![\"NTX](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/u64342zwh4zhm0ct.jpg\")
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DALLAS – North Texas restaurant owners and farmers said the immigration crackdown is hurting their business by limiting the workforce. Now they are calling for policy changes in support of immigrant workers.<\/p>\n
Struggling Restaurants and Farms ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/p-alex-immigration-farming-to-restaurants-530p_00.00.15.38.jpg\")
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What we know:<\/p>\n
Restaurant and farm owners claim current workforce constraints are driving up food prices and putting local restaurants at risk of closing.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, a group of hospitality leaders held a virtual news conference to shed light on the state of the industry with the launch of a national campaign.<\/p>\n
By the numbers:<\/p>\n
According to the Texas Restaurant Association, 20% of the restaurant workforce is made up of immigrants. And approximately 66% of restaurant operators in the Lone Star State report negative impacts in the past few months due to immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n
What they’re saying:<\/p>\n
Many owners said they are struggling to survive due to staffing shortages and rising prices.<\/p>\n
“The difficulty of finding skilled, reliable, consistent labor, and it just makes everything more difficult,” said Sam Lash, the director and co-founder of Farm to Table.<\/p>\n
“I had a restaurant, a corner restaurant in a neighborhood for six years that I recently closed because the math just became impossible for people to pay the price I would need to charge,” added Mary Sue Milliken, the chef and owner of Mundo Hospitality Group.<\/p>\n
The Dignity Act <\/p>\n
Big picture view:<\/p>\n
The group is calling for work permits for immigrant workers across the food pipeline.<\/p>\n
“We are not proposing amnesty. We\u2019re not proposing past to citizenship. We are saying just create work permits that allow long-term, vetted immigrants who\u2019ve been here for years paying taxes,” said Kelsey Erickson Streufert with the Texas Restaurant Association.<\/p>\n
Republican Congressman Gabe Evans said he has a solution with the Dignity Act. It\u2019s a bipartisan immigration reform bill aiming to create a program for undocumented immigrants to work legally, pay taxes, and pass background checks.<\/p>\n
“There\u2019s no pathway to citizenship. It\u2019s a work permit reform program that does everything that we\u2019ve been talking about here, which is allowing folks that have been in this country for more than five years,” Evans said. “They\u2019re going to continue working hard, supporting farmers, ranchers, restaurants, the entire food supply chain.”<\/p>\n
Industry leaders on the call said they fully back the plan.<\/p>\n
“The reality is that we cannot operate our food pipeline without immigrants, many of who have been in this country for decades paying taxes and following the law,” said Sam Sanchez, the founder of Third Coast Hospitality Group.<\/p>\n
The Dignity Act is still a proposed bill in the legislative committee stage.<\/p>\n
The Source: The information in this story comes from a virtual news conference held by the Texas Restaurant Association and other industry leaders.<\/p>\n
Business<\/a>Immigration<\/a>Texas<\/a>Dallas<\/a>Fort Worth<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DALLAS – North Texas restaurant owners and farmers said the immigration crackdown is hurting their business by limiting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[910,102,581,116,1724,223,122,27,29,28,216,393],"class_list":{"0":"post-198969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-dallas-county","11":"tag-fort-worth","12":"tag-immigration","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-tarrant-county","15":"tag-texas","16":"tag-texas-headlines","17":"tag-texas-news","18":"tag-tx","19":"tag-us"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}