😎🌮🍱🍝🍜 ANOTHER “FOOD DRIVEN” IMMIGRANT SUCCESS STORY!

La Cocina, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group, is helping low-income women and immigrants start their own food businesses. The 130 chef-owners receive support, including access to an industrial kitchen, to craft a recipe for a better life.

Oct. 20, 2022

Jay Gray reports for NBC Nightly News in this video:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/san-francisco-nonprofit-helping-chefs-in-need-to-build-their-own-businesses-151187013820

*********************

I loved the shot of 1950’s-style “boring American food!” As a “child of the 50’s,” so true! Also, reaffirms the “food-based approach” to promoting social justice!

Heck, I remember from my days at the BIA that the best way to get folks to show up for a meeting or event and be in a good mood to participate was to “put out the food.” I used to bring bagels to BIA en banc conferences. It often helped “lighten the mood,” even if it didn’t garner me enough votes to win very many of my “en banc legal battles!”

Some things that stand out:

  • Teamwork, skill, and cooperation;
  • The power of immigrant women;
  • Diversity and variety improving American food;
  • Investment in “human capital;”
  • Self-sufficiency;
  • Jobs and education for others;
  • Teaching and training for success.

I think there are “messages” here about the benefits of immigrants and how many of those arriving at our borders could be successfully integrated into, energize, and expand opportunities in communities in need throughout America.

For example, almost everyone agrees that there is a shortage of affordable, livable, attractive housing that is adversely affecting communities around the U.S. Why not invest in the hard work, creativity, skills, and initiative of arriving migrants to help address these problems and make life better for everyone? Expand the economy, expand the tax base, raise wages, solve problems, revitalize “hurting” communities! Decent jobs with a future and homes in the community might also help address the opioid and other substance abuse problems in many areas.

Rather than squandering money and resources on “sure to ultimately fail” “deterrence” strategies and counterproductive restrictions, detentions, and deportations, why not think about ways to 1) recognize the realities of human migration; and 2) harness and direct the undeniable power of that migration for everyone’s benefit?

Leaders of both parties seem “willfully blind” to the realities and benefits of migration in the 21st century. Could public-private partnerships be part of the answer? There must be some more “humane pragmatists” out here who are interested in actually solving problems, building on diversity, and doing things for the common good.

One promising initiative, brought to my attention by my long-time friend and former colleague Lori Scialabba, Specialist Executive at Deloitte Consulting, LLP, is Deloitte US’s recently announced “$1.5 Billion Social Impact Investment to Foster a More Equitable Society.” Read about it here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-us-announces-1-5-billion-social-impact-investment-to-foster-a-more-equitable-society-301633710.html.

Lori L. Scialabba
Lori L. Scialabba
Specialist Executive
Deloitte Consulting LLP
PHOTO: Deloitte

(Historical Footnote: I helped recruit Lori for the Honors Program when I was the Deputy General Counsel of the “Legacy INS.” Later, we were both BIA Members. Lori was one of my Vice Chairs — along with Mary Maguire Dunne — and eventually succeeded me as Chair before going on to a distinguished career as a Senior Executive at USCIS and then Deloitte.)

And, of course, we can and should build upon the extraordinary success of “our own” DMV immigrant entrepreneur Tea Ivanovic and her team over at Immigrant Food. Tea exemplifies the “power of food” and its fundamental connection to immigration, diversity, economic vitality, and social justice! I highlighted Tea’s success in a recent “Courtside” profile: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2022/09/10/🇺🇸🗽👍🏼-immigrant-nation-teas-truth-wisdom-americans-views-on-immigrants-and-immigration-are-overwhelmingly-positive/.

Tea Ivanovic
Tea Ivanovic
Director of Communications & Outreach
Immigrant Food
PHOTO: Immigrant Food

Congrats to the folks at La Cocina and to NBC News for featuring this great, thought-provoking, story!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

10-21-22

THE TRUMP/SESSIONS XENOPHOBIC ANTI-REFUGEE BIAS THREATENS TO DESTROY EVERY ASPECT OF AMERICAN SOCIETY, INCLUDING OUR STAR CHEFS & OUR IMMIGRATION-INSPIRED CRUSINE!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/in-praise-of-refugee-chefs-they-came-from-syria-but-they-represent-an-american-ideal/2017/12/06/64e7c4be-c400-11e7-aae0-cb18a8c29c65_story.html

Marin Cogan reports for the Washington Post:

“On a Thursday morning in June, near the end of Ramadan, Majed Abdulraheem arrives for work at Union Kitchen. The brightly lit, shared commercial kitchen space in Northeast Washington is filled with chef’s tables, pastry racks and the bustling of a dozen cooks building fledgling businesses. It’s Chef Majed’s second time at work today. Fasting makes the daytime heat of the kitchen too hard to manage, and so he was in the kitchen preparing orders late last night, into the early morning.

Abdulraheem, 29, works at Foodhini, a meal delivery service that employs immigrant chefs in Washington. The start-up was founded by Noobtsaa Philip Vang, a child of refugees from Laos, who discovered, after arriving from Minnesota to Georgetown three years ago to get his MBA, that he was missing the Hmong cuisine he grew up with. “I was really craving some of my mom’s food,” says Vang, “and I was thinking I wanted to find a grandma or auntie that was living in the neighborhood somewhere and just buy some of their food.”

He started mulling his own family’s immigration story: When his mom came to the United States, she had limited English skills, and finding work was difficult. His dad sometimes worked multiple jobs, sleeping in his car between shifts, to make sure the family had enough money to survive. What his mother did have, which might have been marketable if only she’d had the resources, was incredible skill as a chef. “There’s got to be a way to create opportunities for people like my mom,” he thought.

Abdulraheem is one of Foodhini’s first chefs. On its website, he offers a menu of his own design: bamiatan, a dish of crisp mini okra sauteed in garlic and topped with cilantro; mutabbal, an eggplant-tahini dip similar to baba ghanouj; and kebab hindi, meatballs cooked in a spiced tomato stew. Like Vang, his love for food and for family are inextricably intertwined: Many of the items on Abdulraheem’s menu are dishes his mother used to make for him when he was a kid growing up in a small town in southern Syria. Even after attending culinary school in Syria, and after years of working in restaurants, he still considers her, his original teacher, to be the better chef.

“You have to love cooking to be good at it,” Abdulraheem tells me through an interpreter. He is preparing the vegetables for fattoush, a staple salad of lettuce, tomato and crunchy pita chips. He stacks long leaves of romaine lettuce, one on top of the other, slicing them crosswise into small confetti ribbons as he talks, before perfectly dicing tomatoes. He cuts huge lemons in half, just once, and squeezes the juice out of them effortlessly. It’s a simple dish but one he loves to make, because it’s both universal and endlessly customizable. “I’m making fattoush, my wife will make fattoush, you can make fattoush,” he says. “But each time it will come out a little bit different, because it’s a reflection of you.”


Majed Abdulraheem and wife Walaa Jadallah at their home in Riverdale Park, Md. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

When Abdulraheem arrived here in 2016, he became part of a long history of immigrants — often refugees — who reached the United States and began making food. You can find this tradition in Eden Center, the Northern Virginia strip mall packed with pho restaurants and pan-Asian groceries, built up by Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. You can see it in the popular Ethiopian restaurants on U Street; in the restaurants of Peter Chang, who fled Washington’s Chinese Embassy in 2003 and acquired one of the most loyal followings of any chef in America; or in the Thai and Indian restaurants in large cities and small towns across the country.

. . . .

What Abdulraheem and other refugee chefs bring when they come to America has implications beyond the kitchen. Cooking the dishes — sharing the foods of their home country — is a way of ensuring “that identity and heritage are not lost just because the homeland is,” says Poopa Dweck, author of the book “Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews.” They are “documenting history, in some way, for the next generation.”

It’s this diversity — the richness of so many cuisines and cultures, brought from all over the world — that makes American food so outstanding. At the moment, however, that tradition is under threat. The Trump administration has dedicated a lot of energy to barring Syrian refugees like Abdulraheem from coming into the country, while waging a multifront campaign against undocumented immigrants from Latin America. Continuing on this path would have a profound impact — not just on our food, but on our national identity.

It can be hard to explain to people who view immigration as a threat just what we stand to lose when we turn away from this ideal. Maybe a grand argument about American values isn’t the best place to begin. Maybe it’s best to start smaller, somewhere closer to home — somewhere like the dinner table.


Abdulraheem’s kebab hindi (meatballs cooked in a spiced tomato stew). (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

There are things that Majed Abdulraheem doesn’t usually talk about when he’s at work chopping vegetables. But they’re on his mind a lot: How, on his last visit to his parents’ home in 2013, they begged him not to return to his apartment in Damascus but to flee Syria across the border to Jordan instead. How he did as his parents asked. And how he never got to see his father, who became ill during his exile, before he died.

. . . .

The culinary education of refugee chefs is unusual. It is at once cosmopolitan — thanks to the fusing of different influences during the chef’s travels — and narrowly defined by both physical barriers and the limitations of circumstance. The journeys of refugee chefs often spark creativity, born of necessity. The education, just like the migration, is sui generis. Just like America.”

*************************************

Read the complete article at the above link.

The irony is certainly not lost on me. Refugees overcome great obstacles to contribute to America’s greatness; immigrants (including, yes, those without legal status) help us prosper as a society; guys like Trump and Sessions are corrosive negative influences who contribute little of positive value and do great damage to our country, our society, and our collective future every day they hold power, despite having having been given every chance to make positive contributions.

America’s continued greatness, and perhaps our ultimate survival as a nation, depends on whether we can use the legal system and the ballot box to remove corrosive influences like Trump, Sessions, and their ill-intentioned cronies from office before they can completely destroy our country.

PWS

12-10-17