By Neil Irwin and Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 30, 2006; A01
At table 10 of the Oval Room, a high-price lawyer slurped an $8 bowl of asparagus soup. Over at table 71, a crowd of Office and Management and Budget staffers toasted a retiring colleague, while at table 76, a White House correspondent leaned in to hear what her lunch partner was saying.
In the kitchen of the restaurant, there was a different kind of kaleidoscope. The sous-chef, a Panamanian immigrant, directed two cooks from El Salvador, one from Guatemala and one from Honduras. A Salvadoran immigrant ran the food to the tables. All the activity was monitored by the general manager, an Austrian by birth, who needs to satisfy the owner, originally from India.
Just as all of those workers depend on the swirl of official Washington business for their livelihood, official Washington depends on them. Tomorrow, immigrant groups plan to boycott workplaces and stores to prove just that point. But one day of activity at the Oval Room, a sleekly designed spot a block from the White House, shows how difficult it is to make any kind of simple calculation.
The tangled web of economic connections among immigrants and those born in the United States creates jobs at a Philadelphia seafood distributor and revenue for the local cable company, even as it causes a financial drain on local hospitals and schools. The impacts are so intertwined that significant changes to immigration laws could change the nation's commerce in unforeseen ways.
"We would not exist without immigrant labor," said Ashok Bajaj, owner of the restaurant. "If the laws change, the entire economics of the restaurant industry would change, too."
Bajaj, a New Delhi native who moved here from London in 1988, was willing to invest a million dollars here because of the availability of labor at attractive prices. His dishwashers make about $10 an hour, line cooks about $14 an hour, and sous-chefs $20 or so. About 70 percent of the restaurant's employees were born outside the United States; overall in the Washington region, about 45 percent of food-service workers are immigrants, according to an analysis of federal data by the Pew Hispanic Center.
If those workers in the Washington area hadn't been available, Bajaj said, he probably would have opened the restaurant somewhere else, perhaps in London, Sydney or New York. About 85,000 immigrants work in the region's leisure and hospitality sector, according to Pew, out of 215,000 total workers in that sector. There are about 86,100 unemployed people in the region, many of whom are just between jobs; were it not for immigrant labor, there would not be enough workers to staff the city's hotels and restaurants at their current levels.
A wide range of other businesses profit from the restaurant industry's immigrant labor. Thursday morning, the bread guy dropped off $32.75 worth of ciabatta and other items. Restaurant supplier Adams-Burch pulled up with $79.20 worth of brandy snifters. Keany Produce pushed $97.10 worth of arugula and other produce down the long, dim corridor to the kitchen, and the delivery guy from Samuels & Son unloaded $305.26 worth of salmon, cod and other seafood.
The booming restaurant business in Washington has rippled through to Philadelphia-based Samuels, which has been around since the 1920s. It has expanded from about 25 employees a decade ago to 150 today on the strength of the increasing numbers of high-end restaurants. Those are union jobs paying $12 to $19 an hour, and Samuel D'Angelo, the company president, figures that about 75 percent of his workforce was born in the United States.
"If there weren't all these immigrants out there to staff these white-tablecloth restaurants, things wouldn't have progressed the way they have in the last five or 10 years," D'Angelo said. "If we had to go backward, there would be a downturn in our business."
D'Angelo employs cutters who fillet fish. Machines can do the same work more cheaply, but they often tear up the meat. If there were fewer immigrants, forcing D'Angelo to pay more to attract workers, he would probably pass those costs on to customers. If restaurants were to balk at higher prices and settle for machine-filleted fish, they might find seafood suppliers who employ fewer people for each serving of fish.
Back at the kitchen in the Oval Room, René Hernandez stood at a station, preparing food for the looming lunch rush. The 22-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, who arrived in the United States four years ago, picked one long, fat, cluster of fava beans after another out of a huge bowl and began the laborious task of removing a handful of beans from each cluster, then peeling each individual bean from its hard shell, a task that can take an hour to yield a small bowlful of shelled beans.
He is paid $10 an hour so that customers can order a $20 plate of Alaskan halibut with fava beans, English peas and mint. He likes the job, and it beats the $5 a day he made as a car mechanic back in El Salvador. The customers like the fresh, subtle taste of fava beans. Had he been unable to immigrate, there wouldn't necessarily be one more job for a U.S.-born worker. Instead, Hernandez might have the less desirable job back home, and the customers less tasty, but easier to prepare, beans.
Costs and BenefitsThe power-lunch crowd started trickling in just after noon; it wasn't until 12:22 that the first order spat from the printer back in the kitchen. Sous-chef Ruben Ortega-Vieto called out, "One foie gras, one crab cake salad, one chicken salad, one turkey club." The line cooks hurried into action. A few minutes later, when the first two items were prepared, Walter Velasquez, a 40-year-old man with a ponytail, narrow goatee and crisp white shirt, dashed the appetizers out to the first two customers of 72 who would eat lunch at the Oval Room that day.
In the political world, a great distinction is made between legal and illegal immigrants. In economic terms, the difference is, in many cases, more limited. Velasquez came to the United States from El Salvador illegally in 1985, worked as a drywall finisher in California, then moved to Washington in 1991 to be near his family. He worked as a dishwasher and advanced to his current job as food-runner.
Years later, he married a U.S. citizen, getting a green card and becoming legal himself. (He and his wife later divorced.) But even after getting the green card, he was still doing the same work, for the same money, for the same employer. All that changed was he had a real green card instead of a fake one. "I require a Social Security card from all my employees," Bajaj said. "But there's no way to verify that they're real."
As the lunch crunch reached its peak, Velasquez wiped his forehead of sweat as he lugged one tray after another to the tables. By the time the crowd waned at 2:30, he was eager to take a break.
He hopped into his Toyota Corolla and made his way across the city to Zola, another stylish restaurant, where his girlfriend, Nancy Avila, prepares salads. He picked her up, then drove to the day-care center in the basement of a Mount Pleasant church to pick up their 3-year-old daughter. He dropped them off in Arlington, where they live in a three-bedroom apartment off Columbia Pike with their daughter and two children from Velasquez's marriage. Velasquez almost immediately turned around to get back to the Oval Room for the dinner shift.
Their household finances show how immigrants support the U.S. economy -- but also incur costs for public services. He makes about $30,000 a year. Avila, who works fewer hours, earns about $18,000. They pay $1,300 a month in rent and pay Comcast $140 a month for cable television and high-speed Internet service. Comcast has added more than 30 foreign-language channels in the past eight years. The couple spends $150 a week on groceries, much of it at the Giant Food store on Columbia Pike, which has a large selection of ingredients that are common in Central America.
Velasquez's family also exacts costs on the economy. He sends about $100 a month home to family in El Salvador, which does not create new economic activity here. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2000, such remittances amount to $10.2 billion for Mexico and four Central American nations.
If the uninsured Velasquez were to have a serious medical problem, the cost would probably be borne by the hospital that treated him. ("We just can't be sick," he said.) Inova Fairfax Hospital, near Velasquez's home, provided $75 million in health care last year to people who were too poor to pay and had no insurance, many of them immigrants, said Ron Ewald, the hospital's chief financial officer. "It can be very volatile and extremely costly," he said.
Immigrant families help the federal government's finances in the long run. Growth in the U.S.-born population is slowing, which is one reason Social Security faces a future deficit. But immigration increases the working-age population that pays into Social Security. Furthermore, illegal immigrants who give employers fake Social Security numbers cannot receive benefits from the system. Between Velasquez and Avila, and their employers' matches, they pay $5,630 into the Social Security system each year.
According to calculations by the Center for Economic and Policy Research based on data from the Social Security Trustees report, if U.S. immigration averages 1.3 million people a year in the future instead of 900,000, it will reduce Social Security's long-term deficit by 14 percent.
There are local costs too. The Arlington County school system is spending $16,464 per pupil this year, or more than $32,000 for his school-age children. School spending is supported partly by state and federal governments but most significantly by property taxes, which Velasquez pays indirectly with his rent.
An official in his apartment complex's management office declined to discuss the property tax for Velasquez's apartment. But real estate research firm Delta Associates said the average property tax bill for similar apartments is $865 a year. Velasquez and Avila's combined federal and state income taxes are on track to be about $1,700 in 2006, based on the amount withheld from their paychecks and their 2005 tax refunds.
But what the school system spends on his children's education can also be viewed as an investment in the next generation of U.S. workers. On Thursday, as Velasquez gathered his things to head back to work, his 17-year-old daughter, Alma, described her plans. After high school, she plans to go to a community college for two years, to save money, then transfer to a four-year university. Ultimately, she wants to be an immigration lawyer. "It came to me because my parents went through so much to get here," she said.
