The Exploitation of Undocumented Immigrants: A Conversation with Robbin

The CDLI team sat down with Robbin, a community member to discuss her memories working in restaurants in New York and how it impacted her anti-racism journey.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago in the 50s and 60s. I was raised by my mother who was a schoolteacher and my father died when I was very young. We lived in this extremely wealthy white community at the time. I didn't recognize it as a white community, but I knew it was very wealthy because we had nowhere near the wealth of others living there. I went to an Ivy League school out East and majored in French. After graduating, I went to Paris and I studied cooking in restaurants. I have this privileged white background that improved my education and economic opportunities.

I gradually became more concerned and aware of issues around equity, rights, protections, exclusion and marginalization. I began asking questions that hadn't occurred to me when I was in all white communities. I was working in a restaurant where I liked the food that they were preparing. After Paris, there were lots of restaurants where I had no patience for the kinds of food being prepared. I was a little bit of a snob. In New York City, I encounter people being hired who didn't have their permanent residency, or in the US green card. They had very little voice and were being pushed to work overtime without being compensated. They couldn't speak about that because it would threaten their immigration status. They didn’t have work permits so they were being exploited and overworked. I did not want to be part of this. I didn’t want to dedicate my life to these organizations. I was very anxious about the people that were working there and I found that repeatedly in different kinds of environments. I didn't think of myself as a whistleblower at the time, but I would speak out about this issue. And then I would lose my job. At the time, I wasn't thinking about systematic racism or about who was being discriminated against. I would stand up when someone wasn’t being treated well.

As I got into graduate school, I started thinking more about ethical issues. I don't care that much about whether businesses make more money or not. I care about whether people are asking good questions and struggling with those. I'm concerned about the impact of business on society. I certainly identified as a feminist for a long time and gradually I've come to see as I've written about gender that you can't talk about it without race. If you just talk about women, then you're only talking about people like me and that's no good. My work in anti-racism has gradually branched from my work around discrimination and gender. We need to talk about equality for all people.