The Sriracha Argument for Immigration

When fighting for the rights of immigrants, food just might be an unexpected weapon.PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNA QUAGLIA / ALAMY

Recently, I drove to a distant corner of Toronto in search of rosewater-scented phyllo. The destination was Crown Pastries, a two-year-old Syrian bakery wedged between a Subway and an adult-video store. Founded by two brothers who emigrated from Aleppo in 2009, Crown Pastries—though located in a city with no shortage of baklava—is renowned for its Middle Eastern sweets.

Crown Pastries is small: a narrow rectangle with a long counter behind glass panes, where precise trays of more than a dozen different pastries are on display. A young Yemeni woman, dressed in a matching purple shirt and head scarf, cut little samples of each sweet, explaining the differences between the cashew-filled Kol o Shkor Baklava and the Esh Al Ashfour, a “bird’s nest” of fried vermicelli wrapped around a clutch of sweetened pistachios and cashews. She quickly filled a box that cost less than twenty dollars, and sent me away with a recommendation for a nearby falafel joint.

What triggered my hunger for Crown Pastries was the same force that stands opposed to its existence: the rising tide of anti-immigrant populism in the United States and much of the Western world. Canada may present itself as a place immune from the closed-door nationalism of Trump’s America, but we have our xenophobes advocating for curbs along religious lines, who have no use for the people who make the delicious sweets at Crown Pastries.

Since the White House ordered its first travel ban on immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries and also started its more aggressive deportations of undocumented immigrants, many in the U.S. (as well as Canada) have rallied to defend the benefits of immigration, culturally, economically, and in terms of innovation (many people noted the number of successful companies founded by immigrants).

But for me, an equally compelling argument is lunch. American cuisine is decidedly global, a polyglot of constantly evolving ingredients, flavors, and ideas from every possible corner of the globe. During past bouts of American ethnic populism, immigrant foods were attacked as a symbol of foreign invaders. Japanese restaurants faced discrimination and boycotts decades before Pearl Harbor. Italian immigrants were derisively called “garlic eaters.” During the World Wars, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage” and hamburgers were dubbed “liberty steaks,” as a protest against their German geographic and linguistic origins. Indians were slandered for the pungency of their spices. Champions of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigration from China from 1882 to 1943, often cited the weakening effect of Chinese food on the American worker. Labor leader Samuel Gompers wrote a pamphlet titled “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat versus Rice, American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which shall survive?”

What’s remarkable in today's America is that, while racism and xenophobia have come out into the open, food this time around seems to be exempt. It would be nearly unthinkable to talk of banning a cuisine based on its country of origin. Red or blue state, Trump voter or Sanders diehard, we all want to watch Anthony Bourdain eat his way around the world and find the tastiest fish taco in town. The political tide may be shifting to nationalism, but our appetite is increasingly globalist.

Adventurous taste buds don’t happen without immigrants and their knowledge of cuts of meat, pickling spices, and the delicious combinations thereof. Cuisine flourishes by feeding other immigrants, creating mini economies of restaurants, suppliers, and specialties in communities. The more immigrants, the better the food. In Toronto, where more than two hundred thousand Tamils live, the string hoppers (nests of roasted rice-flour noodles, served with a variety of fiery curries) are varied and delicious, while the tacos are, on average, mediocre, because the Mexican population is a tenth the size of the Sri Lankan one. (A dark joke among Toronto food lovers is** **that Trump will drive enough undocumented Mexicans our way to change this.)

Often we forget that actual people made our lunch choices better and more varied, as we deploy a liberal squirt of Sriracha hot sauce onto our burger—even at McDonald’s—without acknowledging that it arrived here thanks to a Vietnamese refugee named David Tran, who founded Huy Fong Foods, in California, in 1980. The food brought here by immigrants is often Americanized and deracinated—like the “curry chimichurri” served with the Colorado Lamb Chops and Octopus at the Trump International Hotel’s restaurant in D.C., or Trump’s Taco Bowl. And that is an inevitable part of drawing in the flavors of the world and making them American. “We in America have embraced food from the Middle East like no other country in the world,” said Jose Andres, the chef who pulled out of a restaurant in Trump International Hotel in D.C. after Trump’s insulting comments about Mexicans. But we haven’t yet embraced the Middle Eastern originators of the hummus that fills refrigerated shelves at every American supermarket.

When fighting for the rights of immigrants, and the greater ideal of immigration, food just might be an unexpected weapon. Maybe that’s because food is so personal. It is one thing to demonize unseen, faceless Syrians and Mexicans as The Other. It is another thing to eat their falafel and tostadas for lunch three times a week and still hold fast to those beliefs, as residents of an Illinois town realized when Juan Carlos Hernandez Pacheco, a well-loved manager of a Mexican restaurant in a town deeply supportive of Trump, was detained, and was scheduled to be deported on Friday. Trump’s insistence on vilifying immigrants has, in some perverse ways, only shown how dependent we are on each other.

At the Subway next to Crown Pastries, you can order regular “American” sandwiches. But, if you think about them another way, you’ll see the corned beef and pastrami through the Jews fleeing Tsarist Russia in the eighteen-eighties, or the Italian meatball through the recipes of the Sicilians who arrived in the early twentieth century. People brought us lunch from far away. In time, it became the food we associated with home. We should know better than to bite the hands that feed us.