Originally published on Huffington Post, May 11, 2011 – by Dave Jamieson

WASHINGTON – Miguel Bravo’s year-and-a-half-long stint working at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., came to an abrupt end on March 9. That day, he says, he and his co-workers learned that their manager had just been let go in the midst of an audit of the burrito chain by U.S. immigration officials. As Bravo tells it, when the workers went to the back of the restaurant to talk with a Chipotle representative, they were replaced with a new crew out front.

Suddenly without a job, Bravo started stretching his dollars, looking for work, and speaking out about what he considered an unfair parting with Chipotle. What the 28-year-old immigrant didn’t do was pack his bags and return to El Salvador. After all, it would have made little economic sense to do so. A worker in El Salvador is lucky to earn a few dollars a day, if he can find work at all. Papers or no, Bravo was staying in America.

Not surprisingly, the American fast-food industry still had a place for him. Within two months, Bravo found another job in Washington with a major restaurant chain that he declined to name. “It’s easier, and there’s less pressure,” he says of the new gig. Though he earns just $8 an hour now — one dollar less than he’d been pulling in at Chipotle, he says — Bravo hopes to continue sending $500 a month back home to the wife and two children who he hasn’t seen since coming to America eight years ago.

Bravo’s decision says a lot about the challenges facing U.S. officials as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goes after companies with undocumented workers on its payrolls. The Obama administration has generally adopted an “enforcement-only” policy on immigration, stepping up the auditing of companies while so far declining to push a specific plan for comprehensive immigration reform. (The President’s highly anticipated speech this week on the matter was quickly panned as vague and lacking substance.) As Reuters has been reporting, Chipotle is perhaps the most visible company now in ICE’s crosshairs, with a close look at its books forcing the company to shed hundreds of workers in Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chipotle probe has widened to Atlanta and Los Angeles as well.

But advocates of comprehensive reform like to point out that few, if any, of the fired Chipotle workers seem to be giving up on the idea of U.S. employment. The workers simply move to other jobs, perhaps elsewhere in the fast food industry, like Bravo, or elsewhere, moving off the books entirely to work for smaller and less conspicuous employers than Chipotle. No number of audits, these advocates point out, can change global economics.

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