San Francisco’s Hispanic immigrant restaurateurs retool to weather recession
Betty Bastidas of San Francisco local news web site Mission Local reports that restaurants catering to Hispanic immigrants are floundering as their traditional customer base can no longer afford to eat out as often. The economic downturn has hit immigrant laborers hard; the unemployment rate for immigrants is significantly higher than the national average, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April. In order to make it through the recession, restaurant owners are trying to attract more non-Hispanic customers. They are translating their menus to English, relying on web sites like Yelp for word-of-mouth advertisement, and posting prominent English-language signs for special deals on dishes popular with “anglos.”
Other recent migration features:
- The Los Angeles Times reports that drug traffickers are increasingly using points on the US-Mexico border that are popular crossing points for undocumented migrants, making the journey even more difficult and dangerous.
- Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper features one of the first Bhutanese refugee families to arrive in Canada. Over the next five years, the Canadian government seeks to resettle 900 Nepali-speaking refugees, who had been pushed out by the Bhutanese government into camps in Nepal, in southern British Columbia.
- Spanish newspaper El País reports that asylum applications in Argentina have risen by 142% between 2006 and 2008, mostly due to an increase in the number of asylum-seekers from African countries arriving in the country (article in Spanish). Senegalese are the largest group of asylum-seekers in Argentina, followed by Colombians. Many asylum-seekers have also arrived from Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast. According to the article, some African asylum-seekers plan to transit through Argentina to third countries.
