“I’m not going to cook for you,” world-class chef and multiple-Michelin-star restaurateur José Andrés said as he took the stage at the 10th annual Fast Company Innovation Festival. “Don’t get too excited.”
But then, he cooked.
Figuratively, that is—Andrés roasted American politics for its mangled handling of immigration in the United States.
“Immigration reform has to happen,” Andrés said, citing 11 million “dreamers,” or children of undocumented immigrants. “Everybody is employing them everywhere, in blue and red states, and they are part of the economy.”
The reality is, “people are coming undocumented because the businesses need the people, but the government is not giving them the visas to do it in the right way,” Andrés explained. “If I’m opening 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] cut undocumented immigration by 75% overnight if we were more in the business of creating true immigration systems that benefit America,” he added.
Today’s anti-immigrant vitriol, and the hate-filled rhetoric that has come to permeate public discourse, isn’t the America that Andrés knows. In the ’80s, he saw a different vision: “Watch the [GOP primary] debate between President Ronald Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush,” he said. “They were going back and forth about who was the most pro-immigrant. It was almost hilarious.”
Seeds of hope
An immigrant himself, Andrés founded the nonprofit World Central Kitchen in 2010, borne from the rubble of a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. In the aftermath, Andrés traveled to the country to serve meals to hungry survivors whose homes had been destroyed.
Today, World Central Kitchen goes where it is needed, mobilizing across the world to deliver life-sustaining food to people in crisis zones, from Ukraine in the trenches of its war with Russia, to Maui in the wake of devastating wildfires, to Bangladesh during a heavy monsoon season. It has served over 400 million meals, and Andrés has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the organization.
But this year, World Central Kitchen suffered its own tragedy. Seven of its aid workers were killed by an Israeli airstrike during a mission to bring food to battle-torn Gaza, amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“In the moment, I was just going down in a spiral of, ‘I’m shutting down the entire operation forever,'” said Andrés. “I don’t want that responsibility on my shoulders.”
But, he says, it was his daughter Inés—who is “somewhere in the world feeding people with another organization because she doesn’t want to get close to me”—who gave him faith. “She said, ‘We are not going to be changing the world without understanding that we must take some risks,'” said Andrés.
In all the clashes of nations that World Central Kitchen has been caught between, in all the sparks of conflict and flames of war, and all the starvation, poverty, and pain he’s witnessed, Andrés hasn’t lost hope. He doesn’t see politics as defining, or people as 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 realized?” he asked the crowd. “In the worst moments of humanity, the best of humanity shows up and you will see people in a kitchen helping feed fellow Americans, not because they’re Republicans or Democrats, but they’re Americans helping Americans, people helping people.”