This Restaurant Receipt Offered a Clever Response to President Trump's Message on Immigrants
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A restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico put a politically charged message about immigrants on its receipts and people are paying attention.
At the bottom of every receipt at Plaza Cafe Southside is a note that seemingly riffs on President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan.
“Immigrants make America great," it says. "They also cooked your food and served you today.”
KRQE News 13 - krqe.com
“Immigrants make America great. They also cooked your food and served you today.”
The General Manager of the restaurant, Belinda Marshall, told a local station that the message helps people realize how much immigrants contribute to the food industry.
“I think it opens people’s eyes, because they don’t think about that,” she told KRQE. Although initially Marshall was worried about complaints, she said customers are very supportive of the message.
“People will write on the tickets, this is awesome, excellent,” she told the station. Marshall said she was inspired by a New York City restaurant that had the same message.
In February, ATTN: reported on that restaurant in Brooklyn, which had the same message in its receipt.
Mark Simmons, Chef of Kiwiani restaurant, told DNAinfo New York that he added the message in response to Trump's controversial travel ban executive orders.
"I added that message to the bottom of the receipts recently to remind ourselves [and] our customers that immigrants are quite often the backbone of the hospitality industry," he said to DNAinfo.
In December last year, famous TV host and author Anthony Bourdain tweeted that he would not spend money at restaurants associated with Trump's hotels.
Bourdain pointed out that "half the people" chefs work with are immigrants. In 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that 1.4 million restaurant workers were immigrants, and in 2008 Pew Research Center said that 20 percent of the 2.5 million chefs in the U.S. were undocumented immigrants.
If mass amounts of undocumented immigrants are deported under Trump's immigration guidelines, the economy could see significant effects. Pew Research Center said that undocumented immigrants made up 26 percent of farm workers and held 9 percent of service jobs in 2014.
