‘Immigration reform must happen’: Celebrity chef José Andrés gets real about current politics

“I’m not going to cook for you,” world-class chef and multi-starred restaurateur José Andrés took the stage at the 10th annual Fast Company Innovation Festival. “Don’t get too excited.”

But then he cooked.

Figuratively speaking, that means—Andrés made headlines in American politics for his mistreatment of immigrants in the United States.

“Immigration reforms must happen,” Andrés said, citing the 11 million “dreamers,” or children of undocumented immigrants. “Everybody hires them everywhere, in blue and red states, and they’re part of the economy.”

The truth is, “people come without documents because businesses need people, but the government doesn’t give them visas so they can do it properly,” explained Andrés. “If I open a Spanish restaurant and I want to bring five people from Spain to help me make paella, give me a way to do that.”

“We [would] we would have reduced undocumented immigration by 75% overnight if we were in the business of building real immigration programs that benefit America,” he added.

Today’s anti-immigrant vitriol, and the hate-filled rhetoric that has permeated public discourse, is not the America Andrés knows. In the ’80s, he saw a different perspective: “Look at the [GOP primary] debate between President Ronald Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush,” he said. “They have been going up and down to see who likes immigrants in this country. It was almost funny.”

A seed of hope

Andrés, who is also an immigrant, founded the non-profit World Central Kitchen in 2010, which was taken from the food of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. After that, Andrés went to this country to feed the hungry who had been abandoned by their homes.

Today, World Central Kitchen goes where it’s needed, connecting around the world to bring life-saving food to people in crisis, from Ukraine in the trenches of its war with Russia, to Maui after a devastating wildfire, to Bangladesh in time. heavy monsoon season.

This year, World Central Kitchen faced its own tragedy. Seven aid workers of the organization were killed in an Israeli airstrike while on a mission to deliver food to war-torn Gaza, amid Israel’s war with Hamas.

“At this point, I was just going around saying, ‘I’m going to completely shut down the surgery,'” Andrés said. “I don’t want that burden on my shoulders.”

But, he says, it was his daughter Inés—”who is somewhere else in the world feeding people with another organization because she doesn’t want to be near me”—who gave him faith. “He said, ‘We can’t change the world without understanding that we have to take risks,'” said Andrés.

In all the conflicts of nations that World Central Kitchen has been caught in, in all the sparks of conflict and flames of war, and all the hunger, poverty, and pain he has seen, Andrés has not lost hope. He doesn’t see politics as defining, or people being hateful. For him, it’s not red or blue, but black and white—cut and dried.

“I go to blue states and red states in emergencies, and you know what I saw?” he asked the crowd. “In the worst times of humanity, the best humanity emerges and you will see people in the kitchen helping to feed the American people, not because they are Republicans or Democrats, but they are Americans helping Americans, people helping people.”