, saying it would be disastrous for the restaurant industry.
“If Mr. Trump deports 11 million people, or whatever he’s talking about right now, every restaurant in America would shut down,” he said in a radio interview with Sirius XM’s Pete Dominick yesterday:
Bourdain said that in his decades in the restaurant business, Central American and Mexican restaurant workers have been “the backbone of the industry”.
“Never in any of those years, not once, did any American-born kid walk into my restaurant and say I’d like a job as a night porter or a dish washer, even a prep cook,” he said.
He added that restaurants in New York, D.C., and other major cities are struggling to find cooks because “all the kids coming out of culinary school, they don’t want to do the prep job. They’re like, they show up out of school with their nice knife roll up and the white coffee filter on their head and they say ‘When do I get to be on Top Chef? When do I get my own show? What do you mean I have to clean squid for a year?'”
Trump has said that he will deport all undocumented immigrants if he wins office, before building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. “We have to get them out. If we have wonderful cases, they can come back in but they have to come back in legally,” he said last month.
While Bourdain thinks having a conversation about how many new immigrants America accepts in a set period of time is a fair debate, he said, for the people who are already here there should be no question of deportation.
“For the people who have been living here and were so much part of our lives and have done nothing but do their best to achieve their american dream and raise families and make music and do all of these things for us, there should be an easy path to legality,” he said.