- Concerns about large -scale ice arrests have affected neighborhoods with large populations.
- This comes after Trump’s campaign promise to realize the “biggest expulsion program” in US history.
- Two small businesses owners shared how these fear is affecting their jobs and sales.
Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, McDonald Romain has seen a drop in foot traffic in Brooklyn Grocery Store Labay Market.
“We had more people in the pandemic,” said the 64-year-old business owner who sells exotic and tropical fruit for customers in Little Caribbean, an Afro-Karaibe neighborhood. Many of his clients come from regarding Delaware looking for a nostalgic taste of the house, he said. He estimates that 25% of his clients have stopped walking to his doors since the beginning of the year due to the fear of immigration and customs implementation.
Since Trump took over, rumors and concerns about large -scale ice arrests have ruined neighborhoods with large populations from New York City and Chicago in Los Angeles. Romain is one of the two entrepreneurs who told Business Insider how these concerns have adversely affected his workplace, including sitting buyers and scared employees.
And this can have long -term consequences on the survival of small businesses, which are more vulnerable, said Giovanni Peri, a professor of economics at UC Davis who also Studies on how migration affects the labor markets at the National Bureau for Economic Research.
“They don’t have the boundaries of big companies,” Peri said. “If they lose some of their income within months, they can be out of business, while large companies can attract larger investment savings.”
Rumors and fear are numerous
On the first day of Trump at the White House, he issued a host of executive orders linked to immigration and, in the footsteps of the campaign, promised to carry out “the largest expulsion program in American history,” he said in a rally in November. However, the number of people expelled in his first month in office was smaller than the monthly average of return and removal from President Joe Biden last year, Reuters reported.
There is no data on how the threat of ice raids has affected businesses. Even so, the threat of mass deportations has made some people living in areas with strong populations of fearful immigrants to leave their homes, Romain said. As a result, some of the fruits he sells are breaking.
“It’s a close community, so if something happens on the street, someone will call someone,” Romain added.
At the beginning of February, one of his customers told her that she was stopped by an unnoticed vehicle and asked her to show her identification. “Even people who are documented are concerned because it is such a flowing situation and there are many rumors and Induendos that is happening,” Romain said.
Ted Paizis said his Mediterranean restaurant Nupa suffered financially after an ice raid took place in the parking lot of one of his two places on February 12. Two employees were taken from Rochester, Minnesota, he told Business Insider in an email.
Paizis closed one of the Nupa countries for several days to understand the lack of staff created by the raid. And Paizis is disturbed by the loss of one of his trusted employees.
“Most of our staff have been with us for more than seven years,” Paisis wrote. “We lost an extremely valuable person to our organization.”
Paizis said that replacing those employees will not be easy due to the lack of a national worker. Moreover, many services and hospitality Businesses, including those in the restaurant industry, rely on workers living in the US illegally, Peri said. Removing large pieces of that population from the workforce can make it more difficult to complete the vacancies of personnel. In fact, 8.3 million workers in 2022 lived in the US illegally, according to Pew research.
Meanwhile, at the Paizis Restaurant, his remaining employees are scared of what can happen next.
“Many of our Hispanic staff are scared because they know that the Hispanics of legal work are being taken from ICE,” he added.
Has your business been affected by ice raids or immigration policies? Contact this reporter at jheng@businsinsider.com or safely through the signal in the JANG.20.