Pirate's Cove

A couple days ago the Raleigh N&O whined about local Raleigh area eateries having issues. Now we have the NY Times

Worse Than the Pandemic’: Restaurants Say ICE Presence Imperils Business
In several cities where immigrants are being detained, owners say they’re struggling to stay open as fear keeps customers and workers from leaving home.

Even as the Covid pandemic shut down every dining room across the country in April 2020, Americans were still ordering takeout, and millions of restaurant employees were getting paychecks funded by government assistance.

Now, as that same government is rounding up immigrants it believes to be in the country illegally — about 70,000 are currently in detention — Cecelia Lizotte, the owner of two Nigerian restaurants called Suya Joint, in Boston and Providence, R.I., says many of her customers are afraid to come in. She can’t even get people in her neighborhood to pick up free meals.

Several of her employees are nervous about coming to work, though Ms. Lizotte says they are in the country lawfully. Her brother, Paul Dama, a Nigerian immigrant who is the restaurant’s manager and was in the process of applying for asylum, was detained on the way to church by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June and held for three months at a detention center in New Hampshire.

See, that link the Times offers fails to mention relevant information

Asked about the case, ICE spokesman James Covington said in a statement, “Paul Naanman Dama is an illegally present, 46-year-old Nigerian alien who has been unlawfully residing in the United States since August 2019, when he violated the terms of his lawful admission. Dama has two prior convictions for operating a motor vehicle under the influence of liquor. ICE Boston arrested Dama in Brockton, Massachusetts June 15 and placed him into removal proceedings.”

We do have laws. If he had gone through the normal system of becoming a US citizen those convictions would have disqualified him.

In interviews over the past few weeks, restaurant owners in several cities where ICE agents are out on the streets echoed that sentiment: Their businesses are not only teetering on insolvency, they said, but feel even more vulnerable than during the pandemic.

You know, forget the rest of the pro-illegal alien article, let’s cut to the chase: if your business model relies upon hiring illegal aliens and serving illegal aliens, well, any problems are ones you created. They’re lucky the feds aren’t charging the owners with violating federal law in hiring the illegals. It is a federal crime.