Britain is dining out on economic delusions

The hostess called in sick, so it fell to me to greet the armed police officer. He had a plus one, from Immigration Enforcement. They ambled about politely, spending more time with the out-of-sight staff in the basement. Overall they didn’t seem particularly concerned. Customers hoping for entertainment with their spaghetti were disappointed at the lack of dramatics.

Maybe we were lucky that the kitchen porters cleaning grit from mussels were all legitimate that day. Enforcement, eager to leave, told us to digitally transfer the remainder of our staffs’ ID cards for them to check. The manager in charge never did. He claimed he “forgot”, and we were all happy to go along with it.

 Raids like this are the everyday context of the immigration debate. Whilst it is the public’s number one concern, the issue of illegal workers has not been taken seriously by police, politicians, or cost-sensitive businesses like restaurants. When Keir Starmer announced right-to-work checks through a digital ID card, I rolled my eyes. Checking workers’ IDs has been mandatory since 1997, and the raid above was in 2017, so why would digitising these checks make a difference?

It is a well-worn cliche that restaurants hire illegal immigrants, but it happens to be true, so why do they do it? Customers want cheap meals from far-flung cultures, and restaurants need to be competitive. When your rent, equipment, and ingredient costs are set by someone else, staff are about the only controllable cost, they also happen to be the most expensive.

Employees and employers collaborate on law-breaking for different but complementary reasons

Minimum wage law restricts your ability to act, and when it has increased 88 per cent in the last ten years, some companies choose not to pay it. Surely everyone knows what the minimum wage is, and will speak up if they receive otherwise? Well no, not if the employee has an incentive to keep quiet when they are here illegally. One restaurant called Café Diana, a shrine to the late princess, chose to hire seven illegal staff who they “paid in food”.  This is where supply meets demand, employees and employers collaborate on law-breaking for different but complementary reasons.

 Even when companies are caught, non-compliance is cheaper than compliance. Royal China, on Baker Street, was visited by Enforcement three times since 2018. Across these visits twenty illegal workers were found, four escaped, staff were paid half the minimum wage, and the restaurant was fined nearly half a million pounds. Seven years later. business is thriving — they post viral dim sum giveaway videos, and have six restaurants globally.

 Useful idiots are even helping restaurants get away with it by obstructing police in the exercise of their duties. When Enforcement tried to remove two Indian nationals in Kenmure Street Glasgow, one of whom was a chef, local crowds stepped in including one who crawled under the van. Eventually the detainees were released after an eight hour stand-off. Nicola Sturgeon called the raid “staggeringly irresponsible”. You would think the responsible thing would be to comply with, and enforce, the law.

 Such spontaneous support isn’t novel. Once, activists released cockroaches in two London restaurants in protest of them cooperating with an immigration sting. Even people who should know better get in on the act. When Indian restaurant Udaya in East Ham was fined £180,000 for four illegal workers, Sir Steven Timms the local MP, who had his wedding anniversary at the restaurant, stepped in. He wrote to the Home Office saying that their failure to check their paperwork “was not deliberate”. So that’s ok then.

 When people who undermine public order go unpunished, this is the two-tier policing we are told doesn’t exist. Depressingly, the rest of us play a passive role by wanting two irreconcilable aims: high wages and cheap stuff. The government doesn’t set prices but they do set the minimum wage, which has a knock on effect on prices. Or it would if there wasn’t a handy pressure valve that people are not aware of.

 Self-employment means you can pay yourself less than minimum wage, and if you do that work through an agency, the end-user of the service doesn’t have to check your right-to-work. Despite our lofty aims for a high wage society, Deliveroo riders, for example, can be paid as little as £2 per hour, and because it is an app based in the cloud, right-to-work checks can’t be done everyday, so legitimate riders rent their accounts to illegal migrants. 

 We have created a second tier of society who do not receive high wages, and who are there to fuel our need for cheap stuff. We import them because we’ve forgotten how to cook for ourselves. A chef awaiting deportation said he did “really hard work that no British person would do”. Irrespective of whether or not some have the correct right-to-work, we all want this, and because this new policy is just paperwork, we will find ways to cheat it.

 This practice is not limited to big corporations. To my shame, I suspect I contributed to it by accident. My own restaurant, Café Britaly, was critically-acclaimed but struggling, so my Head Chef hired agency kitchen porters to save money, and we were not required to check their right-to-work. If any had been illegal, the staff would have been arrested but we would not have been fined. 

 This will give everyone what they want even if they don’t admit it: cheap labour for employers, work for migrants, and low prices for diners. Whilst this is relatively new in the restaurant scene, I predict we will see more of it.

 If we feel that our model of inclusivity towards the world’s immigrants has failed, we will have to give up an ever-expanding choice of foreign food, cheap restaurants, and foreigners doing the difficult jobs. As we won’t be honest with ourselves or make the sacrifices necessary, nothing will change, and digital ID cards will be another pointless policy in the dustbin of history.