The Persistence of Immigrant Labor in California’s Hospitality Industry

Historical Overview from 1850's to Present Day

Abstract

Since statehood, California has recruited immigrant labor in boom years and blamed it in lean ones, a pattern this paper traces through the hospitality industry, the sector that has depended on that labor most consistently and suffered most when it is driven into hiding. Drawing on immigration policy from the Gold Rush through the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Alien Land Law, the Immigration Act of 1924, the Bracero Program, and Proposition 187, alongside demographic data and an original interview with Jose Madera, director of the Pasadena Job Center, it argues that immigrant and day laborer communities have outlasted each cycle of exclusion by building institutions of their own. Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves, restaurants opened through the merchant exemption in exclusion law, and, more recently, day labor job centers and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network turned a workforce assumed to be temporary into a permanent foundation of California hospitality. The ICE raids of 2025 mark the newest turn of that cycle and a departure from it: enforcement now reaches every immigrant community at once rather than one ethnic group, and the response is public advocacy rather than the self-segregation of earlier generations. The persistence of these communities suggests that the word migrant no longer describes how long they stay.