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Emily Knight
Emily Knight is president of the Texas Restaurant Association. Since Texas has thousands of Mexican restaurants, el Restaurante asked her some questions about the immigration issues now facing the industry.
el Restaurante: What is the TRA doing to help restaurants deal with ICE raids or other immigration enforcement issues?
Back in January, we started communicating to members about different tools and resources, how to ensure they were compliant, how to ensure if ICE arrives to their restaurant that they do everything lawfully, and even just as important, how are they communicating to their own employees about the situation.
On the political side, I’m proud of the TRA because I feel like we’ve just decided we’re leading on this issue. When President Trump first came out indicating that he may have some type of consideration for farmers and hotel employees, if you remember, restaurants weren’t included. So we worked really hard for about 48 hours, and then he came out with another communication and said, eateries/restaurants are included. Then everything was back to normal. Then it was on again, then it was off. And then, just this weekend, he communicated again in an interview that he was looking at it.
Someone said to me, are you disappointed that the president keeps going back and forth? I’m actually not. It makes me very enthusiastic because he’s looking at this very pragmatically. He ran on a strong border, but he also ran on lower food prices. And if that doesn’t happen, that doesn’t meet his agenda. I think the greatest fear for the administration is empty store shelves, higher prices, and closing businesses.
What would you like to see happen?
We’re asking for two things. We’re asking for deferred action, right? So if you’ve got an employee that’s been working with you for 30 years in one of these protected industries, paying taxes, no criminal background, no criminal record, that we do a deferred action for them and provide a work permit.
But then let’s also think long term about Congressional immigration reform.
So we’re working on both fronts to get relief today and then a future immigration reform, which we need desperately.
What can the TRA do regarding these issues?
That is where an association is so critical. We’ve been able to deploy a lot of different resources. We have members that have direct contact through different relationships with the White House or with the president’s team. We’re able to set up meetings with key congressional leaders.
I partner directly now with the American Business Immigration Coalition. That is where I’m with the farmers and the ranchers and the packers, and we’re bringing all of our voices together and saying, let’s sit down and have a thoughtful discussion about how do we protect these businesses.
It’s been a beautiful, beautiful thing to see all these different industries come together to say, listen, this is a really critical part of the US economy.
I think that economic approach is starting to get attention.
How do government leaders react when you make these arguments?
You know, it’s interesting. We did a survey and 47% of our Texas operators say they have job openings that are difficult to fill. And almost 70% say they'd like to add jobs in the next year. And so what we try to communicate to them is we appreciate that the conversation of citizenship is a future conversation for Congress, but today the president really has the ability through different tools to be able to look at workers who pass a background check, pay their taxes, and are essential in these understaffed industries to have a temporary work authorization.
And so when we get off the final fix or path of citizenship, when we really focus on these essential workers, we can have a thoughtful conversation. And so, to be honest, majority of the conversations have been very good. And the fact that the president is listening and hearing from the business industry and really thinking about how to do this, I think means that, once this big beautiful bill gets through, then we can actually really get to the table. That’s our hope.
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